Episode 242: The ‘Aha’ moment

Robin Potter

Welcome back to another episode of the School of School podcast. I am here with Andy Psarianos.

Hello, Andy. How's your day?

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, yeah, I'm doing well, doing well. Not so happy about the weather, but anyway, we won't complain about the weather.

Robin Potter

Well, I'm just across the water and I'm sorry, but I'm not experiencing that. So I can't feel your pain at the moment, but hopefully I'll send some good weather your way.

Andy Psarianos

Bring on the sun, bring on the sun. That's what I say.

Robin Potter

Yeah, I agree. So while we're sitting inside, I wondered if we could talk a little bit more in depth about what makes a great learning moment for a student or even a child.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, that's a good question. And it's not just the child, it's everybody, And I think that whether it's like, there's sort of lots of different ways that people refer to it, as people say, I had a light bulb moment or I had a 'aha' moment or whatever it is, but some kind of breakthrough, some kind of realization that helps to gel a couple of things together. And what makes those things special? How do they happen? Why do they happen? And what makes them so special? And I think a lot of this has to do with mindset. So if you approach things with, know, I hate using jargon and kind of like, you know, popular terms too much because people have their own ideas about what they mean. if you approach kind of learning in general as there's an expectation that there's a lot of stuff you don't know and that, but that if you work at it, you can get there, right? So this is kind of, I guess, some people call sort of like a growth mindset. You don't have a fixed mindset. Fixed mindset would be like, I suck at this. I will never be good at this. I'll never learn the whatever. I'll never be able to memorise my times tables. Or I'll never remember how to, what the different modes of the major scale are in music or I'll never, you know, like whatever it is, like you just, you know, my brain doesn't work that way. This is not for me. I can't do this. That's a fixed mindset. So fixed mindsets, if you have a fixed mindset, you're have a lot less aha moments in your life, right? Cause you have to, you have to approach things with the idea that you have to work at stuff in order for it to, to gel.

Robin Potter

Absolutely.

Andy Psarianos

Right? And I guess, you know, people talk about a lot of these things as if they're kind of new breakthroughs, but I think we've known, everybody's kind of known this for a long time, right? This is just common sense, really. But if you're to wrap it up in kind of like theoretical education speak, know, the really the person you got to think about is Piaget a little bit. And this idea of like what he called a productive struggle, didn't call it productive struggle, but he said the term that he used was disequilibrium, right? Like you're out of balance. You got to work to become, you work on something and it puts you in a state of unbalance. you're not, all of a sudden things don't make sense, they don't add up. And that's when you have the breakthroughs, right? That's when, because what happens is you, our tendency is to assimilate knowledge, information. Like you just gathering stuff, you know? It's, you know, if it's raining and I go outside, I'll get wet. That's just kind of assimilating, you know, knowledge, right? No, but I mean, it sounds dumb, but it's true, right? But, but, you know, so, but then at some point, you gather a bunch of stuff, but nothing's so linear, nothing is so like, straight. It's like, there's always exceptions, there's always cases where it's not true. So in mathematics, that might be something like a child assimilates information about multiplication and it's like when you multiply two numbers right the answer which is of course not called an answer is the product the answer is always bigger okay that's great but then at some point you run into things like fractions and you're multiplying fractions and that's not true anymore. Right? Or you, you know, like the number isn't bigger. It's like, you know, or, or sometimes it is bigger or the rule, all the rules change all of a sudden. Right? So that's disequilibrium, right? That's like, okay, I'm out of balance now. This, this understanding that I had doesn't make sense anymore. And that's when the breakthrough happens. That's what it's like, that 'okay I get it now', well why is it when you know like just because there's really weird things in math there's really counterintuitive like if you multiply two negative numbers the product is a positive like what like how does that make any sense, right? Surely when you multiply negative numbers, you're going in that direction. How could you possibly be going double negatives multiplied by each other? It's gotta make more and more negative stuff, not...positive stuff, right?

Robin Potter

That's right.

Andy Psarianos

So that's disequilibrium and those aha moments. So what makes a lesson special for a child is when they have those moments, right? When they challenge a preconceived idea and they realize, and it could be a breakthrough in solving a problem or it could be a different way of looking at something or a deeper understanding. And it feels good when you have those things, right? It's like, yeah, now I get it. Yeah.

Robin Potter

Yes. Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

You know, get kind of like the dopamine hit there, right? It's almost equivalent to, you know, I don't know, getting to a new level in your video game or, you know, whatever, scoring a goal, winning a game, whatever. It's the same kind of thing. It's a real reward, right? We're wired for it.

Robin Potter

Sure.

Yeah. And I think you're right. Like we continue throughout our lifetime to have those moments in all different areas of our lives. But I think kids, young children get a lot of those because they are learning at a rapid pace. And so there's so many that, well, that's it. And there's so many aha moments for them, like moving from sounding out a word to being able to read a sentence, you know, and of course in math there's all kinds of aha moments.

Andy Psarianos

Big breakthroughs, right? Huge, yeah, I can now, I'm on this level of, know, I'm now on the red books. I'm no longer on the green books or whatever. You know, but yeah. But what makes those moments happen is careful planning from a teacher.

