SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EDUC ATION

John Willison

The Models
of Engaged Learning
and Teaching
Connecting
Sophisticated Thinking
from Early Childhood
to PhD
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John Willison

The Models of Engaged

Learning and Teaching
Connecting Sophisticated Thinking
from Early Childhood to PhD
John Willison
The University of Adelaide
Adelaide, SA, Australia

ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic)

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 MELT

The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching

Fluid, connected and sophisticated thinking, early childhood to Ph.D.
Preface

This book is about the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching (or MELT for
short), which fluidly connect to 100 years of educational research and 100,000
years of human learning and sophisticated thinking. The MELT are a family of
models with an ancestry that shares common features and that necessarily evolve to
fit new and emerging contexts. Because of their adaptability and shared features, the
MELT have provided a way for teachers, academics, sessional and professional
staff to bring together the years of education, from primary/elementary school
education through to the middle years, high school, technical education, under-
graduate, master’s and doctoral study. This connection was evident, for example,
when teachers, academics and professional staff from these contexts shared their
adaptations and uses of the MELT at the International MELT conference in 2017
and especially through informal conversations about learning. Context-specific
examples of MELT use are found throughout the book and associated website.
The MELT may provide you with a way to deepen your understanding of the
crucial role that you play in students’ learning and where your work fits in the span
of their educational experiences. Along with this insight, the MELT may also
enable to you enhance the learning of students under your care.
These models, when used in concert, have helped teachers, academics, profes-
sional staff and especially students to make connections between different subjects
and disciplines, from accounting to zoology, as well as transdisciplinary studies.
Sophisticated thinking is not context-bound, but rather learned best in a variety of
contexts, where connections between learning tasks may not be readily apparent but
need to be made explicit not only to students but also to teachers in different
contexts. The MELT also enable conversations between people with differing,
sometimes polarised, educational philosophies—for example, between behaviour-
ists employing Direct Instruction and social constructivists who employ discovery
learning.

vii
viii Preface

Polarised perspectives about learning were evident in my visit to a Pacific Island

village community a few weeks ago. But the polarised perspectives I saw did
not represent a tension but rather different points on a learning continuum, different
ways through which students engaged in learning. Below, I recount that experience
in a story called Place Value, which is set in two very different learning environ-
ments that existed in the village. In the first environment, there was a sense of fun
and freedom for young children playing in a tree. In the other environment, an
indoor classroom, the simplicity of the mathematical concept being presented belied
the sophisticated thinking needed for the young children to learn the concept. This
story is symbolic of the potential and tensions across formal education, representing
as it does extremes in terms of students determining their own learning through play
and involved in a teacher-directed lesson. These same tensions and potential are
played out across formal and informal education and so the story sets the scene for
you to grasp the breadth of learning and the breadth of the MELT.
Whatever your educational responsibility, as you read Place Value, consider this
premise: the skills that the children demonstrated under the village tree and in the
classroom are the same skills your students need and use on a daily basis, whether
they are in primary/elementary school or conducting doctoral research. Regardless
of educational level or subject area, good teaching always facilitates sophisticated
thinking, but educational understanding strongly influences how and when this
thinking is facilitated. Therefore this story is used in Chap. 2, along with stories
from high school and university, to introduce the core characteristics of the MELT
and illuminate connections of the MELT across years and contexts.

Place Value

While I swam in the ocean at the end of the tropical day, the children caught my
attention as they played unsupervised under the spreading tree down by the
shoreline. Their ages ranged from three to six years old. One child played with
shells, one laid out a mat as if proffering items to sell, two were in different
branches of the tree, one shook the branches, one just hung on, and two more were
hidden from my view but darted into sight occasionally. Each seemed to occupy a
separate world of play and exploration, of choosing what to do and where to do it.
But despite these separate activities, all the children were within a radius of
6 metres, whether horizontally or vertically, and chattered in their mother tongue.
When I left the water at twilight, the children of the village who were over seven
years old played volleyball on the sand and shell court, with an eight-year old
officiating and making sure they adhered strictly to international rules.
The next day, I attended the Year 1/2 class in the primary school of the village
and saw three of the children who had been playing in and under the tree the day
before.
Preface ix

The children’s play tree by the shore

A Pacific primary school in a village setting

x Preface

The thirty-one children sat closely packed together on a Pacific Island i-TaliTali
mat. The teacher began with some maths terminology and showed flash cards to the
children.
Reading the card being held up by the teacher, Ms. Kristi, one child called out,
‘Plus value’.
All the children chanted, ‘Plus value, plus value’.
Ms. Kristi corrected ‘Place value’, and the children chanted, ‘place value, place
value’.
Referring to the concept of numeral position in a two-digit number, Ms. Kristi
asked the students, ‘Is place value on your right or on your left?’
‘Left’, called some children.
Then eight children were selected to go to the front and each took a number from
a box and held it to their chest for all to see. Numbers chosen were 9, 41, 11, 57, 5,
17, 20 and 29.
Ms. Kristi asked these eight children to arrange themselves in increasing
numerical order. They began to shuffle, reorder, pause, look at each other’s num-
bers and shuffle some more until they stood in a straight line in the sequence ‘5, 9,
11, 41, 17, 20, 29, 57’. Guided by their teacher, who pointed to each number in
turn, the children on the mat read the numbers in order from their right to left: ‘five,
nine, eleven, fourteen…’.
Ms. Kristi paused at this number and began, ‘For…’ and one student completed
‘Forty-one’.
Ms. Kristi paused thoughtfully. Then she said, ‘Let’s move on’ and resumed
pointing.
The children called out ‘Forty-one… seventeen… twenty… twenty-nine…
fifty-seven’.
‘Is it correct or not?’ asked Ms. Kristi.
The children called in unison, ‘Not’, so Ms. Kristi asked, ‘which number is
incorrect? Not in the proper place?’
One girl standing in the sequence and holding ‘5’ pointed to the fourth student
and said, ‘forty-one’.
‘How do you know that forty-one should not stand here?’
The student did not answer. No student answered.
‘So this forty-one should go where?’
Many children pointed to the next position up, so the teacher prompted forty-one
and seventeen to shuffle and change places.
The sequence became: 5, 9, 11, 17, 41, 20, 29, 57.
‘There. How do you know this forty-one should stand there?’
No answer.
Ms. Kristi continued, ‘Any other number is in the wrong place?’
‘Twenty-nine’, a student called out.
‘Twenty-nine should go where?’
‘Besides seventeen’, one student called out, and the student with twenty-nine
shuffled there, passing forty-one.
5, 9, 11, 17, 29, 41, 20, 57
Preface xi

‘Any other number?’

‘No’, called students in unison.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Twenty!’ a boy called out.
‘Right. Where should it go?’
‘Besides seventeen’.
‘Very good. Let’s read the numbers together’.
‘Five… nine… eleven… seventeen… twenty… twenty-nine… forty-one…
fifty-seven’.
‘Very good’. The children, Ms. Kristi and I all clapped.
In Place Value we have three children learning in two vastly different ways in
two very different spaces. Under, in and near the tree, they were unsupervised,
chose what to do and had their own sense of place. Their learning through play was
in keeping with various forms of discovery learning, and in tune with social con-
structivist thinking. In the classroom, they followed prescribed instructions with an
activity that ultimately had right or wrong answers and was placed culturally and
physically on the Pacific Island mat, made through the weaving process called
i-Talitali. The mathematics learning was in keeping with Direct Instruction, where
students are primarily acquiring the canon of maths, fitting in with objectivist
thinking. In both activities, there was evidence of highly sophisticated learning: in
the classroom where the learning objectives were pre-determined by the teacher;
and near the tree, with curiosity-driven learning and no thought to objectives or
outcomes. Which form of learning is more important, more relevant or more
enabling?
Your own answer to that question will say a lot about your educational phi-
losophy. As far as the MELT are concerned, the answer is that both are valuable,
relevant and mutually enabling. I hope some readers of this book are oriented to
Direct Instruction and didactic learning, some align with discovery learning, that
some are somewhere between, and some see the whole thing as a continuum. That’s
not to shift you from your position—I’m sure it is well considered and based on a
good rationale. But when you talk to educators with other perspectives, you may
find that the MELT enables you to have more sensible, more formative, more
complementary conversations than you have had in the past, and that disconnected
aspects of education may become more connected.
The MELT rationale is that all enduring educational theories and practices
usefully inform education and when they connect as a complementary set, this will
provide a richer learning environment for students. In Place Value, for example, the
teacher was guiding the students towards specific, correct answers about numbers in
a sequence. However, she did this in a Socratic fashion and elicited many responses
and thoughts from students, some of whom were demonstrably constructing ideas
individually or socially. Was the teacher correct to provide an approach which
required students to engage in the construction of ‘right-or-wrong’ knowledge?
From a purist theoretical perspective, this approach maybe counterproductive
because of the clash between a constructivist paradigm and an objectivist one. For
instance, from an objectivist perspective, if students constructed an incorrect
xii Preface

