The learning uncertainty principle

The other evening I was having dinner with my sister’s family, including my niece who was home from college for a visit. My niece is a charming education major and already has a teaching certificate, having taught for a couple of years in a prep school in England. My niece knew that I’ve been teaching at Eastern Michigan University and asked: “Uncle Tom, what’s your theory of teaching?”
“My theory of what?”
“You know, your theory of teaching,” she said. “How do you think your students learn? What’s the basis for the way you teach your students?” “What do you assume when you attempt to reach your kids with the things they need to know?”

I had to admit; no one’s ever asked me that question before. I’d been teaching for 5 years with classes as big as 120 and no one ever asked me about my theory of teaching. Unlike my niece, I never had a course in education. Fact is by State law, I’m not qualified to even teach Kindergarten -- but here I am teaching college students.
I realized my niece was right, I really should have some sort of “theory” for what I do. How can I possibly be an educator if I don’t have a theory? I needed one.

How can I get myself a “theory of teaching”? I decided that there were only two practical ways. (1) I could spend semesters in attending boring education courses, reading a bunch of books, and doing research or (2) I could invent something.
Being a seasoned university professor, I chose option #2. I’ve been teaching for a number of years; I’ll just make something up based on what I’ve been doing, give a name, and proclaim it my theory of teaching – having no real idea what I’m talking about. So here it is: my uncertainty principle of learning.

Most of you may recall from your studies of quantum mechanics that the German scientist, Werner Heisenberg, got the Nobel Prize for his “Uncertainty Principle of Physics” in 1933. This important principle deals with the location and measurement of sub-atomic particles. Among other things, it states that it’s impossible to accurately measure both the precise location of a particle and its momentum at the same time. You can do one or the other – you can determine where a particle is or you can say something about its direction and velocity; but not both. They’re referred to as conjugate variables.
Likewise, you can say nothing about either the location or momentum of a particle when it is not being measured – in between times its simply referred to as a “cloud of possibilities” … well really a “probabilities” but “possibilities” sound more democratic.

“Clouds of possibilities”: I like that! That’s how I think of my students -- clouds of possibilities. My meeting with them for a couple of hours each week does little to dispel these clouds. I know little about where they’re coming from, where they are in their lives from day to day, or where they’re going.
However as an educator, from time to time I’m required to locate these students in learning space -- to say something about what they know and whether they have actually learned anything. I have to assign grades that reflect their knowledge.
Or more accurately, grades that reflect how well they’ve psyched out their instructor. As every thoughtful educator knows, assigning a grade reflects a student’s skill in duplicating what the educator imagines the student should know -- not necessarily the truth. Every student since Socrates or Confucius has scored well by imitating the ignorance of their teachers.
Another aspect of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Physics is that in measuring either the location or momentum of a particle, you change it. In other words, the process of measuring a thing, affects it. I firmly believe this to be true with students. Exams are important assessment tools, but you can’t test students without changing them. In reality, it’s the only time you have their full attention and the questions you ask and their answers impart knowledge. Exam questions signal what’s important to you as an educator – what’s not asked has no immediate value.

Given that students try to get good grades, or at least pass a course with minimum effort or disruption to their lives, the questions asked on exams clearly shape what students remember. If they get a good question right, they remember it. If they get it wrong, they sometimes figure there may be a better answer.
It’s quite impossible to test a student without changing that student. Assessing and educating students are conjugate pairs. I decided some time ago I can do one or the other well, but not both. I’ve chosen educating and given up the idea of accurately assessing student knowledge. I focus on using exams to further educate students -- to impart as much potentially useful knowledge as possible. For me the “test” is a teaching tool; not for assessment. I really don’t care what grade a student gets and neither will he or she in 10 years. The only important thing is: has the student learned something related to the subject being taught.
How do I do that? I ask irritatingly, open-ended questions; questions that require both knowledge and thought and often don’t have a right or wrong answer -- questions for which the answers cannot be memorized. I ask students to reassemble what they know in order the discover things they often didn’t know they knew. In the process, they invent their own learning.
For example rather than asking a simple question about the shape and size of Europe, I might ask how Europe’s many peninsulas have contributed to the fact that its rose as a world dominating power in the 17th century. In thinking about that question, some students might get to the notion that it has something to do with the fact that peninsulas are easy to defend and hard to conquer and therefore Europe has always been a land of competing states. Some may come to realize that Europe came to dominate the world because, in part, of its unusual geography.

The bottom line: there’s no such thing as teaching -- only in helping clouds of possibilities, a.k.a. students, on their paths to achieve certain goals. Where they end up within their space of possibilities is anybody guess, but my job is to facilitate that process as best I can. That’s Wagner’s uncertainty principle of learning.