How
movement can help thinking and learning
by
Roger Greenaway, Reviewing
Skills Training
"Movement and thinking are great playmates at all ages."
"Moving
and thinking together has a long history, but the examples of practice
in this article show several ways in which this ancient tradition can
be adapted, developed and applied in the 21st century classroom or
training room."
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Part
One: Moving, Thinking and Learning
Moving
and Thinking
Rodin's thinker sits with his head bowed, forehead resting on his
clenched fist. This is the classic static thinking pose. But other
poses are also available: for example, lying on the grass and looking
up at the sky can work quite well. So can going out for a walk – alone
or with someone to help you think things through. Some famous thinkers
(Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens, for example) have done their best
thinking while walking. Other people find it easier to think if they
have something in their hands – pen and paper for writing or sketching,
or play objects, or models. Some people find that performing an
activity needing little mental effort somehow enhances their conscious
thinking: Sherlock Holmes famously played his violin to help him solve
crimes. In Minority Report or Silent Witness you see investigators
moving objects around on a screen: by physically rearranging the data
they discover new patterns and possibilities that can create
breakthroughs in thinking. Perhaps real world example are more
convincing? Such as Google's playrooms that encourage movement and
playing with objects in order help employees find the next
breakthrough. And the same is true for young children the world over:
our most rapid period of learning involves exploratory movement and
manipulation of objects. Movement and thinking are great playmates at
all ages.
So when you want people to think deeply about past, present or future,
consider using physical movement and physical objects to help them
think more deeply or creatively.
Thinking
together
Rodin's thinker thinks alone. Thinking
alone sometimes works well. Thinking with others also works well. Some
people find it difficult to cope with any useful thinking when they are
on their own – a series of experiments reported in Science (Wilson,
2014) showed how people left with nothing to do will, after
only a few
minutes, inflict pain on themselves with self-administered electric
shocks. So it seems there is a good chance that in any group you work
with some people will try to avoid being left alone with their thoughts
or will at least find that thinking with others is more productive and
rewarding.
Although there is an element of personal preference about whether to
think alone or with others (and how best to balance the two) there is
plenty of research to support the value of thinking with others - such
as the finding reported by Gokhale
(1995) that cooperative teams
achieve higher levels of thought and retain information longer than do
people who work quietly as individuals. Mercer
(2015) also demonstrates many benefits arising from thinking
together.
As you will see later in Part Two, there are many ways in which
reflective thinking can be a sociable activity while also being mobile
and hands-on using tangible objects and visual aids that assist
thinking together.
Reflecting on
experience
The principles outlined so far apply to all kinds of thinking. The
main focus in what follows is the kind of thinking that involves
reflecting on experience in order to learn from it. Learning from
experience is probably the most significant kind of learning for
anyone:
- it shapes who we are
- it influences our orientation towards
future experiences
- and we tend to believe what we discover at first
hand rather than believe what reaches us from second hand sources.
Reflecting in
experience
For some forms of scientific enquiry separation from experience
provides a distance from which objective thinking is more easily
achieved. But the world of training is generally a more pragmatic and
immediate world where we are looking for what will work well in this
situation, here and now. Refined thinking at some distance from the
action has a different kind of value compared to the thinking that
happens on the spot in a live, dynamic and ever-changing situation.
Step back too far and the risk is that your thinking becomes out of
touch and is less relevant. The optimum distance for learning depends
very much on the kind of learning that is wanted: distance may assist
abstract learning and thinking outside the box, but proximity is needed
for pragmatic learning, field testing, skill development and confidence
building. Most forms of active reviewing are designed to reduce the gap
(or even create overlaps) between experience and reflection and between
doing and thinking.
Reflecting is
an experience
Archimedes' "Eureka!" moment while reflecting on the level of his bath
water was accompanied by great excitement as he leapt from his bath to
share his discovery with the world. Reflecting on experience can itself
be a powerful experience. Receiving feedback about what you did and its
consequences tends to be an emotionally charged experience for all
involved – especially if it is about mistakes or failures. Receiving
praise is quite an experience too – especially if it comes from several
people at much the same time. An intense reflective dialogue
while walking with a coach can be an emotional roller-coaster of a
conversation. The best group reviews I have experienced or witnessed
tend to be emotionally charged rather than being remote, distant and
abstract. Reflection and learning have a strong emotional dimension.