understanding of place value, this would have negative implications for their
enduring engagement with maths. From a constructivist perspective, if students
were corrected on an answer that they volunteered in good faith, this could be
counterproductive to their ongoing confidence and willingness to engage in
learning. But from the pragmatic perspective of the MELT, a ‘bricolage’, a blending
of what works, is not only possible, but desirable, providing that teachers under-
stand what they are trying to achieve, how they will achieve it and especially know
why this is their goal.
Learning that is structured in order to help students acquire mandated knowledge
is not, by default, powerful, but neither is learning through play. One could argue
that without guided teaching, students involved in play (such as the children in the
tree) may merely be reproducing their cultural setting and knowledge, not learning
to be critical thinkers. This would suggest that play can be more reproductive and
less conceptually free than it appears on the surface. But Direct Instruction and
learning through play can be powerful, and in the context of the MELT, the
combination of these and other modes of learning provides a powerful incentive for
students to learn to think in sophisticated ways.
Learning and teaching are complex, and individuals, groups and systems will see
the same things differently through the MELT, as each will inhabit different social
and cultural worlds. I offer the MELT as a way in which our educational worlds can
become a little less polarised, and a little more connected and fluid across the years
and contexts in order to improve student learning.

Adelaide, Australia John Willison

November 2019
Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to my daughter Nadia, an intrepid learner.

The cartoons that comprise the chapter title pages are drawn by Aaron
Humphry.
All materials are under 4.0 Creative Commons licence to be shared, adapted and
re-shared with attribution.
Joe Miller edited my often convoluted writing and proof read with his eagle eye.
Many colleagues and students have contributed in so many ways, and I greatly
appreciate the feedback on drafts from Chad Habel, Chido Alozie, Chris Trevitt,
Colin Sharp, Jasvir Kaur, Kara Loy, Lyn Torre, Nadia Willison, Penny Vervoost,
Ray Tolhurst, Sheryl Mills, Sue Garvin and Suzanne Schibeci. Thanks to the blind
reviewers who provided provocative insights that improved the book.
All the photos in the book were taken by the author, except the Fronticepiece
Gold drop, which is from Shutterstock.com, under a non-exclusive right to use,
modify and reproduce worldwide.

xiii
Contents

1 What Is Our Purpose? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 MELT Components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2.1 MELT Facets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2.2 Continuum of Learning Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.2.3 MELT as a Thinking Routine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.3 Parachute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3.1 MELT Features in Parachute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.4 100 Billion Brains: Learning from Human Prehistory
to Contemporary Classrooms and Learning Environments . ...... 17
1.4.1 Beaver and Human Know-How . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 18
1.4.2 Inevitable Earth: Problems with Dams . . . . . . . . . ...... 19
1.5 One Billion Brains More: The Problems We Face Need
Research-Mindedness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.6 Structure of This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.7 Conclusion: Student Learning that Resonates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2 What Will We Use? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1 Introducing the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching . . . . . 29
2.1.1 A Holistic View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.1.2 The Origins of the MELT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.1.3 Learning Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.2 Silver Fluoride . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.3.1 Embark & Clarify . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.3.2 Find & Generate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.3.3 Evaluate & Reflect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.3.4 Organise & Manage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.3.5 Analyse & Synthesise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

xv
xvi Contents

2.3.6 Communicate & Apply . . . . . . . . . . . . .............. 52

2.3.7 Spiralling, Recursive and Messy . . . . . .............. 56
2.4 Conclusion: Engagement, Adaptability, Fluidity
and Ownership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .............. 57
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .............. 58
3 How Do We Arrange? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.1 MELT Connecting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.2 Many Models Across Educational Levels and Contexts . . . . . . . . 62
3.2.1 Early Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.2.2 Year 4/5 Primary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.2.3 Year 6 Primary School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.2.4 Year 8 Subject-Specific: A Case Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.2.5 Year 7–10 High School Transdisciplinary Projects . . . . . . 70
3.2.6 Technical Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
3.2.7 Undergraduate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.2.8 Work Integrated Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.2.9 Course-Based Master’s Degree Programmes . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.2.10 Academic Research: Doctoral, Master’s and Early
Career Research (ECR) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
3.2.11 Interdisciplinary Studies and Digital Literacy . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.3 Outside the MELT Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.4 Conclusion: Commonality with Adaptability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4 What Do We Trust? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.1 Gullible Consumers or Discerning Users? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.2 Shrink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
4.3 MELT Analysis of Shrink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
4.3.1 What Did Tara Trust? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
4.4 Three Theoretical Orientations to Learning: Objectivism,
Social Constructivism and Personal Constructivism . . . . ....... 90
4.5 Understanding the Three Theories Using the Example
of Shrink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
4.5.1 Objectivist Perspective on Shrink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
4.5.2 Personal Constructivist perspective on Shrink . . . . . . . . . 93
4.5.3 Social Constructivism on Shrink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
4.5.4 All Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
4.6 Theoretical Underpinning of MELT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
4.6.1 Theory on Learner and Teacher Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . 96
4.6.2 Autonomy and Metaphor Together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Contents xvii

4.7 Trusting the MELT? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

4.8 Conclusion: Conversations and Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
5 What Does It Mean? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
5.1 Situating Contemporary Learning Theories/Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
5.1.1 Threshold Concepts [2] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
5.1.2 Cognitive Load Theory [3] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
5.1.3 Connectivism [4] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
5.1.4 Schön’s Reflective Practitioner [5] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
5.1.5 Corporately Destructive or Mutually Informative? . . . . . . 109
5.2 MELT for Curriculum Design and Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
5.2.1 Teacher Action Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
5.2.2 Conjoined Action Research: From the Transferability
of Individual Studies to Generalisability When Using
an a Priori Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
5.3 Conclusion: Multifaceted Use with the Same Overarching
Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
6 How Do We Relate? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
6.1 Soyuz and Apollo: A Story About a Cold War Meeting
in Orbit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
6.2 Inevitable Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
6.3 Evitable Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
6.4 Retheorising Theory in Education, from ‘Competition’
to ‘Complement’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
6.5 Conclusion: It’s Only When We Relate to Divergent Practices,
Concepts and Places in Education that We Will Solve Our
Educational Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
7 How Much Guidance? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
7.1 Autonomy: Engaged Learning, Engaged Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
7.2 Conclusion: Structure Provided, Creativity Needed . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Glossary of MELT Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Acronyms

ATL Approaches to Learning

CLT Cognitive Load Theory
ECE Early Childhood Education
IB International Baccalaureate
MELT Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching
OPS Optimising Problem Solving
PBL Problem Based Learning
RBL Research Based Learning
RSD Research Skill Development
STEM Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths
writE Writing and Reading Integrated with Talking about Experiments
WSD Work Skill Development

xix
Chapter 1
What Is Our Purpose?

