Artisans and Black Box Systems

Teachers (and unReal Trainers) are artisans. This means they need an intimate relationship with the tools inside the black box.

Jump Leads
When the smiling young man in the car park approached me brandishing a greasy set of jump leads, my first thought was to flee. It's not that I'm scared of jump leads, (they're just a way of connecting a flat car battery to a battery in another car and borrowing a bit of, erm, 'jump', after all) but I'd never 'popped the hood' before and had no idea how to do it.

Figuring a guy with such greasy wherewithal would know how to do this, I agreed to his request. And a mere ten minutes later we were staring at where the engine should have been. But where now there were five black plastic boxes. Even I know that you can't plug jump leads into black boxes.

Black Box Systems
Why black boxes? One clue is my ignorance. Cars, these days, are pretty good so you don't need to do much. Another clue is the lack of tinkering you see these days. As a child, it seemed like half the males on my street would be playing with their engines of a Sunday afternoon. Cars, these days, are very complicated. You put fuel in and out comes 'go' and that's all you need to know.

By coincidence (not) such things are called black box system. If you put one thing into a system and something other comes out - and you don't know or don't care what happens in between - then it's a black box.

For most people, a computer is a black box system. You don't want or need to know what happens inside them. In fact, the number of people on the entire planet who could 'build' a modern computer from scratch is vanishingly small. Hobbyists who make their own computers don't 'build' them so much as assemble them - from black boxes. (Which might not be either black or box-like, but you get my drift.)

It's a similar thing with the mail order company. You make a complaint and the person on the phone starts explaining that the truck was late because the driver was ill because her father was upset because his cat had died. Who cares? Not you, because for you the 'order' button on the website is a black box. Click goes in and out comes a reduced bank balance and a book. (Or not, in this example.)

Industrialisation means Black Boxes
Of course, there are some things where we both care and need to know what goes on inside, but we don't. Many big-company CEOs would dearly love to know what's going on in their departments and divisions and business units. But they don't. They manipulate and coordinate a string of black boxes - the divisions, the departments, units and teams - like Lego. This is what it means to be industrial.

It also gives us a clue what it means to be an artisan. Artisans can't take black boxes for granted because knowing their tools and materials intimately is part of their craft. (I'm using the word 'artisan' in a very loose sense here because I can't think of a better word - this is the kind of thing I mean.)

Learning means art, and science
Helping people to learn cannot be an industrial process. There's clearly an art to it and there should be few black boxes. Here are some, though:

• She explained the assignment to the class.
• She explained the situation to her team.
• The class learned about the historical period.
• The team learned about the new policies.

Explaining and learning are the basic tools and materials of every teacher. But what's happening inside people's heads (and, more importantly, inside their minds) while all this is going on is a black box. Professor of Pyschology, Steven Rose, has called this an explanatory gap.

Twentieth Century Cutting Edge
Here's a thread about what a 'cutting-edge' Training the Trainer course might look like. None of the suggestions (including mine!) make any reference to the mind and how it learns. There are a few references to 'understanding learners' (and, inevitably, 'Learning Styles' - watch this space for a post on that in the very near future) but that's about it.

All the teacher training I've ever done has been more about the 'big picture' than the details and opening up the black box (although I did once attend a seminar on 'Aromatherapy and Memory'). But it's the details that take competence and turn it into craft.

Time to get metacognitive
Teachers and students, managers and staff should be opening up the black box to work out where they're going to attach the jump leads. Why aren't we doing it already? And where can we go to get more help on closing our explanatory gap?

Later this week, another long one on the same theme: Grokking cognitive dissonance and the bitter disappointment of writing proper Learning Objectives.