zenpundit.com

Military education reformer and author Don Vandergriff has joined the blogosphere and  he is off to a nice start:

First of all, my hat’s off to anyone that ventures out and participates in something like the adaptability conference. It takes moral courage to admit, “maybe I can get better, let’s see what happens here.” More compliments to the person’s organization if the organization was willing to support and encourage its people to get better. Too many organizations focus on the short term profit and simply don’t want to lose control of its people, don’t take the opportunity to make a long term investment in making its people more competent and confident. These attributes are the hallmark of adaptability.

I use a series of different games and scenario based education to involve the students (or participants) in the discussion about how to evolve adaptability in themselves and in their organization. The students end up doing the talking and usually solving or finding the answers to their questions. Each and every time any group does these exercises, they assume that I, as the facilitator, limit what they can do, like asking question to broaden their assumptions and courses of actions, and that I will always say no if they do ask a question, like “can we have more time.”

I will leave you with this thought, after doing this approach with games and getting similar results from audiences the past 50 times, why do students box themselves in? What does that tell us about ourselves and our organizations, when we always assume the negative? How does this limit our “evolutionary adaptability”?

Facilitation is the skill that separates the great teacher, who leaves an intellectual legacy in the form of students whose worldviews they have been profoundly impacted, from the scholar who is merely competent in the classroom. The latter knows their field while the former knows how to elicit students to think about the field in a deep and meaningful way.

Not all “star” scholars are great facilitators because that skill requires a good deal of self-restraint to guide students to the point where they can make the leap to discovery and comprehension on their own ( genuine learning, in other words). A high tolerance for failure and error is required because students will initially go down well-trod blind alleys ( well trod to the instructor, not to the students – this is a perspective that academics frequently overlook) before realizing that they need to generate alternative solutions. Facilitation, unlike pontification, keeps students cognitively active and on-task with timely re-direction or adaptively ( modeling for the students) takes advantage of a student insight to create a learning moment for the larger group.

I look forward to reading more in this vein from Major Vandergriff in the future ( Hat tip to DNI )

Charles Cameron, who already blogs in his area of professional expertise at Forensic Theology, has added Hipbone Out Loud to his arsenal:

Understanding is modeling, mapping.

In this blog, I want to capture the glimpses I have of an extraordinary world, each glimpse being a tiny area of a vast map – certainly more sophisticated than any individual can generate with data visualization tools and modeling software, perhaps more complicated than a single culture can grasp as a collective – but important, as it is the matrix in which our individual and cultural life-maps fall.

You will find I favor quotes and anecdotes as nodes in my personal style of mapping – which lacks the benefits of quantitative modeling, the precision with which feedback loops can be tracked, but more than compensates in my view, since it includes emotion, human identification, tone of voice.

The grand map I envision skitters across the so-styled “Cartesian divide” between mind and brain. It is not and cannot be limited to the “external” world, it is not and cannot be limited to the quantifiable, it locates powerful tugs on behavior within imagination and powerful tugs on vision within hard, solid fact.

Doubts in the mind and runs on the market may correlate closely across the divide, and we ignore the impacts of hope, fear, anger and insight at our peril.

I’ve featured the writing of Charles Cameron here before because he produces posts rich in both complexity and depth, generating intriguing horizontal-thinking patterns that would have easily escaped my attention.  This another blog that I’ll be checking frequently.

It isn’t quite being “liveblogged” but DNI is putting up posts on The Adaptive Leadership Conference.

I had the pleasure of meeting Maj. Don Vandergriff at Boyd 2007 and his brief on adaptive thinking, while targeted at reforming military education, has a facilitated “free play” nucleus that would be applicable to a wide variety of secondary and postsecondary educational settings to develop creative thinking based problem solving skills in students. Many of Vandergriff’s ideas are laid out in his book,Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War.

Hopefully, DNI will soon be providing an analysis of some of the presentations.

