A Philosopher, a Children’s Novelist, and the Art of Teaching
Warning: this post contains footnotes
If Jesus were giving his Sermon on the Mount today, what questions might he be asked?
“Lord, is this going to be in the test?”
“Are we supposed to have taken notes?”
“Why do we need to know this stuff?”
“Is there going to be any homework?”
“The other disciples didn’t have to learn all this.”
“What time’s this class supposed to finish?”
“When are we ever going to need any of this in the real world?”
Would the Pharisees step forward and ask Jesus for his lesson plans? Would a Sadducee point out that Jesus hadn’t set out his learning objectives? Would a scribe say that there hadn’t been a plenary?
Maybe.
In this post, I won’t go into how Jesus taught and what we can learn from his approach, not least because I’ve already written a book on the topic (the first chapter of which you can read here).
Instead, I want to look at the question of how we learn (and so how we should teach) by looking at the work of one of the greatest philosophers of all times, St Thomas Aquinas, and, by contrast, the writing of one of the greatest children’s novelists of our own time, Frank Cottrell Boyce.
How do we learn?
According to Aquinas, knowledge is acquired “both from an interior principle, as is clear in one who procures knowledge by his own research; and from an exterior principle, as is clear in one who learns (by instruction).”1
This makes a lot of sense but it’s easily forgotten. As teachers and parents, we tend to remember the instruction part and forget everything else. However, the truth remains: sometimes we need someone to teach us and sometimes we work it out for ourselves. We learn from teachers and we learn from reading.
But what does the teacher actually do?
According to Aquinas, the teacher can only succeed in his or her task if he or she respects what is already potentially present in the student: “the teacher causes knowledge in the learner, by reducing him from potentiality to act”.2 The image he uses is of the doctor who “assists nature, which is the principal agent, by strengthening nature and prescribing medicines, which nature uses as instruments for healing.”
Now here’s where he builds up to the important part for us in the classroom today.
Knowledge “pre-exists in the learner … in the active sense,” he writes. “Otherwise, man would not be able to acquire knowledge independently. Therefore, as there are two ways of being cured, that is, either through the activity of unaided nature or by nature with the aid of medicine, so also there are two ways of acquiring knowledge. In one way, natural reason by itself reaches knowledge of unknown things, and this way is called discovery; in the other way, when someone else aids the learner’s natural reason, and this is called learning by instruction.”
This is so easy to ignore. As teachers and sometimes as parents, we often assume that the only way students learn is through our instruction. Of course, they do learn that way, but they also learn through discovery. And this is where Aquinas becomes really interesting because he points out that “the teacher leads the pupil to knowledge of things he does not know in the same way that one directs himself through the process of discovering something he does not know.”3
If instruction and discovery are the two pillars on which education is based, discovery is the stronger of the two. Or, to be more precise, when we instruct our students or children, we should be leading them to knowledge in exactly the same way as we learn something by discovering it ourselves. We don’t impose knowledge on our students, like weights on a pair of scales, we help them find a way to discover it for themselves.
So what does this mean in practice?
It probably means that we need to talk a lot less and let the students think out loud a lot more. In other words, our lessons should be more often like seminars than lectures or tutorials.
Tutorials, Lectures, and Seminars.
OK, so what’s the difference between these three approaches? Here’s Jeffrey Bond, an American teacher:
“Unlike the lecturer, the seminar teacher does not guide his students by unfolding formally what he already knows. Neither does he, as the tutor does, closely question students to correct their thinking so that they may attain certain knowledge. Instead, the seminar teacher encourages students to wrestle with fundamental problems, problems with which every student must struggle if he is to make a good beginning in any discipline. The seminar teacher therefore leads more by raising questions than by providing answers.”4
The idea that we should raise questions more than provide answers may worry you, but let’s stick with idea for a moment. Why is Bond making this suggestion?
It is important to note that he’s not denying the importance of tutorials or lectures, but he is suggesting that we can also help students learn better by encouraging them to engage with the material they are studying themselves. He is suggesting that we instruct so that they can discover. Or, to be more precise, we instruct in a way which enables them to discover. And the best way to do that is by asking good questions.
Raising questions
But what does this actually look like in practice? Here’s where (finally) we turn to Frank Cottrell Boyce, who is both one of the nicest authors out there and also one of the funniest. Let’s have a look at an extract from his wonderful 2022 novel, Noah’s Gold.
In this book a group of schoolchildren are abandoned by their teacher, Mr Merriman, when their Geography field trip goes disastrously wrong and they find themselves cut off on an island off the coast of Ireland. Worse still, they no longer have internet access.5 But then Mr Merriman reappears. With a boat. What’s more, he has six gold bars in his lighthouse hideout. Mr Merriman, in short, has gone off the rails, but he hasn’t lost his teacherly ways. Just look at the way he “teaches” his students in this extract:
We were all thinking, now we were back with Mr Merriman, he would know what to do and look after us, and everything would be OK.
He did have a plan.
It just turned out that the plan was mostly not about rescuing us from an uninhabited island. Mr Merriman wanted us to carry the gold bars from the lighthouse, down to the boat, and then take it back with us to the mainland.