1.1 Purpose

There are a lot of hidden similarities in education. Differences are often emphasised,
and similarities hidden, by the articulation of context-specific terminology and tech-
niques. These include differences associated with ways of learning and teaching, such
as pedagogy versus andragogy; epistemological perspectives including objectivism
versus constructivism; pedagogical approaches, for example, Direct Instruction ver-
sus discovery learning; disciplinary ways of speaking and doing such as counting
and accounting versus zoo visits and zoology; and ways of researching, as evident
in qualitative versus quantitative methods.
Between all of these perspectives and approaches are genuine differences that are
good and helpful, for they mirror ways of learning, teaching and researching in a
variety of contexts. Such differences in perspective and approach mirror the differ-
ences between the communities to which they belong. However, these perspectives
and approaches also share quite a few similarities.
This book is about the similarities. The similarities are important because they
can be the connective elements across formal education, for teachers, principals,
academics, communities, education systems, parents and especially for learners.
Frequently, education comes across to students one learning activity, one assignment,
one subject at a time. But all those integrally involved aim for education to become a
forest of learning for students, rather than a sequence of individual trees. That forest
is a complex ecosystem of interactions, involving all year levels, all subjects and all
educational concepts growing in health and harmony. Where all the individual parts
join together into a complex whole is the location that students develop 21st century
skills, becoming critical thinkers and problem solvers who are research-minded and
information-savvy.
In order to connect the similarities so that students learn more effectively to solve
complex problems, think critically, research and make evidence-based decisions,
this book introduces and explains the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching
(MELT). The MELT provide an understanding of the connections between diverse

© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. Willison, The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching,
SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2683-1_1
2 1 What Is Our Purpose?

educational contexts, approaches, ideas and activities, and so enable a variety of

different perspectives, practices and energies to work together. The MELT illuminate
a way for educators and learners to participate in the development of sophisticated
thinking skills, where the individual trees are more clearly connected in a forest of
learning.
The purpose of this book, then, is to connect disparate energies and ideas of
education through the MELT in order to facilitate students’ development of sophisti-
cated thinking. Educational theory and practice has tended towards conflict, creating
uncertainties, distrust and wasted effort. With projections that Earth will reach a pop-
ulation of 8 billion people in 2023 [1], we need a new, more complementary style of
education for the billion human brains that will be born from 2023 to 2030 [1], for
they will become the leaders of the planet from 2040. Many of the problems they
grapple with as leaders will be human-generated.
From Dewey in 1904/1974 [2] to Bundy in 2004 [3], 100 years of education
research produced a set of understanding of learning as diverse as human learning and
sophisticated thinking over the past 100,000 years. From MELT’s perspective, this
diversity is necessary, insightful and if not complete, then well-rounded, for inform-
ing education. As we move into an era where e-learning blended with face-to-face
is the norm in schools, and in many technical education and university programmes,
what do we need to know about human learning 100 Millennia ago, and how does it
connect to the twenty-first Century?
The first 4 billion anatomically modern Homo sapiens born, from around 200
millennia ago [4, 5] to 100 millennia Before Present (BP) [6, 7] have a fossil record
that demonstrates just a little innovation [8, 9]. Our large-brained ancestors primar-
ily survived in the environments in which they were raised, or adapted to the new
environments into which they moved.
The flurry of innovation shown in the archaeological record from around 100
millennia ago [8] onwards marks a transition to modern human behaviours. This set
of behaviour is manifested in the development of diverse technologies, including
hunting tools, fire control and chemical modifications, and abstract representations
such as artworks. From this time, Homo sapiens are clearly apes with sophisticated
thinking enabled by adaptive learning. Humans were not merely wandering into new
environments from this time, but taking more calculated risks to get to new places,
as evidenced by transport technologies such as simple canoes.
This flurry of innovation was self-perpetuating. One reason for this was that
development compounded: one tool led to the development of another tool, and
when both were used together, this enabled further development [9]. Another reason
was that humans could now observe others’ intentional adaptation of things, so that
the idea of innovation became apparent. At some point in human history, someone
first coined a word for the idea of intentional change, and humans armed with such
a word may have caused the concept of innovation to reproduce like a meme [10],
further accelerating innovative practice.
The innovation flurry was also driven by the fact that many of our innovative
solutions became problems themselves. Enhanced hunting technologies at times led
to the extinction of the prey on which humans depended. Domestication of herd
1.1 Purpose 3

animals provided a breeding ground for many killer diseases that resulted in large-
scale human and animal suffering. Wide adoption of crops led to the extreme use of
herbicides and insecticides, and the clearing of natural habitats. And technologies
that closed the distance between people through online social engagement across
the globe enabled cyber-abuse to enter people’s bedrooms and addictive behaviours
to control the tempo of modern relationships. Solutions produced fresh problems,
each of which required increasingly sophisticated solutions of their own. Thus, we
became the problem-solving ape [11], in part because we had to learn to solve the
problems we made for ourselves and for the whole planet. As a species, we have a
knack of solving problems with solutions that create new, more complex problems.
The MELT provide a way to gather together and connect educational ideas and
energies in a way that may help us to break out of the vicious circle of our solutions
that cause more problems. This is possible because, as noted, the MELT connect to
100,000 years of human learning and 100 years of educational research; with this
diverse set of otherwise conflicting set of understanding, the MELT can enable an
education that is broadly savvy of the influences on education. The MELT intention-
ally draw together and represent disparate views of education theory and practice, so
as to capture the broad sweep of learning and teaching, including Direct Instruction
to discovery learning; objectivist perspectives on learning through to social con-
structivist thought; primary/elementary school to Ph.D. studies; and accounting to
zoology and interdisciplinary notions; The MELT then can be used as a conceptual
set to connect those with different roles such as caregivers, lab managers, learn-
ing advisors, learning designers, lecturers, librarians, principals, professors, parents,
programme coordinators, sessional staff, supervisors of higher degree by research,
teachers, vice chancellors and, crucially, students from primary/elementary school
to Ph.D.
MELT is frequently put into action to help students understand their own sophis-
ticated thinking and see more clearly the purpose for their own education that nec-
essarily revolves around the further development of that thinking. It is not easy for
teachers to have or develop a sense of purpose for students that goes beyond the
immediacy of daily lessons to the big picture. For both students and teachers, MELT
may be used as a thinking routine [12] that becomes habitual (but not mundane)
and which, through repeated exposure, prompts growth in sophisticated thinking,
not only about what to do and how to do it, but also metacognitive awareness.
When considering the last 100 years of educational research, our understandings
of learning and teaching can seem more disparate than ever, and theory has not
connected well with practice. For example, it is common for teachers to omit the
explicit use of theoretical frameworks for their lesson planning and when leading
other teachers [13]. However, we are also at a point of knowing an amazing amount
about the complexities of teaching and learning. The MELT were formulated not to
be theoretically pure, but through a consideration of major aspects of educational
research and simultaneous reflection on classroom practice [14], as discussed in
Chaps. 2 and 4. The models provide a conceptual framework for action, not a theory
or set of theories. A ‘conceptual framework’ pertains here to a structure that guides
thinking, that sets the parameters for considering learning and teaching.
4 1 What Is Our Purpose?

The MELT provide a practical philosophy, then, connecting theories with theories
and practices with practices, and especially connecting theory with practice. The
MELT makes the skills associated with sophisticated thinking explicit, with the
intention of encouraging coherent, explicit and cyclic development of such thinking
across students’ education.
This book spans early childhood education (ECE) to postgraduate study and con-
tains examples across those contexts. But why would an early childhood teacher care
about Master’s level study, or undergraduate or high school? Why would a Ph.D.
supervisor care about primary school learning? I suggest a reason is that the MELT
can help with the connections across education, ultimately improving learning and
teaching in ECE, primary and secondary school, technical education, undergraduate,
master’s, Ph.D. and employment contexts. Another reason is that all students use and
teachers value the skills and attitudes associated with the MELT, because the models
encapsulate what we do when we engage in sophisticated thinking [14].
A brief history of MELT
Beginning in 2004, my colleague Kerry O’Regan and I synthesised disparate liter-
ature and reflections on classroom practice, culminating in the first fully-developed
version of the MELT, called the Research Skill Development (RSD) framework [15].
The RSD was employed in two national studies [15–17], which were designed to
determine its efficacy in higher education contexts. However, the word ‘research’ did
not always connect to people’s practice. For example, Sue Bandaranaike coordinated
student placements in industry called Work Integrated Learning or Cooperative Edu-
cation and knew that ‘research’ did not fit her context. In 2009, Sue re-articulated
the sophisticated thinking expressed in the RSD in terminology that was true to
employment contexts, producing the Work Skill Development (WSD) framework
[18]. Then, in quick succession, colleagues in Oral Health developed the Clinical
Reflection Framework in 2012 [19], student-tutors developed a pentagon-shaped ver-
sion for engineering, called the Optimising Problem-Solving pentagon [20] and an
early childhood music teacher developed a song version called ‘Research Mountain’
[21], both in 2014. Colleagues from the University of the South Pacific developed a
process-based version [22], using the metaphor of weaving a Pacific Island mat, the
italitali mat that students were sitting on in Place Value. In 2018 Monash University
developed the Digital Skills Development (DSD) framework [23] and in 2019 the
Blended and Engaged Learning Zones (BELZ) [24] was devised for the design and
evaluation of modes that are explicitly blended with e-learning. (Note that ‘learning’
is used preferentially to ‘e-learning’ in this book because modern learning is so often
bound up with, or mediated fully by, the electronic that it is often not helpful to
differentiate [25]).
By 2016, the number of RSD-based models had grown to such an extent that one
name was chosen to be emblematic of the characteristics and purpose of all of them:
the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching [15]. It took from 2004 to 2016 to
determine the core characteristics of these models, and to find a name that could
connect them conceptually. The MELT evolved over time to become a set of related,
but context-specific, representations of how sophisticated thinking could be taught
1.1 Purpose 5

