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“The Having of Wonderful Ideas”
and Other Essays on
Teaching and Learning
THIRD EDITION
“The Having of Wonderful Ideas”
and Other Essays on
Teaching and Learning
THIRD EDITION
ELEANOR DUCKWORTH
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher.
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents with thanks
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
References 193
Index 203
About the Author 208
vii
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Jean Piaget for his remarkable body of work and for his
confidence in me. I am equally grateful to Bärbel lnhelder, at whose side
and through whose patience I learned, among other things, the practice
of critical exploration. There are many others who have, over the years
during which this work was done, helped me to learn what I needed to
learn, and with enjoyment along the way, among them: Jeanne Bamberger,
Magali Bovet, Penny Carver, Mani Denis, Hubert Dyasi, Brenda Engel,
Ariane Etienne, Claryce Evans, Christiane Gilliéron, Ann Goldsmith, Joan
Green, Ken Haskins, David Hawkins, Mary Ellen Herbert, Lisa Hirsh,
Connie Kamii, Evelyn Keller, Catherine Krupnick, Maggie Lampert, Ann
Manicom, Debbie Meier, Elliot Mishler, Neil Morrison, Philip Morrison,
Phylis Morrison, Elaine Newman, Vito Perrone, Eva Peterson, Mike Sav-
age, Abbie Schirmer, Audrey Schirmer, Boone Schirmer, Peggy Schirmer,
Lisa Schneier, Klaus Schultz, Vicky Steinitz, Julie Ince Thompson, Lillian
Weber, and Rose-Marie Weber.
I am indebted, in many ways that they know, to Jinny Chalmers, Joanne
Cleary, Mary DiSchino, Fern Fisher, Wendy Postlethwaite, and Mary Riz-
zuto—the moon group.
My students and teaching fellows continue to teach me about teaching,
learning, schools, and a grand array of subject matters.
My brothers, Martin and John Duckworth, have never failed to give
me support and good cheer when I needed it.
The first and most enduring providers of support and encouragement,
whose influence is found throughout these pages, were my parents, Mu-
riel and Jack Duckworth. I dedicate this book to my mother and to the
memory of my father.
ix
x Acknowledgments
“The Having of Wonderful Ideas” from Piaget in the Classroom, edited by Martin
Schwebel. Copyright © 1973 by Basic Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Basic
Books, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.
“The Language and Thought of Piaget, and Some Comments on Learning to
Spell” from The Language Arts in Elementary School: A Forum for Focus, edited by Mar-
tha L. King, Robert Emans, & Patricia J. Ciancolo. Copyright © 1973 by the National
Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.
“Either We’re Too Early and They Can’t Learn It, or We’re Too Late and They
Know It Already: The Dilemma of ‘Applying Piaget’” from The Genetic Epistemolo-
gist, Vol. 7, Nos. 3 & 4. Copyright © 1978 by the Jean Piaget Society. Reprinted with
permission.
“A Child’s-Eye View of Knowing” first appeared in Reason and Change in Elemen-
tary Education, Omaha, NE: Tri-University Project in Elementary Education, 1968.
“The Virtues of Not Knowing” from National Elementary Principal, Vol. 54. Re-
printed with permission. Copyright © 1975 by the National Association of Elementary
School Principals. All rights reserved.
“Learning with Breadth and Depth” first appeared as the Catherine Molony Me-
morial Lecture, City College of New York, Copyright © 1979. Reprinted with permis-
sion of the Workshop Center for Open Education.
“Understanding Children’s Understanding” first appeared in Building on the
Strengths of Children, edited by Vivian Windley, Miriam Dorn, and Lillian Weber,
published by the Dept. of Elementary Education, City College of New York, 1982.
“Structures, Continuity, and Other People’s Minds” from Reunion, Reaffirmation,
and Resurgence, edited by Kathe Jervis. Copyright © 1983, The Miquon School.
Reprinted by permission.
“Making Sure That Everybody Gets Home Safely” from The Connecticut Scholar,
Vol. 7. Copyright © 1985. Reprinted with permission.
“Twenty-Four, Forty-Two, and I Love You: Keeping It Complex” and “Teaching
as Research,” both from The Harvard Educational Review, Vols. 61 & 56, Nos. 1 & 4,
Copyright © 1991 and 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Reprinted by permission.
“Critical Exploration in the Classroom”. Copyright © 2005 from The New Educator.
Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC., www.taylorandfrancis.
com. This article was first published in 2004 as “L’Exploration critique dans la salle de
classe,” in J.-P. Bronckart & M. Gather Thurler (Eds.), Transformer l’Ecole [Transforming
Schools] (pp. 79–97). Brussels: DeBoeck.
“Design” from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem.
Copyright © 1947, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 1975 by Lesley
Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
“miss rosie” by Lucille Clifton, from Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–
1980. Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of BOA
Editions, Ltd.
Figures 5.1, 9.3, and 9.4, and related discussion in text from Learning and the Devel-
opment of Cognition, by B. Inhelder, H. Sinclair, & M. Bovet. Copyright © 1974 by the
President and Fellows of Harvard College. Included with permission from Presses
Universitaires de France.
Introduction
T
HIS BOOK MAKES assumptions about what education can be. In
these essays I assume we want schools in which students come to
feel the power of their own minds and their creative capacities. I
assume we want students’ understanding to be deep, confident, and com-
plex, and their means of expression to be varied and nuanced. I assume
we want students to develop a sense of community responsibility, dem-
ocratic commitment, social justice. And since, as Evans (1981) has said,
“Educational practice is what teachers do,” I assume we want teachers
who support students’ engagement in their learning, even if this may lead
to forms of practice that are unfamiliar to us.
