Learning Beyond the Classroom

There were moments in my classes when I could almost see the problem on a student's face....  I had explained the concept. The terminology was technically correct. The diagram was on the screen. The example was working. Yet the student still wasn't quite there. Sometimes, the answer was not another explanation.  It was an analogy. Over the years, particularly when teaching university freshmen, I found myself using everyday situations to explain concepts that initially seemed far removed from everyday life. A new programming paradigm, an algorithm, a technical process full of terminology that students had never encountered before. And quite often, something very simple worked. I would take the concept out of the textbook for a moment and put it into a situation they already understood or knew. Then, once they understood the idea, we could bring it back into the technical context. I found this particularly useful with students who were moving from what they already knew into som...

Over the past five posts , I have been asking a question that has gradually become more complicated. It began simply: Are we actually assessing higher-order thinking, or are we simply asking harder questions? But the more I think about it, the more I realise that HOTS cannot be added to a course at the end. We cannot teach students a collection of facts for several weeks and then suddenly say: “Now think critically.” We cannot spend most of a course demonstrating solutions and then expect creativity in the final assignment. And we cannot tell students that reasoning matters while assessing them almost entirely on the final answer. Higher-order thinking needs to be designed into the journey. That is what this final post is about. Start with the destination The first post in this series, #01 - Start With the End , began with a simple principle: Before deciding what to teach, decide what you want students to be able to do with what they learn. It is surprisingly easy to begin course desi...

Throughout this series , I have been asking a fairly simple question: If we want students to think, how do we design learning that actually requires them to think? We have looked at the importance of starting with meaningful learning outcomes, building the necessary foundations, designing activities that require reasoning, and creating opportunities for creative thinking. But there is a problem we cannot avoid. Eventually, we have to assess something. And that brings us to a difficult question: If thinking is part of what we want students to learn, how do we actually capture evidence of that thinking? A familiar classroom situation Imagine a Computer Science class. Students have spent several lessons learning about algorithms. They have discussed different approaches, written code, tested their solutions and debugged their mistakes. At the end of the unit, the teacher gives them an assessment: “Write a program that solves the following problem.” The students submit their programs. One ...

  In the previous posts in this series , I have been gradually moving from the question of what we want students to learn to the more difficult question of how we design learning that makes it possible . In #01 - Start With the End , I argued that we need to begin with the learning outcome rather than with the content we want to cover. In #02 - Build the Foundations , I explored something I have become increasingly convinced of through my years in the classroom: we cannot expect students to think deeply about something they do not yet understand. Higher-order thinking needs foundations. Then, in #03 - Designing Learning Activities That Require Thinking , I looked at what happens when we deliberately design activities that require students to analyse, compare, investigate, make decisions and justify their reasoning. But there is another question that has stayed with me throughout my teaching career: Are we teaching students only to solve the problems we give them, or are we also ...

 A classroom scenario Imagine a Computer Science class. The students have just learned about sorting algorithms. They know what an algorithm is, they have seen different sorting techniques, and they have written code to implement them. The teacher gives them an assignment: “Write a Python program to sort a list of numbers.” The students get to work. Some remember the algorithm from the previous class. Others look at their notes. A few search for examples. Eventually, most of them produce a working program. The teacher checks the outputs. Correct. The activity has achieved its immediate objective . But there is a question worth asking: What, exactly, did the students have to think about? For many of them, the answer may be: "not very much." They remembered a procedure, translated it into code and checked whether the expected output appeared.  There is nothing wrong with that activity. Students need opportunities to practise and consolidate new knowledge. But if our objective i...

In the previous post, I suggested that course design should begin with a simple question: What should students be able to think and do after they have learned this? That question naturally leads to another one: What do students need to know before we can reasonably expect them to think beyond what they know? This is where things become interesting. Because in our enthusiasm for higher-order thinking, creativity and problem solving, it is easy to underestimate the importance of knowledge . Can students simply look it up? We live in a world where information is everywhere. A student can search the web for an explanation. They can watch a video. They can ask an AI system to explain a concept. They can generate an example in seconds. So it is reasonable to ask: Why should students still spend so much time learning foundational knowledge? I think the answer is that access to information is not the same as knowing how to use it. A student may be able to find an explanation of an algorithm bu...

If we want education to develop better thinkers, perhaps the first question we should ask is not: “What should we teach?” It is: “What should students be able to think and do after they have learned it?” This sounds like a small difference. It isn't. For many years, educational planning has naturally started with content. Here is the syllabus. Here are the topics. Here are the chapters. Here are the concepts students need to cover.  Then we decide how to teach them and, eventually, how to test whether students remember them. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. Students need knowledge. They need foundations. They need concepts, vocabulary, procedures and subject-specific understanding before they can do anything meaningful with them. But if we want to develop higher-order thinking and creative thinking , content coverage cannot be the final destination. We need to start thinking about the destination first. What should the learner actually be able to do? Consider a...

We have spent quite some time asking what education should achieve beyond grades, examinations and the acquisition of knowledge. We have talked about higher-order thinking, creativity, “what-if?” questions, responsible creativity, and the difficulty of assessing creative thinking without turning creativity itself into another rigid benchmark. But there comes a point when discussion needs to move towards implementation. If we genuinely want students to become better thinkers, problem-solvers and creators, where does that change actually begin? I believe it begins much earlier than the classroom. It begins when we design the learning experience itself. A teacher cannot simply walk into a traditionally structured course one morning and announce, “From today, we are going to be creative thinkers.” The students may be willing, but the structure surrounding them may still reward remembering more than questioning, producing answers more than exploring possibilities, and getting things right ...

 You cannot ask students to think differently before giving them something to think with. This may sound obvious, but I have often seen discussions about creativity and Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) move too quickly towards the exciting part - problem-solving, innovation, creativity and independent thinking—while overlooking the foundation on which all of these depend. Students need knowledge. They need concepts. They need vocabulary. They need to understand the fundamentals. Only then can we reasonably ask them to analyse, question, challenge, modify or create. I discovered this quite clearly through my own teaching. From fundamentals to thinking One example that stays with me comes from teaching Banker's Algorithm , a topic from Operating Systems in my undergraduate Computer Science classes. For someone who has never encountered it, Banker's Algorithm is essentially a method for determining whether a computer system can safely allocate limited resources to different pro...