and learned, in keeping with Homo sapiens’ history [9] and contemporary learning
environments [14, 15].
Contemporary issues
By unpacking the MELT, this book will address four perennial, yet contemporary,
issues:
• How educators may effectively help students think in sophisticated ways, includ-
ing understanding their own thinking processes. Sophisticated thinking takes many
forms, and includes researching, problem-solving, evidence-based practice, clin-
ical reasoning, ethical reasoning, critical thinking, discovering, inquiring and
understanding concepts, as well as metacognition.
• How to connect different aspects of education so that they mutually reinforce and
complement each other:
– Across students’ education, from early childhood through to school completion,
technical and further education, undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. level, onto
employment and continuing professional development.
– Across subjects and disciplines from counting and accounting to zoo visits and
zoology, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning.
– Between sometimes competing paradigms, theories and teaching practices.
• How to deepen educators’ understanding of the dimensions and practicalities of
student autonomy in learning. This understanding will illuminate connections
between disparate discourses around student-centred learning, Direct Instruction,
Cognitive Load Theory, Threshold Concepts, discovery learning and networked
learning, as well as student cultural, language and learning diversity.
• How educators can effectively engage with educational theory in ways that offer
practical value for teaching and learning environments.
The book introduces the MELT as a way to conceptualise how such enabling,
connecting, deepening and engaging may take place.
This chapter details the purpose and features of the book and of its namesake sub-
ject, the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching. Section 1.2 outlines the MELT’s
six facets of sophisticated thinking, elaborated along a continuum of learning auton-
omy. Section 1.3, called Parachute, comprises a story about two students, Shelly and
Katie, each engaged in an individual short project in the first year of high school.
As well as covering some of the types of learning that are common across formal
education and in many different disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, this story
is true to the sophisticated learning that humans have engaged in for 100,000 years.
In Sect. 1.4, 100 billion brains, humans are contrasted with beavers, who were the
premier engineers of the past 20 million years, but who were stuck in their mode
of learning. Unlike beavers, humans have developed multiple ways of learning, sug-
gesting that a multiplicity of teaching strategies are not just possible but desirable.
Section 1.5, One billion brains more, outlines the absolute need to develop sophisti-
cated thinking in order to address educational and planet-wide problems, requiring
a conceptualisation like MELT to connect different teaching approaches and ideas.
6 1 What Is Our Purpose?

Section 1.6 provides the structure of this book, where each chapter’s title is one
of the seven questions that are central to each MELT facet and to learning auton-
omy. The chapter concludes with Sect. 1.7, Student learning that resonates. For the
MELT, recognising and fostering a diverse range of teaching and learning strategies
is absolutely central to effective education. Therefore, this book explicitly articulates
the connections between disparate educational ideas, placing them all on the same
learning autonomy continuum of the MELT, in the hope that these ideas will be taken
together as a set and become more mutually supportive.

1.2 MELT Components

The MELT comprise the six facets of sophisticated thinking elaborated along a
continuum of learning autonomy.

1.2.1 MELT Facets

The facets of the MELT concern the ‘what’ of learning and teaching. Content varies
subject-by-subject, lesson-by-lesson and in the MELT focus, the ‘what’ concerns
the skills and attitudes of sophisticated thinking as applied to, and mediated by, the
content.
Figure 1.1 shows a version of the MELT that was inspired by engineering students
who tutored in a large first year course. The student/tutors adapted MELT and devised
a version that they called the Optimising Problem-Solving (OPS) pentagon. That ver-
sion stripped out a lot of detail, resulting in a representation that is student friendly
and focuses on the facets, rather than explicating learning autonomy directly to the
students. Context-specific adaptations of MELT, portrayed in the pentagon configu-
ration, are used, with students from Year 4 of primary school to master’s level, and
in introductions of MELT to educators in schools and universities.
Complex learning from ECE to Ph.D. always requires something akin to the six
MELT facets. In many ways, these facets are clear and uncontroversial in nature if
not in name, and commonly made explicit in education. Each MELT facet comprises
a name made of verb couplets, an associated affective adjective, and a corresponding
question, as shown in Table 1.1 (as well as a description, provided in Chap. 2).
The facets of MELT are quintessential processes whose descriptions act as triggers
and connectors. As quintessential processes, the MELT facets can’t independently
capture the meaning for every context. They are fully dependent on the educators
who adopt them, each of whom knows or is coming to know, what needs to happen
in any learning situation that they are facilitating, and how to articulate the processes
they are facilitating.
Each facet of the MELT is designed to ‘trigger’ words and phrases that better
describe the facet’s concepts in a particular context. These words and phrases then
1.2 MELT Components 7

Fig. 1.1 The MELT Pentagon’s six facets, each with a pair of verbs, a key question and an adjective
in blue which represents the affective domain

Table 1.1 The six facets of

Facet name Affective Question
MELT
(learning process) adjective
Embark & clarify Curious What is our
purpose?
Find & generate Determined What will we use?
Evaluate & Discerning What do we trust?
reflect
Organise & Harmonising How do we
manage arrange?
Analyse & Creative What does it
synthesise mean?
Communicate & Constructive How do we relate?
apply
8 1 What Is Our Purpose?

may conceptually connect to other contexts which use different words and phrases for
the same concepts being triggered by the facet. Without this conceptual connection,
the processes associated with the same facet may otherwise seem unrelated to students
and educators. For example, the facet embark and clarify may trigger terms that
suit the start of a process such as ‘pose research question’, ‘define problem’ or
‘determine need’, depending on the terminology of the context and the purpose at
hand. These terms do have useful differences, but they also have conceptual overlap
that is frequently overlooked. As triggers, the facets are not generic skills, because
‘generic’ implies skills that students maybe able to generalise from one context
to another. The facets may be better thought of as ‘connectable skills’ rather than
transferable skills.
As an educational trigger, each facet has four vital inter-related components. Three
are introduced above (verb couplets, affective adjective, key question), and the fourth
component, introduced in Chap. 2, is a sentence description of each facet. Some
educators may focus on the cognitive aspect (e.g., embark), some on the affective
(e.g., curious), some on the question (what is our purpose?), some on all three.
But together, these aspects provide the sense of what we are after across education,
and that sense can be explicitly connected from one context to another. Subject and
discipline-mediated ways of understanding and representing the facets vary widely
[16–19], as demonstrated in Chap. 3’s look at MELT use in a variety of contexts.

1.2.2 Continuum of Learning Autonomy

The continuum of learning autonomy in MELT concerns the ‘how’ of learning and
teaching, that is, the ways that the facets maybe developed, making the continuum an
explicit articulation of the teaching process for scaffolding the development of sophis-
ticated thinking. It is also possible to enable students to understand their engagement
in the learning process, and representation of the continuum of learning autonomy
expressly for students is shown in Fig. 1.2. In the figure, the red pentagon represents
lower levels of learning autonomy, where students emulate; a yellow pentagon at
mid-levels of learning autonomy, where students improvise, and a blue pentagon
representing high levels of learning autonomy, where students initiate. Students may
emulate, then improvise, then initiate sophisticated learning and then proceed to
emulate once more, for example, if the learning context shifts so that students are
unfamiliar with new content, if conceptual demand goes up or as the expected rigour
increases. In other words, learning autonomy in MELT is not unidirectional towards
high autonomy, but rather shuttles back and forth, according to the young child’s or
the Ph.D. student’s learning needs [27].
Learning autonomy in MELT maybe engineered by teachers, and matrix ver-
sions of MELT often articulate a five-level, teaching-oriented continuum of learning
autonomy, shown in Fig. 1.3. Five levels of differentiation are sometimes helpful for
teachers, whereas three levels are typically enough for students.
1.2 MELT Components 9

Fig. 1.2 A student-oriented continuum of learning autonomy, here represented by three verbs and
corresponding colours: emulate, red; improvise, yellow; and initiate, blue (see www.rsd.edu.au/
framework)

