For years I’ve been meaning to write up a simple technique which makes lessons flow. I lacked the words until I read Gary Klein’s brilliant book, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Klein captured what I could not: he described the technique of mental simulation.
Klein spent years studying how experts making decisions. He shadowed leaders under pressure: pilots and fire chiefs, naval officers and tank commanders. He is probably best known for this example:
It is a simple house fire in a one-story house in a residential area. The fire is in the back, in the kitchen area. The lieutenant leads his hose crew into the building, to the back, to spray water on the fire, but the fire just roars back at them.
“Odd,” he thinks. The water should have more of an impact. They try dousing it again, and get the same results. They retreat a few steps to regroup.
Then the lieutenant starts to feel as if something is not right. He doesn’t have any any clues; he just doesn’t feel right about being in that house, so he orders his men out of the building – a perfectly standard building with nothing out of the ordinary.
As soon as his men leave the building, the floor where they had been standing collapses. Had they still been inside, they would have plunged into the fire below.
In this case, although the lieutenant attributed his decision to a ‘sixth sense’ and didn’t even know there was a basement, Klein’s questioning revealed that he had been aware that the fire was much hotter and much quieter than it should have been in a house that size: the lieutenant’s “expectations were violated”.
This example is so arresting that it is the most frequently quoted, but in unpicking how experts think, Klein discusses many other aspects of their practice, and some equally astonishing examples. A detailed analysis of the USS Vincennes’ attack on an Iranian airliner in 1988, for example, compares the attack to an earlier incident in which the same officer avoided apparently inevitable conflict with Iranian warplanes. Klein explains how experts use their experience to recognise patterns in situations, how they consider options rapidly and sequentially, and how they use mental simulation to evaluate and refine those options.
Mental simulation
Mental simulation simply means envisaging different ways a situation might play out. Klein exemplifies it by discussing how a fire officer planned to remove someone from a crashed car. The doors are crushed and the firefighters’ usual tool (the ‘Jaws of Life’) is unlikely to work in the cramped space.
During his investigation, the commander has noticed that the impact has severed most of the posts holding up the roof of the car. He begins to wonder if they can lift off the roof and then slide the passenger out rather than fighting their way through the doors. He tries to imagine how that might be done. He imagines the roof being removed. Then he visualizes how they will slide the driver, where rescue workers will stand to support the driver’s neck, how they will turn the driver to maneuver him around the steering column, and how they will lift him out. It seems to work. He runs through the sequence again to try to identify any problems but can’t find any. He has heard that rescues could be made this way, but he had never seen it.
He explains to his crew what they need to do, and the rescue works out as he had imagined. The only problem is that the driver’s legs become wedged underneath the steering wheel, and additional firefighters have to reach in to unlock his knees.
Klein highlighted the following aspects of a mental simulation:
- People construct them “the way you build a machine”: they picture the startpoint, they add the next challenge, then the next action, and so on.
- They’re “not very elaborate”, relying on no more than three factors – like a machine with no more than three moving parts – for example, car, firefighters, driver.
- People construct them through no more than “six different transition states” – or steps.
The handful of factors and steps we can manage is presumed to be due to the limits of working memory. Looked at this way, Klein notes, mental simulation “no longer seems easy” as it requires “a lot of familiarity with the task” and the need for “the right level of abstraction”: too detailed and it chews up working memory, too abstract and it provides little help.
Fine for firefighters, what about teachers?
Klein offers examples of mental simulation – successful and unsuccessful – from shipwrecks and war, law and engineering. I’ve read about its use by sportspeople, visualising moves the night before a game.* Does this fit teaching though?
A decade ago, as an Assistant Language Teacher in Japan, I stumbled upon mental simulation, realising it could make the difference between a successful lesson and baffled students. Consider the following scene:
Logistically, to reach this point, I had to have:
- Chairs and tables pushed to the side.
- Students in a circle on the floor
- Two volunteers, kitted up and positioned
- All students clear about what was happening
I probably needn’t emphasise that this activity was novel for students, nor that our common language was limited. So how to make this work?