Recess is a historical staple of elementary education in America and it is still not uncommon to see children granted small amounts of time for “free play” or educational games in the primary grades. Unfortunately, this practice is under fire in recent years. Some critics of public education or politicians would prefer to see that time devoted to increased amounts of formal, skill-drill exercises; but aside from the fact that test-prep activities quickly hit the point of

diminishing returns in terms raising a school district’s aggregate mean test scores ( a little is good, a lot is not) the so-called ” wasted free time”, is actually neurologically vital for the optimum cognitive development of children’s brains. It’s good for us older folks too but that’s a topic for another day.

A report from the excellent Eide Neurolearning Blog:

Remembering to Play

“Several recent articles remind us of the importance of play. From NPR, Old-fashioned play builds serious skills, and NYT, Taking Play Seriously.Also from the American Academy of Pediatrics (The Importance of Play for Health Child Development pdf : “Play allows children to use their creativity while developing their imagination, dexterity, and physical, cognitive, and emotional strength. Play is important to health brain development…Undirected play allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts, an to learn self-advocacy skills.” An increased in hurried lifestyles and school-based academic performance may leave a child with little unstructured time. In one survey by the National Association of Elementary School Principals, 30% of kindergarten classes no longer had recess periods

….An additional point made in the NYT article, was the importance of play for the development of the cerebellum. For kids with sensory processing disorders, this is a big one. Sometimes the earliest indication that something isn’t “quite right” is when a child avoids the normal rough-and-tumble play on the playground. That’s why without intervention, a child may accumulate even fewer play experiences and fall even farther behind their classmates with time.”

Read the rest and find additional brain-learning resources here.

While older students do not have “recess”, time for creative, exploratory and imaginative learning activities should be a regular aspect of core academic classses.  The chance to “play” with concepts, solve puzzling scenarios, smash ideas up in a synthesis, articulate  new or unorthodox  solutions to old problems is a teaching strategy for students to arrive at a deeper understanding of the subject at hand. It trains them to create and evaluate analogies, test the logical soundness of each other’s ideas, debate and experiment. Less structured but goal-directed time is a valuable investment as independent thinking cannot be cultivated in a classroom where every moment is direct instruction and rigidly scripted. At some point, the training wheels have to come off if we are to discover which students can ride on their own and which ones need additional guided practice.

Furthermore, in relation to “play”, music, the arts, sports and drama play a critical role in brain growth and do not represent “frills” but a central modality for integration of concepts, application of learning and generation of insight. As subjects, they are the brain’s “Right” side exercises to the ” Left” side’s analytical-logical reasoning provided by mathematics instruction and science classes.

As a society, we have gone berserk on overscheduling children into formal activities, academic as well as extracurricular, to the point where some elementary age kids show signs of anxiety, burn-out and depession or have time with their families that is not devoted to some kind of structured, formal, event. I find that many students lack any real cognitive independence, normal childhood creativity or the ability to negotiate social interactions with peers without hands-on, adult, supervision. A kind of well-meaning, suburban, shelteredness that produces a vaguely “institutional” passivity in many children.

Our students need both structured learning as well as some degree of “space” or “freedom” in order to maximize their intellectual and emotional growth, not either-or.

Fabius Maximus has hit his stride as a blogger with a highly informative set of posts on wargaming that later expanded to DNI.

War games, the antidote to “Victory disease”

Are war games a competitive edge of conventional forces vs. non-state 4GW foes?

The Achilles’ Heel of military simulations

At DNI:

During Millenium Challenge 2002

It is generally underestimated by the public (and even academics) how powerful games – especially free-play games- can be as a tool for learning; the cognitive potential of a well-constructed and rigorously moderated game is literally immense. ( and when coupled with mass-collaboration, social-networking, MMORPG  technology a level of validity might be realized that the old Prussian Grossgeneralstab or RAND apparatchiks could only have dreamed. Unfortunately, a rigged game becomes a powerfully persuasive lie, so integrity is key if gaming is to guide decision-making in the real world) A few examples:

” The gamers argued that insights arose from immersion in play. In 1956 Joseph Goldstein noted that the war game demonstrated ‘ the organic nature of complex relationships’ that daily transactions obscured.War-gaming gripped its participants, whipping up the convulsions of diplomacy ‘ more forcefully…than could be experienced through lectures or books’.”