Fig. 1.3 A teaching-oriented continuum of learning autonomy, here represented by five verbs and
corresponding colours: prescribed, red; bounded, orange; scaffolded, yellow; open-ended, green;
and unbounded, blue (details removed: see www.rsd.edu.au/framework)

Frequently, considerations regarding the extent of learning autonomy are left

buried below the level of teachers’ and students’ consciousness. However, implicit
understandings of learning autonomy permeate classrooms and supervision contexts
in which teachers seek to develop sophisticated thinking [27]. The question below,
associated with the continuum of learning autonomy, is arguably the most pressing
concern in education, whether for face-to-face, online, augmented, virtual or blended
10 1 What Is Our Purpose?

realities. It is ultimately the most contentious question and because of this has the
potential to connect disparate ideas in education:
How much guidance?
The six facets of MELT elaborated along the continuum of learning autonomy frame,
but cannot answer, the above question. The question can only be answered by indi-
vidual teachers and their students, by school communities, by systems and, maybe
soon, by Teaching Machines (see Chap. 5) who understand the context of learning.
The MELT explication of the continuum of learning autonomy provokes answers,
however, around a healthy shuttling where students emulate, improvise and initiate
and then proceed once more to emulate. The amount of guidance depends on the rela-
tionship of the student to what is learned, to the teacher and to the broader context,
and the complexity of such relationship is best discussed and debated.

1.2.3 MELT as a Thinking Routine

Sharing the inter-relationships of facets and learning autonomy, the MELT takes
on many forms and may be revisited in different guises along a student’s learning
journey. Some forms include tables with text, pentagon or jig-saw shapes, songs with
actions, and a weaving metaphor; diverse MELT models are presented in Chap. 3.
Formats and phrasings depend on the purpose chosen for each of the MELT, the
intended audience, and educators’ professional judgement, and so the MELT are
necessarily fluid. With a growing number of emerging MELT, the models show the
potential of working together as a set that conceptually connects the disparate ideas
and energies of education. Multiple manifestations and uses of the same overarching
framework by many educators, researchers and parents may, over time, richly develop
the sophisticated thinking that enables students to create solutions to problems—
solutions that do not become the cause of further problems.
Providing students with multiple exposures to MELT in many guises enables the
six facets to become a thinking routine [12], a way of thinking that can conceptually
accompany them throughout their education and remain afterwards. Researchers
found that a hallmark of effective teachers was that they frequently employed explicit
thinking strategies for students to use [11]. Teachers repeatedly introduced, modelled
and used these strategies to facilitate student learning. The researchers called these
thinking routines because they became almost second nature for students, and they
were a vital component of ‘making thinking visible’ to teachers, parents and to the
students themselves. The six facets of the MELT can become for students a thinking
routine if teachers facilitate their use repeatedly. One final-year university student,
looking back over multiple semesters of MELT use said ‘because they have been
consistently applying this structure to all of our assignments, we have come to think
that way for science’ [28]. MELT became a thinking routine for that student.
Education connotes a process of educing, a ‘leading out’ of what is inside stu-
dents, their capacities for sophisticated thinking, whereas the facilitation of learning
1.2 MELT Components 11

content knowledge could be called inducation. A combination of inducation and

education provides the opportunity for sophisticated thinking to be nurtured in a
content-rich environment. Students who employ skills in inquiry learning without
much background knowledge and understanding often struggle [29], while an empha-
sis on content is frequently demotivational [30]. Diversity of pedagogies, teaching
personalities and contexts, with inducational and educational elements, will provide
rich learning. For example, it seems counterproductive to teach students to think
critically while only presenting them with one understanding of critical thinking.
Critical thinking in English literature looks quite different from critical thinking in
astrophysics; students will develop richer, more robust and useful forms of critical
thinking if presented with the diverse approaches and methods afforded by different
subjects and disciplines and they can see the similarities and connections, not just
the differences.
This book seeks connections, not through terminology or definitions, but by pro-
voking thought on how sophisticated thinking maybe facilitated by MELT adaptation
and use in many content-rich contexts. The book introduces, mirrors and represents
MELT by using the seven questions above for its structure.
The story below, along with Place Value (Preface) and Silver Fluoride (Chap. 2)
will be used in Chap. 2 to show how the complexities of sophisticated thinking are,
across formal education, legitimately and usefully captured in MELT.

1.3 Parachute

This chapter emphasises purpose, and purpose is the underpinning theme in the class-
room story below, called Parachute. A big range of teaching and learning strategies is
evident in Parachute: there is a teacher present, a person who holds a vast amount of
culturally-specific knowledge and who is keen to incorporate that into the students’
own knowledge bases. The teacher has an intention for the learning that may or may
not be realised student-by-student. There is a learner, Shelly, who is willing to take
a risk and innovate, and another learner, Katie, who plays it safe and emulates the
teacher. There are unnamed students who strongly influence the learning dynamic,
even though the focus of the class is nominally an individual project.
This diversity of actors and actions is true to the reality of human learning across
millennia, where the capacity to learn was a huge determinant of the survival and
evolutionary direction of the species. At times in our prehistory, imitation and rote
learning, forms of emulation, were far more effective for survival than discovery
learning requiring innovation. However, there have also been many times where
existing knowledge and practice were insufficient and, like Shelly below, individuals
or groups needed to take risks and innovate. Without such adaptations, human groups
would have perished or been overrun. Or they just may have missed an amazing
opportunity unless they adapted and took risks, as demonstrated by the Polynesians
who sailed into the unknown Pacific about 3,000 years ago [31].
12 1 What Is Our Purpose?

Sophisticated thinking has always involved drawing on existing knowledge, eval-

uating that knowledge and then seeing if different knowledge and skills are needed.
Like this book more broadly, Parachute does not romanticise discovery learning as
a panacea, but neither does it promote a strong didactic approach as the solution.
MELT is suggestive of something more fluid, something that takes shape and then
flows again between didactic and discovery approaches. The story is narrated by me
as a participant observer conducting research in Mrs. Breen’s Year 8 science class
[32], and shows the potential and problems with content knowledge acquisition and
with discovery learning.
Parachute
‘Continue on with your steps for your parachute,’ calls Mrs. Breen, addressing the
class during the double period before lunch. ‘Then draw up an observation table. We
have material in plastic bags, cotton, string of two different lengths, thick and thin.’
Shelly takes a compass and attempts to draw a circle on some plastic, using a
pen. Once Shelly has cut out a misshapen circle, her desk partner Katie uses it as a
template for her own experiment, cutting out a circle of plastic and a circle of cotton.
Shelly works on some calculations for a while, then comes up to me and says, ‘I
don’t have enough plastic.’
She explains that her intention is to make a square parachute of the same area
as the round one. I am shocked when I see how much plastic Shelly has left. There
seems to be enough to make ten square parachutes of the same area as the round one
she is holding.
‘I need a square one hundred and eight by one hundred and eight centimetres,’
she informs me.
My mind reels at the size of this square. It would have a surface area greater than
her work desk, and yet is supposed to be the same area as the circle she has cut, a
circle only a little larger than her open hand.
‘Show me how you worked out the area,’ I ask, wanting to find out how she could
make such a miscalculation.
To find the area of the circle she has made, Shelly puts pi r squared into action,
and her calculator reads ‘433.5’. So far, so good. Then, to find the length of a side
of the square to make it an equivalent area, she hits the division button, followed by
the four buttons.
‘One hundred and eight,’ she exclaims. ‘See? It doesn’t fit.’
Sure enough, her sheet of plastic would be dwarfed by a square with sides of
108 cm and, therefore, she thinks she doesn’t have enough material.
I brace myself, remembering that Shelly is a very bright student and begin, ‘The
area of the circle is right, but the square is much too large. You just found the length
of the side if 433.5 was the perimeter.’
‘I don’t know how to do it,’ she says, looking up at the clock.
‘What is the area of a square with sides of two centimetres?’ I ask in Socratic
fashion.
‘Four centimetres squared,’ Shelly answers.
‘What are the sides of a square sized nine centimetres?’
1.3 Parachute 13