Since this book first appeared, public education has been running in
the opposite direction. Teachers have fewer and fewer occasions to sup-
port students’ own learning engagement with the world—with its cultural
traditions, its living beings, its physical regularities, its social structures. A
number is accepted as an adequate representation of a student’s learning,
and as a criterion to determine a student’s future within formal education.
The fact that the ideas contained in these essays are more at odds with
today’s educational system than they were 20 years ago makes it all the
more important to me to keep those ideas in the public discourse (see also
Carini 2001; Hawkins, 2003).
One important emphasis in this collection of essays is that there is a
vast array of ways that people come to their understanding—a vast array
of perfectly adequate ways. I have also found that, although people come
to equivalent understandings in many different ways, they often do not
recognize the validity of any way but their own.
In chapter 8, for example, Figures 8.4 and 8.5 show two ways of repre-
senting the same event. For many people, only one of those ways makes
sense—but for some of them it is one, and for some it is the other. And if
only one of those ways makes sense to a person, it is almost impossible for
xi
xii Introduction
him or her to grasp the sense of the other representation—no matter how
it is explained.
Similarly, two ways of figuring out possible arrangements of three ob-
jects are outlined in chapter 10. Both ways are perfectly adequate to the
problem, but people who solve it one way often have trouble seeing how
the other way can make any sense.
The most striking simple example in my experience came from a group
discussion about arithmetic division (see Duckworth, 1987). “What does
it really mean, 24 divided by 8?” one person asked. A second person re-
sponded that if you have 24 things, and you distribute them evenly into 8
piles, you then count how many end up in each pile. Yet another person,
astonished, said, no, that’s not what it means! It means you have 24 things,
and you put them in piles of 8, and you see how many piles you get.
Now clearly it means both of those. But imagine a teacher who be-
lieves—as some in that group believed—that it could mean only one of
them. Imagine that teacher explaining a division problem to a child who
was thinking about it the other way. The teacher, with her own way in
mind as the only one possible, would not even notice that the child was
thinking differently—adequately and differently. With all the good-will in
the world, the discussion would nonetheless come to an impasse. Prob-
ably both of them—the teacher and the child—would emerge from that
discussion believing that the child was hopeless in arithmetic. Imagine
how often such an impasse arises in discussing more complicated matters,
and how often learners’ ways of understanding are left unrecognized.
Textbooks and standardized tests, as well as many teacher education
and curriculum programs, feed into this belief that there is one best way
of understanding, and that there is one best, clearest way of explaining
this way of understanding. Then we need only decide on the best way to
come to understand a given topic, and we can tell teachers to present it to
students that way.
This idea that there is one best way of understanding is linked to a
pervasive pernicious belief—that the students who do not understand it
in our way are not smart enough to understand it at all, that their future in
the academy is limited, that they need a different kind of education.
And there is another, related pernicious belief: the idea that intelligence
is given at birth in a fixed amount. If people have not been given much of
it, we can generously try to do our best with them, but it won’t surprise us
if they do not manage to understand.
These two ideas support each other quite beautifully: “There is one
best way to understand.” “Many people are not smart enough to under-
stand.” Once we believe those two ideas, a third harmful idea is implied:
Introduction xiii
“If someone does not understand our way, it is not that there is any prob-
lem with our insisting on our way; it is that there is a problem with that
learner.”
So I find this matter to be critically important. The essays in this book
start instead from the premise mentioned above—that there is a vast array
of very different adequate ways that people come to their understanding.
Curriculum, assessment, teacher education programs—and all of our
teaching—must seek out, acknowledge, and take advantage of the diver-
sity of ways that people might take toward understanding. We cannot
plan “the logical sequence” through a set of ideas, especially if we want
schools to make sense for students whose backgrounds differ from our
own. As Lisa Schneier (personal communication, 1997) has said, we must
find ways to present subject matter that will enable learners to get at their
own thoughts about it. Then we must take those thoughts seriously, and
set about helping students to pursue them in greater breadth and depth.
In this way we can capture the intelligence of all our students, so we do
not lose the one-half, three-quarters, nine-tenths that we lose now.
I need to add to this my conviction that students who succeed in our
current one-right-way system are similarly missing out on vast possibili-
ties for learning (see Pettigrew, 2006). The world is far more complex and
fascinating than the small piecemeal views that the one-right-way al-
lows.
Part of the work described in these chapters involves giving people
an appreciation of their own ways of understanding. Part of it involves
giving people experience in figuring out and appreciating other people’s
ways of coming to understand—ways that are different from their own.
Much of the learning described here seems light-hearted, playful. It is. But
it is also monumentally serious.
There were two major formative influences as I began my work in edu-
cation: the work of Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, and my experience
with the Elementary Science Study curriculum development program.
These two influences were very powerful.
Piaget’s was one of the great minds of the 20th century, and his work,
and Inhelder’s, are still my most significant source of intellectual stimula-
tion. With Piaget and Inhelder I learned how futile it is to try to change a
child’s mind by telling her to think something different. It raised the fas-
cinating question of how on earth one can help someone learn, if telling
them what you know does not help.
I started to be able to pursue this question when I joined the staff of the
Elementary Science Study. My science background was exceedingly limit-
ed. The only formal science I had studied since high school was a first-year
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