” A team from the Social Science Division [ at RAND ] posed a number of questions which they hoped the unfoldig month of gaming would resolve. Chief among them was whether gaming could be used as a forecasting technique ‘ for sharpening our estimates of the probable consequences of policies pursued by various governments’. Would gaming spark “political inventiveness“, and more importantly, how did it compare to conventional policy analysis? Did gaming uncover problems that might otherwise be neglected? And invoking the emerging touchstone of intuition, did the experience impart to policy analysts and researchers “ a heightened sensitivity to problems of political strategy and policy consequences?”

  Sharon Ghamari- Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn [ emphasis mine]

Another example:

“What we encountered, though, once our game-called Therapy, as it happens-was finished, were two remarkable things, both of which Colin Powell and Richard Duke might have told us. First, of all the professions, psychiatrists and psychologists tended to do worst at the game; secondly, the synthetic process worked even better in reverse. Playing the game expanded people’s grasp of human nature in general and their particular group’s dynamics. But even more, watching people play revealed a depth of information about them, and about the world at large, that you would ordinarily expect only from months of official therapy“

The quote comes from an article “Wanna Play ?” in Psychology Today. Further insights in the article:

“In fact, the phrase “just a game” is a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance. Games are anything but “just” anything. They cover the gamut of human endeavor and come in every package and medium you can imagine. Last year in the United States alone, 126 million board-style games were sold for $1.14 billion; video and computer games accounted for another $5 billion. It is impossible to calculate how much people benefit from games:

* Games are primers on turn-taking, the basis of all relationships.

* They can solve major crises in industry and teach people not to pilfer pencils from the company storeroom; in fact, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on them for that.

* They can be training grounds for legendary generals and make the difference between winning and losing wars.

* Finally, and most important, games can reopen doors into the world of pretending and childhood, reminding us of unadulterated fun, sparking creativity

Psychologically speaking, games have a knack for setting us free”

Instead of reading about games, you should be playing one 🙂

SOCRATES AND THE FREE PLAY OF CIVIC MILITARISM

William Lind at DNI had an excellent article up today dedicated to the “free play” military educational program of Major Don Vandergriff. Like most things rooted in good principles, the program has broader application than where it was begun by Vandergriff. Lind writes:

“We should all therefore greatly admire those few Army officers who have tried to wake their dinosaur up. None has done more than Major Don Vandergriff. Not only has he produced two excellent books that get at the heart of the Army’s problem, its personnel system, he also led a highly successful reform of the Army’s Georgetown University ROTC program. ROTC is, for the most part, a sad joke. Vandergriff’s program was a highly demanding, creative exercise in building real leaders. Many of its graduates have gone on to outstanding performance as platoon and company commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The purpose, I would add, is not just to challenge them but to develop in them the habit of “looking up” and seeing their own situation in a larger context that is essential for mission-type orders to work.”

Those who read Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling And The Stone, may recall Hammes’ endorsement of free play training as a tool for creating an officer corps capable of handling 4GW opponents.

These sort of exercises are very powerful teaching tools because they stress a fluid combination of imaginative speculation, analysis, methodical problem-solving and drawing upon existing knowledge – and does so under the crucible of situational pressure. Some of you readers were fortunate enough to be taught in a classroom that relied heavily upon the Socratic method, which incorporates some of the same aspects, to a lesser degree, in a classroom setting (if you weren’t, then think of the Professor Kingsfield character in the movie, The Paper Chase).

Vandergriff would have the Army teach its officers a mode of thinking that ought to have been inculcated in public school so that every citizen, civilian or soldier, can think critically, independently and creatively. This is not cognitive training for war but for life.