Mental simulation was a key part of my preparation: sitting over the plan and visualising each successive step. To give another example:
- Tables into fours
- Cards distributed
- Instructions
- A model
- Start playing
Playing it out in my head, I might come across obstacles or delays: students are in an odd number – so where will the two extra students go? How will students choose who should go first? I might ask the person nearest the door to begin. Mental simulation allowed me to anticipate problems and refine the lesson accordingly, or, in meeting an insurmountable obstacle, rework the plan from scratch.
Perhaps the discipline of writing a lesson plan as a new teacher is designed to help address this need. I’m not sure it does though: it’s too easy, particularly as a novice teacher, to write ‘Students quiz one another’ without thinking through, or mentally simulating the transition: how many students in each group? How will they move their seats? Who will give out the quiz papers and when?
I suspect experienced teachers do this unthinkingly, and I also suspect that novice teachers either don’t do it, or they struggle. Success requires both thinking to mentally simulate the change and a good understanding of the different ‘factors’ – how an approach may play out in a specific classroom Experienced teachers are also likely to ‘chunk’ ideas: having distributed a task and asked students to pair up hundreds of times, they are likely simply to think ‘start the activity’; for novice teachers ‘handing out papers’, asking students to ‘pair up’ and getting them started represent three separate actions..
So this week’s suggestion: in planning your next lesson mentally simulate the transitions. Or more importantly, in working with a trainee, ask them to talk you through their mental simulation of the lesson step by step.
Klein’s book is both a great read and full of fascinating ideas about expertise: Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions.
In many ways Klein’s work may seem to conflict with Daniel Kahneman’s, on the limits of our expertise. This paper, which co-authored by Klein and Kahneman, on the ‘Conditions for Intuitive Expertise’ is fascinating.
The Real Mr Roo offers this example of mental visualisation in sport, from Wayne Rooney: ‘I visualise scoring wonder goals’.
What were students learning?
Picture 1 – Directions: up, down, left right, forward, back. The two combatants are trying to hit one another with rubber mallets while blindfolded. Peers are shouting directions (in English), pupils are responding (under pressure).
Picture 2 – Numbers.
* Searched for and failed to find the reference for this. Remind me please.
What about if you not just describe but make people try an exercise themselves first to gain the experience and start reflection about eventual outcomes? As for a card game training oral language skills, pick a language you are in between you not too comfortable with, etc ..
I like this a lot Sara, thanks for the suggestion – helpful to show how confusing unclear instructions can be.
Heya.
I teach literature at a elementary school in order to have something to do. I tend to use all types of free resources here in question. For example my sixth grade literature class are asked to do a quiz based on the weekly news. Or they play either scrabble or hangman in any case too. Best wishes.
My fifth grade students are expected to rewrite a story. But from time to time I mix it up. I typically get my more able fifth grade pupils to rewrite a newspaper article as well. It however varies from week to week. Sometimes I use information which is taken from a website. At this grade level I expect a bit more. They solve crosswords.
My fourth grade children have to learn a entire poem. In addition they must demonstrate good writing and spelling skills. And they must try to read a whole chapter out loud. On top of that they are shown a information text and instructed to memorise it. I get them to work silently in pairs.
For my third grade kids I make it easy. With my help they have to write a four line poem. They are also asked to write short thank you notes and to prepare a oral recount. Other fun tasks for this particular grade include a themed task for the class. To encourage teamwork they work in pairs. Occasionally I decide a quiz with ten clues for them to do on their own.
With my second grade pupils I give them a task. They have access to a word bank. The usual task I give them is this one, describe a plate. Alternatively if they are bored I ask them to find ten words that describe a farm. Once a week I bring a blank crossword into school with me. Again we play Scrabble.
First grade kids are hard. There is a lot they can actually do but I don’t want to force or rush them. In lieu of that I basically improvise a task for them to do each week. I pick a fun theme. One of the themes is Xmas. Another theme is the news.
Dreyfus model of moving from novice to expert is helpful here…
Thanks for this Harry. Really enjoyed it.
