I have been having various discussions recently about anger. The most compelling explanation of its presence in adults in a modern society is to do with a lack of empowerment. A four-year-old will get angry when they can’t get their way but as they grow up, they develop increasingly sophisticated ways of navigating the world that don’t require raw anger, as it is not especially effective, even at four-years-old.
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Where knowledge is the counter to ignorance, wisdom is the counter to self-deception.
As humans we have developed powerful cognitive tools for adapting to our environment, such as our ability to look at a situation and determine what is most important (known as ‘relevance realisation’). Our ability for insight is another, allowing us to re-frame a situation to make meaning of it. Our ability to recognise complex patterns is a third.
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In cognitive science there is the concept of ‘problem finding’ which uses a range of cognitive tools such as relevance realisation (perceiving what features are important to consider in a cognitive landscape), insight, zooming in and out, and re-framing to formulate problems in ways that make a solution possible.
Problems may present to us – often the things we resolve day-to-day – but the important problems are often not yet formulated as problems and thus cannot have solutions.
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The new book is coming out soon (next month). Where Red Brain Blue Brain and Student Feedback were ‘what’/’how’ books, this is a ‘why’ book. Why we need to make systemic changes and what is their nature.
About 80% of school operating costs are made up of salaries, a systemic change to raise student learning and outcomes sustainably, comes down to teachers becoming more valuable to their students.Being more valuable necessarily means a change in behaviour.
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