‘Three?’
‘What did you do to get it?’
‘Divide by itself?’ asks Shelly in answer.
‘Sort of,’ I respond, thinking she is getting close.
‘Find what
√ and what… like square roo… like you..?’
I write ‘ 9’.
‘I don’t know how to do that,’ Shelly laments.
I show her the symbol on her calculator. It is term three of Year 8 and Shelly is in
the top mathematics class. She says that does not know how to find the length of the
sides of a square when given an area. She says that she does not know how to find
the square root of a number, even using a calculator.
Much worse to me, though, is that she never thought for a second that there could
be something wrong with the size of the square she had calculated. And she was an
‘A’ grade student in maths.
Shelly finds the square root to be 20.5, runs to her desk and immediately starts to
rule up the plastic. There is now plenty of material to make a square parachute with
sides of 20.5 centimetres.
Mrs. Breen goes to the doorway to speak to a number of students dropping
parachutes outside: ‘Alright everyone, back in.’
As Shelly hears this, she says, ‘Shivers,’ quietly to herself, grabs both parachutes
and heads for the door.
She almost makes it outside, when Mrs. Breen waves everyone back to their seats.
‘I want everyone to listen.’
Back at her seat, Shelly works hastily to make sure her parachutes are ready to
test.
‘I know most of you have done the experiment…’ (Shelly works at a more frenzied
pace) ‘…but I also want you to do a bar graph.’
Mrs. Breen draws an example on the board.
Katie begins to do some test drops with her two parachutes. She is comparing
the drop time of a cloth parachute and a plastic parachute, which was the example
provided by Mrs. Breen. Both parachutes float to earth in a satisfying parachute-like
manner.
Shelly grabs the stop-watch and starts to drop her square parachute. However, the
string pulls off the plastic.
‘Mine doesn’t work. It’s crap,’ she sulks to Katie.
Shelly quickly repairs the square parachute and drops it again (Fig. 1.4).
In the results table, under the column heading ‘round’, Shelly writes ‘0.68’, then
crosses it out. Next to this, she writes ‘1.12’ after another drop. Then, she crosses
this out. She drops again and writes ‘0.93’, yet changes the nine to a six, so her
only number in that column reads ‘0.63’. This dropping, erasing and writing process
continues for several minutes.
Mrs. Breen passes and asks, ‘So what happened? Is it OK?’
‘Yep’, says Shelly, ‘the round one takes longer to hit the ground.’
‘Did you use several measurements?’
‘Yes.’
14 1 What Is Our Purpose?

Fig. 1.4 Shelly determines the drop time for a square, plastic parachute

Mrs. Breen smiles, extremely pleased with Shelly’s success.

Mrs. Breen returns to the front and explains to the whole class, ‘In the conclusion,
list what went wrong, and how you could improve.’
Shelly gets to work on the conclusion of her report. She writes, ‘If the key factors
are the same the parachutes should come down at the same rate as it was not proven
here I have come to the conclusion that the shape does matter to the time.’
Katie works on improving her cloth parachute. She drops it and coos, ‘Cool,’ as
she watches its smooth flight.
As it floats gently to earth once more, she says abstractly, ‘I hate maths with a
passion.’
Shelly echoes her sentiment: ‘I hate maths too.’

1.3.1 MELT Features in Parachute

In Parachute, Shelly and Katie were engaged in learning that involved designing
experiments and determining independent variables, dependent variables and con-
trolled variables. MELT is one way of representing the sophisticated thinking in this
story. The simple analysis of Parachute below foreshadows the six facets of MELT
that are introduced more thoroughly in Chap. 2.
Shelly is determined to compare square and round parachutes, whereas Katie
looked at cotton versus plastic, the teacher’s example. This is where each decided
1.3 Parachute 15

what to embark on for their experiment, as well as beginning the complex process
of ongoing clarification of purpose.
Early on, Shelly worked to craft two plastic parachutes of different shape but
the same size, and realised that she needed to use geometry to achieve this. She
created the round parachute, measured it and generated its surface area from pi r
squared. Then she used the formula for perimeters of a square to calculate its sides—
generating a number that dwarfed the circle. Shelly found needed resources (plastic, a
calculator and maths formulas from memory) and generated data using an empirical
methodology.
Shelly realised there was a problem, and her evaluation correctly suggested that
there was insufficient material to make a square big enough to match her calculation. I
was surprised that she did not notice the huge discrepancy in size between her actual
circle and her proposed square. It seems she implicitly trusted the mathematical
calculation, even when the discrepancy was huge, evidencing little reflection at that
point. Shelly sought help from me for more materials. However, instead of sourcing
more, I prompted her to consider that her calculation of the size of the square was
wrong. At this point, Shelly and I tried to determine whether she knew an appropriate
formula to determine the amount of material she would need for a square parachute.
When she struggled remembering a correct equation for the area of a square, I
provided her numerous cues until I virtually told her area equals the length of one
side squared.
Once she applied a formula that gave a more sensible answer, she produced a
square parachute of comparable size to the round one, and began to time parachute
drops. She wrote, erased and rewrote results into her results table. This organisation
of results was accompanied by the evaluation of data as somehow wrong and in
need of re-recording. All the while, Shelly had the huge pressure of managing her
dwindling time to set up the entire experiment, which was novel, in that no one else
was contrasting shape, while others were following the teacher’s example procedure.
Shelly analysed her data and found that the round one took longer to fall. Her
synthesis was the overall finding that ‘shape does matter to drop time, given the same
surface area’.
Throughout, Shelly listened to and talked with her desk partner, me and the teacher,
while she also wrote and recorded, demonstrating multiple modes of communication.
She applied remembered and prompted knowledge (formulas for the area of a circle
and of a square) to the experiment, as well as her evolving knowledge of experimental
design, relating this to her existing knowledge and to others in the classroom.
The story is set in a school science laboratory, but Shelly engaged in sophisti-
cated thinking that is as relevant to hunter-gatherers as it is to learners in virtual
worlds. Lab learning, hunting and online gaming differ in many ways and the fun-
damental neuronal wiring of the brains of children brought up engaging heavily
online maybe quite different to that of hunter-gatherers. However, the story contains
elements of the sophisticated thinking that we crave as teachers and such thinking
spans 100,000 years. Like most learners throughout human prehistory and history,
Shelly experienced frustrations, setbacks and unresolved tensions, as well as some
successes.
16 1 What Is Our Purpose?

The in-class learning of Shelly, involving exploring and risk taking, and of Katie,
involving emulating and safety, demonstrated a lot of the potential and pitfalls con-
nected to learning autonomy. Shelly attempted to work on her own questions about
square and round parachutes, showing much more autonomy in learning than Katie
and others in the class by initiating in many MELT facets, and improvising in the
rest. Katie was primarily emulating the teacher’s example. Thus, there were differ-
entiated experiences along the continuum of learning autonomy in the same room,
at the same time, given the same parameters by the teacher. The task in Parachute
had the scope of open-ended inquiry, but because the teacher provided modelling
that students were permitted to imitate, most students took the safer, easier way of
emulating.
Shelly’s higher autonomy had associated risks, exemplified by her extreme mis-
calculation. Shelly had possibly applied the formula for the area of a square dozens
of times in her schooling, and this time she was way off any sensible number. While
there is potential for huge learning here, the situation is also an example of a huge
learning curve. Where that curve is too steep, some students may experience enough
demotivation and discouragement to put them off trying. However, Shelly was not
deterred by her miscalculation, in part because she did not perceive the discrepancy
in the actual size of the round parachute and the calculated size of the square one.
Instead of recalculating, she sought more material to match her calculation. From
a Problem Based Learning (PBL) perspective, if Shelly recognised the discrepancy
between calculation and size, this could have led to deep learning [32]. However,
within the constraints of the classroom, she had little time to complete and submit
her work. Practicalities of teaching, such as lesson length, frequently dictate what
actually happens in formal education regardless of theory informing the lesson. Ulti-
mately, Shelly demonstrated in the eighty minutes before lunch the sophisticated
thinking that comprises MELT’s six facets on the higher end of the continuum of
learning autonomy. Often these facets are not deployed consciously and, much like
an unopened parachute, learners may have a hard landing when conceptual difficulties
emerge.
In Parachute, Shelly’s own research question created a need for mathematical
calculation and specific mathematical equations. This maybe contrasted with Place
Value, where children required no specific knowledge to play around the tree, and
in their classroom, the focus was on content knowledge inculcation or construction.
Shelly, a student of thirteen, had experienced seven years of schooling in maths, and
it’s reasonable to assume that she would have learned about calculating the area of
a square several years earlier. Place Value represented learning experiences in two
different contexts and each elicited a very different learning autonomy. However,
Parachute showed some of the tensions that maybe evident within a single context,
and highlighted the intimate connection between content knowledge and inquiry
learning. This tension between an appropriate knowledge base and learning through
discovery has been evident throughout human prehistory. The questions of engaged
learning and teaching are as pertinent to ancient Homo sapiens as they are to contem-
porary humans whether they are inhabiting real or virtual environments. The wiring
of our brains may be or become quite different, but the questions of learning are the
same.
1.3 Parachute 17

