Modelling Stupidity as a Life of the Mind...Curiosity is a Better Way to Frame This

Modeling the Behavior We Expect in Class is a good short read.   After only reading the title (and waiting for the article to open) I thought this might be an interesting source of some new ideas and began to wonder: what do I do that models the behavior I expect?

Actively listen and frequently spend time in class helping students, on multiple ‘sides’ of an issue, strengthen their own arguments.

When listening to student comments it is important (if I choose to be one of the responders) to highlight what the student did well and to point out ways the student inaccurately summarized a scholarly article or appears to have conflate two concepts, or whatever the error might be…and suggest ways to re-think it.

Ask students what they think.  Then push them so they believe you really want to hear what they actually think.  Then take it seriously and connect it to course material in as many ways as possible.

Change my mind.  Sometimes in small ways, like ‘that is an interesting read of this article and one I had not thought of,’ and sometimes in larger ways, like ‘fair point, you are right, when I said xyz I overlooked this or made the exact mistake our author is warning us against.’

Be curious and excited about engaging with the ideas and arguments under examination.  Connect these to better understanding some real world problem on people’s minds at the time.  Try to find illustrations of the students doing the same and point it out to them that they are doing this…with enthusiasm!

These are a few of the ideas that zipped through my head in about a second.  Then I turned to the article which starts with a reminder of the value of social-learning theory or observational learning.  That is, the insight that we learn ‘by watching others.’

This reminded me of how our children so often learn the least productive approaches to conflict transformation by watching their coaches, parents, teachers, pastors, and other adults model behavior they would be humiliated to claim as their own on a video.

The author tells us about Matthew Fleenor, who in a 2010 article called on teachers to ‘model stupidity.’  To really be a first-among-equals in classrooms designed to focus on inquiry and open questions and learning. 

Fleenor was, according to our author, building on a 2008  idea from Martin Schwartz who is quoted as saying , “the more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.” 

Both of these remind me of Einstein saying ‘If we knew what we were doing we wouldn’t call it research.’  The modelling noted here is about meeting our students where they are to travel with them to a life of the mind, research, inquiry.  For me, however, we should be modeling curiosity and open-mindedness.  Calling it modelling stupidity catches our attention as educators, but works less well in our communication with students or larger publics than modelling curiosity and open-mindedness.

Our author takes an idea from Julie Glass who suggests we “turn our classroom documents into scholarly documents” and builds on that to recommend an assignment where students engage with a scholarly text as text, but also as an artifact not all that different from the texts they create in some fundamental ways so students will get comfortable assuming the position of ‘scholar.’

We too infrequently put scholarly texts in front of our students.  Whenever I do, they rise to the higher expectations, so I am doing it more and more.  We want them to engage with texts, and peers, and communities of scholars and more.  Help them do just that and their tour guide through scholarly texts, where we are one reader among many.  Modeling stupidity as a life of the mind...is an interesting point, but the same point works better if we think of it as modelling curiosity and open-mindedness (and build in, or better yet be open to, being wrong now and again).