Only in rare circumstances should we try to strip out the emotion and
treat reflection as a purely abstract process. We do not try
stripping out the emotional content of poetry in order to understand it
better: so why would we expect to understand experience any more by
trying to put feelings to one side? Reflecting is an experience and
trying to strip out the emotion is more likely to reduce its value than
add to it. For example, the first two methods described next in Part
Two are designed to help people re-experience key moments of the
original experience.
Part
Two: A Sequence of Four
Methods
Reflection can be assisted by:
You will see that these three aspects are emphasised by the way in
which the four active reviewing methods are presented below. Each
method is also associated with one of four different stages of the
process of reflection as described in the Active Reviewing Cycle
(Greenaway, 2000).
1. Action Replay
starts with discovering what happened ("Facts")
2. Storyline
draws attention to the experiences behind the event ("Feelings")
3. Horseshoe
brings out the diversity of views and the reasons supporting them
("Findings")
4. Turntable
helps participants to explore the merits of different future options
("Futures")
Action Replay
Movement: Action
Replay involves re-enacting selected episodes of the event being
reviewed. It is like viewing recorded highlights or video clips except
that no technology is involved. Replay does not involve actually doing
the same activity again but it does involve going through the same
motions and saying the same words (as far as can be recalled).
Re-performing what happened can make people feel that they are back in
the original experience. This means that reflection at this point will
be closer to the experience – which prompts and enables further
learning from experience.
Things:
A dummy remote control helps the "director" to re-stage the scenes. A
dummy microphone helps to make interviews more lively and focused.
Neither artefact is essential but they do both help to improve the
quality of the performance. Some of the original objects can help to
add realism to the replay, but miming tends to be quicker, easier and
less distracting.
People:
People who took part in the original activity are invited to take part.
If key people (such as members of the public or people from other
groups) are not available, their part can be performed by someone else.
Also a new role appears in the reconstruction which is that of the
interviewer. Good interviewers bring out information that was not
apparent or available at the time. The interviewer can be the
facilitator or a participant. The interviewer is free to ask any
questions and is not limited to questions about what happened. What
happened is the starting point for Action Replay: it is where the
exploration begins.
Storyline
Movement:
The storyteller creates a graph showing their ups and downs during the
event being reviewed. A recommended variation is to lay out the graph
on the floor using a 5 metre rope. This large-scale version allows the
person to walk along their graph as they tell their story.
Things:
a 5 metre rope is ideal. Alternatively, improvise with any objects that
can be readily used for making a wiggly line such as a pack of cards,
pens, shoes, sticks, foam tubes ... Pen and paper works too,
but is less flexible and a rope is the ideal aid for "walking through"
the story.
People:
At least one person listens to the storyteller. They are usually given
questions to ask at high or low points in the story to help bring out
learning.
Horseshoe
Movement:
At the beginning, each person moves to their chosen position on a
curved line. The position represents where they would place themselves
on the spectrum (which might, for example, extend from "agree" at one
end to "disagree" at the other). This is usually followed by talking
with a friendly neighbour before moving into a whole group discussion –
at which point there can be more movement if and when people's views
change.
Things:
No extra objects are needed in this process, but it can be useful to
mark out the horseshoe shape of the spectrum with a rope or with chairs
or other objects. A microphone (dummy or real) can help encourage an
interview-style dialogue rather than have people making speeches.
People:
Everyone is instantly involved with their silent statements (the
position they choose is automatically a "silent statement"). The
process builds up from talking with friendly neighbours in 2s or 3s to
whole group discussion.
Turntable
Movement:
About every two minutes everyone stands up and moves to their left in
the circle. Each person may speak only in support of the views and
values that their seat represents. Whenever this move takes a person to
a new 'side' of the discussion, they need to make a mental switch to
correspond with the physical change of place.