Eve quickly noticed something was wrong with the plan.
“Sir,” she said, “is this your gold?”
“Excellent question, Eve. Has anyone else got an answer? This gold was just here behind the door when I arrived. Has anyone heard the phrase Finders Keepers?”
“We have heard it, Sir, but we don’t think it applies to gold.”
“Interesting. Anyone else?”
…
Mr Merriman told us to grab one gold bar each and carry it down to the boat. “Don’t try to carry two. They’re very heavy and the steps are slippy. Do it quickly. They will be looking for their boat now.”
“Who will, Sir?” said Lola.
Mr Merriman said this was a great question and wanted to know if any of us had a good answer.
I said, “The people who came this morning on the boat, Sir. They didn’t come to fix the internet, did they, Sir?”
“Yes those people.”
“Is it,” I asked, “their gold?”
“Excellent answer, whatever your name is. And what kind of people do you think might hide gold bars in a remote lighthouse?”
Dario suggested people from the Armada.
Ada suggested faeries.
Ryland said criminals.
“Criminals! Very good, Ryland.”
Lola said, “Oh! I know what’s happening now. The people who left the gold are robbers. Gold robbers. And now we’re going to take their boat, so they’re stuck here on the island, and tell the police all about them so that they can put them in jail and return the gold to the proper owners.”
“Very good, Lola – that’s very nearly exactly right,” said Mr Merriman.
He said this in the sort of voice you might use for saying a Mars bar is nearly exactly a vegetable.6
My suspicion is that every teacher has had these Mars-Bars-as-vegetables moments. We’re teaching our class, asking all sorts of beautifully framed questions, and then one of our students gives us the “wrong” answer, the one we hadn’t been expecting, the one which throws us off our lovely, pre-planned path. And so we ignore it and carry on regardless.
But that’s not how teaching should be.
Yes, we decide the topic of the lesson. Yes, we know more than our students and so we should establish the parameters within which the lesson proceeds. But we also need to leave room for the unexpected, for students to ask the questions they really have, rather than the ones we think they ought to have, for the lesson to go where we had not expected it to go.
Objections and suggestions
I can hear the objections now. But we haven’t got time! We’ve got a syllabus to get through! The exams are in three months time!
I get it. Teachers work under severe restraints. Nonetheless, it is still possible to teach in a way that allows our students to discover, to learn, and to actually remember what they have learned.7
So here are some practical suggestions for the classroom:
Cut back on Powerpoint. Powerpoint has its place, but it puts you in a pre-planned straitjacket of your own making.
Listen more: talk less.
Ask genuinely open questions, not Has-anyone-heard-the-phrase-Finders Keepers-style questions.
Talk about topics that aren’t on the syllabus. (If we only talk about exams and topics which are going to be examined, students will assume that it’s only exams that matter.) Creative approaches to the start of lessons can be useful here.8
Share your own work, or what you have recently learned yourself, with the students.
Move out from behind the desk.
Re-consider the arrangement of your room from time to time. (If students are always sitting in serried rows, facing a screen, it suggests that the screen is the most important object in the room. It isn’t.)
If it all gets too much, read a book by Frank Cottrell Boyce.9
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I. 117, accessed October 24, 2017, http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/FP/FP117.html#FPQ117OUTP1. See also, St Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, 11.
Aquinas, Summa, I. 117.
See also Aquinas, Summa, I. 117: “Now the master leads the disciple from things known to knowledge of the unknown, in a twofold manner. Firstly, by proposing to him certain helps or means of instruction, which his intellect can use for the acquisition of science: for instance, he may put before him certain less universal propositions, of which nevertheless the disciple is able to judge from previous knowledge: or he may propose to him some sensible examples, either by way of likeness or of opposition, or something of the sort, from which the intellect of the learner is led to the knowledge of truth previously unknown. Secondly, by strengthening the intellect of the learner; not, indeed, by some active power as of a higher nature, as explained above, because all human intellects are of one grade in the natural order; but inasmuch as he proposes to the disciple the order of principles to conclusions, by reason of his not having sufficient collating power to be able to draw the conclusions from the principles.”
Jeffrey Bond, ‘On the Modes of Teaching,’ https://thejosias.com/2015/04/14/on-the-modes-of-teaching/
Just in case you’re wondering, I’m being ironic here.
Frank Cottrell Boyce, Noah’s Gold. Macmillan, 2021, pp221-223
I realise that I’ve used a split infinitive in that sentence, but I quite like split infinitives and am prepared to have an amicable discussion with anyone who thinks they’re grammatically incorrect.
A simple example. Students find poetry difficult. They think it’s a puzzle that needs to be solved. It isn’t. So, I’ve created an anthology of poems which I like, starting in the 21st century and working backwards through time. Each poem is followed by a short analysis / appreciation from me. The students get the anthology to enjoy in their own time. At the start of each lesson, we look at a poem while I take the register. By the time students come to study poetry, it’s not such a closed book. That’s the idea anyway.
I’d start with Noah’s Gold and then move onto Cosmic, the audiobook version of which is also fantastic. The only problem I had when reading it was that I had to self-isolate. I was laughing so much it upset the rest of my family.