Through our prehistory, humans proved to be highly adaptable because our brains
were not programmed to ‘get stuck’ on one mode of learning. But ironically for a
discipline centred on learning, the practice and research of formal education have
tended to become ‘stuck’. That is, researchers have often prioritised researching the
forms of learning that seem optimal to them, and looking at the learning gains by
contrasting performance, e.g., that of Direct Instruction versus discovery learning.
The findings of studies, of course, have always depended on what was valued as a
learning gain in the measurements. But a mentality which emphasises measurement
has possibly diminished educators’ awareness of the potential range of ways to learn,
with a whole spectrum of possibilities being minimised for the sake of theory and
parsimony. Search for a grand theory that underpins all learning undermines the
potential of humankind to engage in diverse and enriching learning and teaching.
To maximise the efforts of educators and students, it is necessary to pull together
the disparate threads in education, in a way that reflects how humans were geared to
learn 100,000 years ago and how they are currently geared to learn. In educational
practice and theory, MELT connotes a fluidity, rather than being stuck in one place,
in keeping with our learning as a species.

1.4 100 Billion Brains: Learning from Human Prehistory

to Contemporary Classrooms and Learning
Environments

Humans are the only known animals to use systematic, descriptive labels for living
things, including ourselves. And while we labelled our cousins with systematic and
descriptive species names such as Homo erectus and Homo habitus, we chose for
ourselves the more interpretive title of Homo sapiens, or ‘wise man’. If sentient ani-
mals had a vote, would they describe modern humans as wise? We are certainly a
learning animal, but many animals are that too. What about our learning is distinc-
tively sapiens? We have big brains, proportionally, but Neanderthals had a bigger
brain volume [33] and still died out.
As noted early in this chapter, Homo sapiens have been very efficient at solving
problems whose solutions created new problems which emerged days, years or cen-
turies later. This is highly disturbing, albeit probably inevitable. The disturbing side
of the process whereby solutions beget problems is obvious, with rates of species
extinction unprecedented since the meteor that led to the demise of the dinosaurs,
degradation of water, air, soils and society, and massive migrations, alienations and
competition between cultures, religions, political ideologies and nations.
The inevitable side of the process by which human-made solutions generate new
problems may come as a surprise. To demonstrate this inevitability, I present a
comparison between humans and beavers—the pre-eminent engineers of the ani-
mal world, for more than 20 million years [34] up until 12,000 years ago. The reason
for this comparison is that those early engineer-beavers were more instinctive than
18 1 What Is Our Purpose?

purposively engaged in their learning, whereas humans frequently need engaged

teaching to enable engaged learning.

1.4.1 Beaver and Human Know-How

The massive engineering projects requiring complex social behaviour, up until rel-
atively recently in the earth’s history, were conducted by beavers. It is only in the
recent past, starting about 12,000 years ago [35], that human engineering projects
were conducted on a scale more massive than beavers’ dams, even though the human
physique’s capacity for engineering has exceeded the beavers’ physical capacity for
200,000 years.
So, how is it that beavers were more able to conduct massive engineering projects
than humans for over 180,000 years? In short, because it took a whole lot of learning
about materials, physics, chemistry, maths, nature, and ourselves, including through
artistic expression, creative imagining and philosophising, for humans to take top
spot on massive-scale engineering. Critically, what is important to, and reflective of,
MELT, is that this human learning was diverse in mode.
A curious feature of beaver dam-building know-how is that the majority of it is
in their genes [36, 37]. Beavers can learn over time to build better dams, but their
fundamental damming behaviour is hard-wired. So, even if you could challenge a
beaver to build some other massive structure (such as a bridge) it would not have
the cognitive capacity to do so. Beavers are smooth-brained (lissencephalic) whereas
humans and other apes have wormy brains featuring gyri and sulci, which allow for
more neurons and synapses to be packed into the same space. Pre-programed know-
how only gets you so far, and beavers can’t generalise their learning from dams to
other engineering projects.
As with beavers, Homo sapiens have genetically programmed know-how: we can
suck, chew and crawl, and maybe some humans can walk and run without examples.
But we can’t talk, write, read or do anything like build a dam without learning to
do so, whether by watching and listening, with a teacher or through trial and error.
Beavers’ engineering knowledge is pre-packaged, whereas ours developed over the
course of tens of thousands of years, and needs to be culturally transmitted rather
than genetically transmitted.
Perhaps because we have so little genetic know-how, human babies are called
‘sponges’, as they appear ready to soak up and imitate almost anything they see and
hear. As a tragic example, orphans in Romania who were deprived of care by adults
[38] mimicked the movements of cranes that they could see through the window.
Engaged learning is the norm for a baby in three modes: being taught, observing,
and experimenting through trial and error. All these three modes are vital for normal
development, and the second and last are ubiquitous for babies.
Being taught, however, requires someone to facilitate the learning. This could
involve correcting a child’s pronunciation, instructing on the number of protons in
1.4 100 Billion Brains: Learning from Human Prehistory … 19

magnesium or suggesting a strategy for brush strokes on a painting. While com-

mon, teaching and being taught are not ubiquitous. This is the most difficult to
operationalise of the three modes mentioned above, because it depends on the inten-
tionality of someone who is not the learner. Such intentionality requires some effort,
some thought. In societies with universal schooling, the process of teaching and
being taught entails effort by the whole of society. So this book is about engaged
teachers. And because learning can and does take place independently of a teacher,
this book is also about engaged learners. Most of all, it is about the relationship of
engaged learners and engaged teachers together, where sometimes the teachers learn
and sometimes the learners teach.
MELT frame a range of teaching pedagogies that fit human learning. At one
extreme end of a teaching spectrum, beavers don’t need pedagogy; for them, there
is little intentional teaching and little capacity to engage in it. At the other end,
humans need a multiplicity of pedagogies that represent our broad-ranged sophis-
ticated thinking, and the MELT represents this range. The use of the plural word
‘models’ in MELT is intended to capture the numerous ways of conceptualising
engaged learning and teaching. The broad parameters that all existing and future
MELT share attempt to capture the breadth of education research, theorising and
practice for the past 100 years, and the breadth of the human experience of learning
and teaching for the past 100,000 years.
‘Engagement’, the ‘E’ in MELT, is a term sometimes used glibly in education,
but in MELT it is used deliberately to suggest the same idea that it connotes in the
context of a manual car: it won’t move unless you engage the clutch. There must
be cognitive meshing. Learning, then, is a ‘moving forward’ into a place we have
not yet been conceptually, enabled by engagement. Teaching is driving towards a
goal, a forward impetus where frequently the teacher steers. But in contemporary
classrooms, online environments, and throughout human prehistory, learners may be
the ones steering and controlling the accelerator and brake. Teaching, in MELT, is
attending to and establishing the preconditions and conditions for learning, including
cognitive, affective and social aspects. Without a teacher, planned learning is difficult.
However, when the learning is driven by a teacher, it is never guaranteed to be positive
or effective, especially if students are demotivated about the learning at hand. It is
a huge challenge to teach a class of students effectively day after day, to tutor, to
supervise, and to nurture learning.