Robin Potter

Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

Because it takes a good understanding of what is the learning journey, right? So what, how, what is, when they all are thinking along these lines, which they, largely for the most part, children will be thinking along a certain path, a predictable path, right? When they're all going down this path, what's the likely misconception?

Robin Potter

Mm-hmm.

Andy Psarianos

So I gave a few examples, like multiplying two negative numbers, right? That's a very well-known, common kind of aha moment for a lot of kids. What makes it special is, so as a teacher, what you need to know is that at some point they'll have to cross this bridge, because it's counterintuitive.

Robin Potter

Mm-hmm.

Andy Psarianos

And you got to give them the right kind of learning experiences for them to develop, to come to this conclusion themselves, to have that aha moment and not spoil it for them and just tell them what all the rules are and kind of say, don't bother trying to understand any of this, because it doesn't make any sense. Just remember these rules, right? As if it's like, I don't know, something out of the Bible or something, right? The 10 Commandments of Mathematics, you know?

Robin Potter

Yeah, I mean, it's important along the way to have these moments to continue with the journey because if you're not having, well, as you said, if you're not having the light bulb moments, then you're not in a growth mindset, number one. So that could impact you.

Andy Psarianos

But learning becomes the whole, the only joy in learning is having those aha moments really, right? Cause the rest of it is just like work, know, it's struggle, right? And that's, that's the thing. That's the reward.

Robin Potter

That's what I mean. Yeah. So we're okay. I have to go back. I have to ask you then, as someone who has mentioned that you didn't like school at a young age, you didn't enjoy it. Would you say, would you say you had less aha moments? Were you not, or would you say you had aha moments?

Andy Psarianos

No, I think I had plenty of aha moments, but they weren't orchestrated in the classroom. I was kind of, and I think kids will have many, many, many learning experiences in their life that have nothing to do with school or the classroom, right? But I think that those, you know, that's part of learning, just growing up being a person, right? That's what you do.

Robin Potter

Right. Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

But if you're not, if you're not, so as an educator, your role really is to kind of create this environment where these learning experiences are going to happen, not to just kind of give the information, right?

And that's, that's kind of the trick, right? So if you want kids, so we talked in another podcast about kids not being engaged. Why are they not engaged? Because there's no, there's no reward at the end, right? There's no kind of like, you know, what are they going to get? What, how do you win this game? Right? Like it's this, do you know what I mean? There's nothing, there's nothing to be had by all the toil and struggle you're asking. There's nothing to win, right? You know what I mean? Because, because it's not presented in a way that that has any kind of learning prizes in it. Yeah, learning is a prize, right?

Robin Potter

Yeah. So what's the best way for teachers to ensure they're giving the kids the opportunity to have these moments?

Andy Psarianos

Well, it's not easy, right?

That's the trick. So what it requires from the teacher is to understand and know a lot about how people learn and how to deal with people who are at different levels of readiness in the classroom and all this kind of stuff without just creating busy work or tedious nonsense to keep them busy, right? So I think a common coping strategy when I was in school for teachers would be to give you busy work if you were, if you were, let's say, finding it easy or, you know what I mean? It'd be like, okay, well, here's some tough questions. And once you've done that, then you can go and clean out all the things and, you know, you can empty all the trays and clean them out or something, right? Like give you some kind of busy work, you know? This has nothing to do with learning.

Robin Potter

Now give me busy work.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, there's different types of busy work. could be like, you might as well give the kid a broom, right? And say, go sweep the hallway, right? You know, because you're... Yeah, whatever it is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's like, you know, so that's not how you do it, right? So how you do it is you understand where your kids are at.

Robin Potter

All back in the day was the chalkboard maybe clean off the brushes, whatever.

Andy Psarianos

You say, okay, these were ready now for this new discovery. So now I'm going to orchestrate a lesson to kind of try to surface this in the lesson so that they get it, right? And that's the tough bit. It's like giving them something. And often it has to do with like giving them problems to solve.

Robin Potter

Mm-hmm.

Andy Psarianos

you know, and then where they, where maybe the current skills that they've been, that you know, they've learned are not going to help them solve this problem. They have to learn something new to solve this problem. And that's, that's not easy, but you know, as an author, a textbook author, that's what you're trying to build all the time, right? It's like, say, what's the next thing? What is the level of variation? How can I make this question different perceptually or how can I mathematically vary this question so that it's different than the previous one, where it's gonna give them a broader understanding of things, right? It's very challenging to do as an author. And then as a teacher, it's also equally challenging to make sure, because I think the problem that a lot of teachers run into is they just wanna tell, say, this is the trick, this is how you know this, right? This is why it works this way. But it's much more meaningful if they have that a-ha moment themselves. Much more meaningful. Yeah. Don't spoil it for them. It's like telling everybody how the movie ends before they watch it. like, what's the fun in that? Don't do it. Stop. Don't do it.

Robin Potter

Resist temptation teachers, resist temptation. Let them have the aha moment.