Things:
Chairs are arranged in arcs separated by spaces. Each arc represents a
different position on the topic. Typically there are 3 positions. These
could, for example, be 3 different attitudes or 3 different
stakeholders or 3 different options
People:
To get off to a quick start you can ask people to start in their
preferred position. Alternatively you can give people time to think
through what they might say in their (randomly assigned) starting
position. But once moving begins, the process becomes more improvised
and more challenging as people need to work harder to imagine what
someone in these other positions might say.
Part
Three: Facilitating Learning from Experience
Using
movement to promote reflection, shared thinking and new learning
We have moved on from the powerful image
of Rodin's thinker that represents just one way of thinking: quiet solo
thinking time. We now appreciate ways of thinking and learning that are
more active and sociable. We have moved on from copying from the
blackboard or watching a Powerpoint presentation or TV. We have moved
on from reading and writing to ways of learning that are more
experiential, more dynamic, more sociable and more kinaesthetic.
This article moves even further away from passive learning traditions.
It even moves beyond "learning by doing" – which is usually understood
to be a period of action followed by a period of reflection (Stefano,
2014). And it does so because the period of reflection is an
opportunity for action and movement: thinking and doing at the same
time while using movement to assist thinking.
This is not a revolutionary concept in learning. Labyrinths have
existed for several centuries. A labyrinth is the thinking person's
maze. You follow a narrow winding pathway at a slow, thoughtful pace
and at each tight turn there is a word or phrase that prompts a new
line of thought. The prompts follow a fixed sequence that includes
thinking, feeling, physical and spiritual aspects. You enter the
labyrinth with an issue and if all goes well, you exit with a solution.
Although Labyrinths combined movement and thinking, I have yet to see a
labyrinth that is wide enough for two people to walk and talk together
along the pathway. A labyrinth is designed for making a private
meditative journey. Whereas Storyline (for example) is more sociable –
it is an aid to help the storyteller communicate with others. Storyline
is also more flexible – it allows the storyteller to give the story
their own shape rather than follow a prescribed labyrinthian pathway.
Moving and thinking together has a long history, but the examples of
practice in this article show several ways in which this ancient
tradition can be adapted, developed and applied in the 21st century
classroom or training room – or even taken back into the outdoors where
both exercise and fresh air can assist reflective thinking – with or
without the aid of a labyrinth.
I hope this article has itself been a breath of fresh air and might
encourage you to explore ways in which you can make reflection more
active, more engaging and more rewarding. Inside or outside these
active methods will circulate more oxygen in the brain. The emotional,
social, visual and kinaesthetic aspects of these methods will also
allow for deeper, richer and faster ways of learning that can become
more readily integrated into people's ways of doing, feeling, thinking
and being.
References and
Quotations
All hyperlinks were retrieved or checked on 10/4/2015
Gokhale
(1995) Collaborative
Learning Enhances Critical Thinking, Journal of Technology
Education Volume 7, Number 1 http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/v7n1/gokhale.jte-v7n1.html
Greenaway
(2000) The
Active Reviewing Cycle, http://reviewing.co.uk/learning-cycle/index.htm
Greenaway
(2015) 4
Active Reviewing Methods and the Active Reviewing Cycle
http://reviewing.co.uk/articles/4-active-reviewing-methods.htm
Mercer
et al (2015). Thinking
Together, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge
https://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk/about/#
Impacts
include:
"Quality of group work: students engage more effectively with tasks for
longer periods of time, with all participants being included more in
discussions
Quality of talk: the quality of students' talk changes significantly.
More features of Exploratory Talk appear in their dialogues, showing
more reasoning occurring when they solve problems."
Stefano
et al (2014) Learning
by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance, Harvard
Business School http://hbs.me/1HZo0ri
Wilson
et al (2014). Just
think: The challenges of the disengaged mind, Science 4
July 2014: Vol. 345 no. 6192 pp. 75-77 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6192/75
Abstract:
"In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy
spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but
think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more,
and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves
instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to
prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that
something is negative."
Honourable Mentions - or where this article has been cited
- If you would like to see another take that refers back to this article see Bernie deKoven's blog post on Action Learning at DeepFun
To
ensure that you do not miss future articles you can you can learn more
about Active Reviewing Tips and how to subscribe at: http://reviewing.co.uk/_ezines.htm
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