Cognitive Perspectives: Getting Organized

(Late start today. But I am delighted to report that my daughter is back in preschool today for the first time since her tonsillectomy last Monday. There was much rejoicing. Shout out to Grandma and Oma for helping us get to the finish line.)

For me, cognitive perspectives on learning are most helpful when I'm trying to get my head around how people (and systems!) organize and use information and skills, both internally and with the help of learning and memory aids. I mentioned yesterday that cognitive science grew up alongside computer science, so people who know something about programming might recognize some of the ideas. (It's an interesting philosophical question to wonder how one or the other disciplines might have grown up more independently of each other, or even if such a path would have been possible.)

A good introduction to this style of thinking about learning is schemas. This video is a pretty good introduction:

In short, recall that schemas are like the filing cabinets where we store our understandings of the world. Hopefully we regularly interrogate our schemas to help us incorporate new information, such as when we discover that our internal concepts are too limiting (e.g., stereotyped answer to the question "Who is a surgeon?" in the video). Remember those Patrick Steward GIFs? Piaget calls this process accommodation.

I find that being aware of what the video calls "script schemas" to be especially useful. We all use (and all need!) these implicit procedures for navigating the common situations of our lives, like ordering in a restaurant. But here again, scripts can be limiting. Over years of therapy, for example, I've occasionally learned to identify when I'm choosing to play back a script I don't actually want to reenact.

My absolute favorite article from my cognition class is the classic "How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds." The point is that we can "offload" some of our cognition to external systems—like those in an airliner cockpit.

This basic idea gives rise to some useful teaching and learning techniques. As I said a few weeks ago, a great way to get a group of learners on the same page about a concept or procedure is to build a shared schema, perhaps through whiteboard work or team-based mind-mapping.

"What do you know about meat?" you might ask (RIP Anthony Bourdain). You could help the group build a little schema together, bringing together participants' disparate knowledge, and externalizing it in a way that makes it more universally accessible to everyone.

But probably the most useful article I read studying cognition and learning was a science education article about physics problem solving. Stay with me, I think we can safely generalize from it.

The authors asked expert and novice physics problem solvers to classify a set of problems: pulleys, springs, blocks on inclines, the kinds of problems you learn to solve in engineering school until your fingers are distinctively calloused according to your writing utensil of choice and you start singing your little trigonometry memory songs when you're just walking down the street.

Notice that study participants weren't solving the problems, just putting them into meaningful groups. A few conclusions leapt out:

• The experts took longer to study and classify each problem.
• The experts used more sophisticated representations to describe the problem when making their choice of how to classify it.
• Accordingly, the experts were more likely to see to the heart of the problem, to the underlying physics law that would provide a mathematical route to the desired answer, rather than focusing on the more superficial surface features of the problem in order to classify it.

Humans, and human systems, are much more complex to understand than little physics cartoons. But I think the same principles often apply to skilled vs. novice ministry leaders when problems inevitably arise.

"What is actually going on here?" is an underrated question, as practical theology scholars usually emphasize. What relevant concepts are most likely to be descriptive of the situation in the most meaningful ways, ways we might be able to use to find some leverage on the situation as our understanding deepens.

Our minds often try to speed us up—with help from schemas of varying degrees of sophistication. This is useful in genuine fight-or-flight situations and often destructive otherwise. We can all use the reminder to slow down, stay curious, and try see to the heart of the problem(s) before leaping in to action.