But here’s a thought. It is interesting and persuasive as far as it goes, but I wonder if it misses out a vital dimension. Any transition in a lesson is a transition that sits between one bit of curricular substance and another. Whether that’s a different dimension of the same thing, a new bit of content, a stage in an analytic journey or whatever, there is something that is being taught. There is a ‘what?’ that precedes the ‘how’ and profoundly colours the ‘how’. For the students to gain a sense of why they are moving from point x to point y, or activity x to story x, or activity x stage 1 to activity x stage 2, one can state it procedurally and have it all go smoothly with minimal words – sure, no mean feat, and well worth having – or one can make sure that one’s instructions do another, more fundamental job, which is to show the role of that shift in advancing more deeply into the puzzle, the story, the facet of content or other curriculum property being taught.
We’ve found on the Cambridge history PGCE that a trainee’s transitions (of all kinds) are transformed most rapidly when they finally click on two key things, peculiar to the subject, and they are the use of (a) the historical narrative; (b) the ‘enquiry question’ (in the Riley 2000 sense) to shape the transition. The latter is most critical, and its effects are profound.
“So now we’ve done this, we’ve noticed a new problem coming into view, a bit of our question we hadn’t thought of, one we hadn’t looked at. So now we need to…”
OR
“So we’re all absolutely clear on X. And, as Fred remarked, we now know XXX which has helped us with Y. BUT, if you now …. read the story on page 17 / move these facts into different categories / recall Y that we learned three months ago / log on and visit this webpage / listen to this slightly different story …. then you are going to see something new in our question, something that we haven’t yet tackled, another challenge that the question has hiding for us.”
It’s this ability to make every transition subject-driven, whether by its narrative or analytic structure or both, that seems to make every transition sing, that avoids time-wasting clunkiness, that never makes moving a chair or changing resource about chairs and resources but about history.
Until they can do this, trainees tend to say, ‘And now we’re going to do X’. They might give crystal clear, efficient and timely instructions, but the flow is broken because they are just giving instructions not teaching a subject.
Bringing this together with your post, I would say that the mental simulation needs to be of that of intellectual flow. This is where lesson planning IS mental simulation, the prior mental enactment of a micro-curricular journey – the structuring of knowledge through time and its intricate logical steps, whether substantive or disciplinary or both.
Thank you for the comment Christine, you are completely right and I feel the post now needs substantial rewriting. The intellectual flow must precede the sequence of the lesson as it’s what gives the lesson its purpose. In trying to keep the post focused on a single element, my oversimplification may have gone too far.
P.S. Managed to write all that and failed to say the most important thing! We have found that the key to a trainee doing effective transitions is the rigour of the lesson sequence (by which I mean, say, 3 to 5 lessons) and the trainee’s internalisation of its intellectual direction (narrative and analytic). We have found that the trainee turning the corner of crafting that governing disciplinary question and shaping the entire sequence around it so that every 5 minutes advances the student’s ability to answer that question, independently, at the end of the sequence, is invariably one and the same process as a qualitative shift in trainee practical performance regarding transitions. Every transition is a stage in the unfolding of that sequence, and if the EQ and the entire sequence doesn’t feel ‘present’ in each transition, the transition collapses into a mere procedure, a practical instruction, an efficient but footless pedagogic move.
I’ve recently surfaced from being on one of the DfE Workload Challenge groups, ‘Planning and Resources’. You’ll see a key message in there which I banged on about a lot is the overriding importance of planning the lesson sequence rather than the individual lesson, for the sequence ‘carries’ the knowledge shape and carries its curricular structure – how that knowledge is structured over time. Focusing on that sequence, rather than ‘the lesson’ means that anticipation of every transition (mental simulation) is one and the same thing as planning. To plan is to ask, ‘how will that stage of the ‘enquiry’ and/or narrative (usually both, if it’s a history lesson) be advanced by this new bit of the lesson?’ And therefore the act of imagining oneself introducing it is the same thing as planning.
In our experience at Cambridge, history trainees stay clunky in their transitions until that lesson sequence is planned with sufficient historical coherence to flow seamlessly and their retention of it sufficiently fluent for the mental simulation of its joins (and their practical outworking) to have happened already.
Everything else stitching it up backwards – the reversion to procedure rather than substance.
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.