1.4.2 Inevitable Earth: Problems with Dams

Another good reason to know about beaver learning is to deepen our understanding
of human learning and its consequences. As beavers evolved increasing capacity,
physically and cognitively, to build dams, they not only built bigger and better dams,
but they changed entire ecosystems through the flooding of valleys to make lakes.
They changed the course of evolution for untold species of plants, animals, fungi
and bacteria. However, this process took millions of years, and entire ecosystems
20 1 What Is Our Purpose?

adapted slowly to beaver-induced changes [39]. Many animals wreak major changes
quickly on the landscape, such as swarming insects or defoliating elephants, but few
have had an impact on the scale of beaver technology [40].
Compared to the elaborate engineering projects of beavers, we Homo sapiens
were very simple builders for most of our evolution. However, as noted earlier,
simple toolmaking eventually gave rise to a compounding [8] of tool use, where
one tool enabled other tools: a chipped rock made sharp for killing an animal, for
example, could also be used to smooth the haft of a spear. Animals use what’s at their
disposal, and humans were no different. The pace of technology compounded, and
while initially glacial, it became exponential: single-edge stone tools maintained the
same design from 200,000 to 120,000 BCE [8], but once further adaptations emerged,
tool use and development took off—literally—like a rocket!
This ratcheting up of problem-solving capacity and technology is possible because
human brains are learning-versatile compared to beaver brains. A major element of
human learning before the establishment of cities was that our brains had the capacity,
much more so than beavers, to engage in didactic-reproductive learning, generation
after generation. At the same time, we also had the capacity, used when the cir-
cumstances warranted it, to engage in the development of new knowledge through
research-like processes of discovery. When competition came, when the environment
changed, when an important prey animal died out or humans moved into different
ecosystems, the learning of established ideas through reproductive modes was inad-
equate by itself. Adaptation was required which, in turn, demanded a different order
of learning. Human brains are adaptive and plastic, and adults could shift their think-
ing somewhat, rewiring neural networks. However, for the young with developing
brains who moved with their extended family into new challenges, an upbringing of
upheaval geared their brains for discovery mode; they neurologically wired to inquire
[41, 42]. A challenge for educators in the twenty-first century, then, is to work out
what modes of learning are pertinent in emerging local and global circumstances and
what balance can be struck across different modes of teaching and learning, from
more didactic to more discovery-oriented. The MELT facets and continuum of learn-
ing autonomy provide the what and how of Homo sapiens’ transmission-oriented and
innovative learning over the course of the last 1000,000 years, as we have always,
and need still, to emulate, improvise and innovate.

1.5 One Billion Brains More: The Problems We Face Need

Research-Mindedness

Because humans are adept at solving problems, and because our solutions cause
more problems, we and the planet are on a destructive trajectory. Education systems
that replicate our current successes will also magnify our current problems. Instead,
we need educators with broadened perspectives that cope with, and even enjoy, a
range of teaching and learning modes. MELT articulate the human capacity to learn
1.5 One Billion Brains More: The Problems … 21

didactically and to learn through discovery in ways that reinforce each other. While
some educators, parents, researchers and students take a polarised position towards
one particular teaching and learning approach, MELT suggest that we need learning
environments that explicitly value every point on the learning autonomy continuum
This is, arguably, our best hope to move from an inevitable problem-solving/problem-
causing loop to a less predetermined future for the Earth.
We need to be able to cover every point on the continuum of teaching and learning
approaches, because we need brains that are wired to swing adaptively from learning
established knowledge to constructing fresh knowledge. We need brains that are
wired to memorise and recall and wired to inquire and delve [41]. Education systems
need to draw on young children’s natural curiosity, promote the acquisition of the
massive canon of modern knowledge, and be more purposive in how they move
between these two.
How can parents, caregivers and early childhood educators help young children’s
brains to wire in such a way that they love to learn existing knowledge, as well as
to discover knowledge on their own? How can these loves be nurtured throughout
primary and secondary schooling? What will facilitate the further development of
such engaged learning with undergraduates and Master’s students, including those
who are enrolled in teaching degrees? What difference will this make to Ph.D. stu-
dents and other researchers when addressing the problems of the Earth? And what
will this mean for teachers who engage in their own active and systematic learning,
such as action research and ongoing professional development, to improve their stu-
dents’ learning? Further, how can we best nurture a love of moving fluidly across the
continuum of learning autonomy, rather than prioritising one of the ends?
The above fluidity is one where our genetically-determined neuronal architecture
and its adaptive responsiveness to environmental cues [42] forms our brains with not
merely the capacity to learn new things, but the capacity to rewire. MELT can inform a
rewiring for the next billion brains that is both knowledge-savvy and inquiry-oriented
(Fig. 1.5).
Humans have the greatest number of neurons at about seven months’ gestation,
typically two months before birth [42]. Then apoptosis—healthy, natural cell death—
is genetically programmed to remove the less used neurons, so that newborn babies
and adults alike have substantially less neurons than we had when we were in the
womb [42] where the adult brain has around 80 billion neurons. Typically, those neu-
rons that synapse—or connect—with other neurons survive. These neurons continue
the complex process of developing neural networks, with any one neuron connected
up to 1,000 other neurons [42] in a mind-boggling array that is the powerhouse of
sophisticated thinking.
Most amazing and relevant for MELT is that the number of our synapses—the
connections between neurons—goes through the roof early in life, so that by age
three we have trillions. But after the age of three, our healthy genetic programming
begins to reduce those networks in a process called ‘neural pruning’ [42]. Our healthy
brains go through this natural pruning process where if we don’t use it, we lose it:
a synapse connection in which two neurons rarely communicate tends to be pruned.
The saying is that neurons that fire together wire together [42], meaning that if two
22 1 What Is Our Purpose?

Fig. 1.5 Wired to inquire?

synapsed neurons communicate regularly, they will stay connected and maintain
their part of the network. After the age of three, we begin to lose billions of synapses
each year, and this process continues through different parts of the brain until the
twenties [42]. This sounds bad because learning equates to synapse formation and
maintenance. However, neurons and synapses require a lot of energy, and an overly
complex network is less efficient and effective.
But here’s the thing: what we are sensing, doing, thinking and saying from birth
and beforehand (e.g., tasting mother’s amniotic fluid as an embryo) influences our
synapse formation, and what is pruned [42]. So children who spend the majority
of their time using information and communications technology (e.g., gaming) are
using their brains in such a way that some neural networks are enhanced and others
are limited. As a result, their neuro-architecture—their actual brain’s wiring—will
reflect their environment [42], just as has always been the case for human brains.
The brain’s wiring is a complex mix of genetic determinants and environmental
influences. As an extreme example, a baby reared in the dark will not be able to see
even when taken into the light at age one [42]. The development of optical pathways
in the brain is not only genetically determined but requires environmental stimulus;
use it or minimise it.
Learning in the human brain is not compartmentalised into ‘cognitive’ and ‘affec-
tive’. Long-term memory is closely associated with the part of the brain called the
hippocampus, which itself is also associated with emotions [43]. Correspondingly,
a longstanding finding from psychology is that we learn that to which we attend
1.5 One Billion Brains More: The Problems … 23

[44], and so motivational elements are vital for learning [43], frequently in multi-
modal ways that reinforce learning [44]. MELT explicitly articulate the cognitive
dimensions of engaged learning in concert with the affective dimensions. The beaver
in each cartoon at the beginning of each chapter calls out affective-oriented words
that connect to the more cognitive facet titles, and this simultaneous connection of
cognitive and affective domains is central to MELT, because the connection is true
and vital for human learning.
A full range of educational experiences, including face-to-face, hands-on, online
and virtual learning, is needed for the education of the next billion brains on the
planet. This range of experiences needs to be full not just in terms of subject matter,
but in terms of how this subject matter is learned. In MELT terms, this especially con-
cerns the continuum of learning autonomy. A full range of educational experiences
would embrace teacher-directed immersion of students in content knowledge and in
key concepts, as well as student ownership of learning and inclusion in curriculum
decisions, where students would be given scope for high levels of autonomy in their
learning through investigation, problem-solving and discovery. For the MELT, auton-
omy ebbs and flows from levels of low learning autonomy, with prescribed teaching,
through to high levels of learning autonomy with teacher boundaries removed, and
back again to low learning autonomy. Such shuttling, where students emulate, impro-
vise, initiate and flow back to emulate over time, is suggestive of spiralling learning
autonomy throughout formal education from early childhood through primary and
secondary school, to employment, technical study and university, whether a student
completes compulsory education, undergraduate study or proceeds to Master’s level
and Ph.D.

1.6 Structure of This Book

This book’s seven-chapter structure mirrors the seven core components of the MELT,
the six facets and learning autonomy. Each chapter has as its title one of the seven cen-
tral questions of MELT on a title page comprising a cartoon by Dr. Aaron Humphries
[45]. Each cartoon has three characters: a young child, Albert Einstein, and a beaver,
each saying something emblematic of the sophisticated thinking pertaining to a par-
ticular facet. The child sings a line that represents a facet from the song Research
Mountain [21] except in Chap. 7 she says a line from a research article. Einstein says
something for each facet that connects to sophisticated thinking from the Nobel prize-
winning end of the learning spectrum. And the beaver calls out the affective aspect
of each facet. In each cartoon’s banner is the facet process, such as embark and clar-
ify, and all facet processes are double-edged, comprising two strong, interdependent
verbs for learning.
This introductory chapter asked, ‘What is our purpose?’ for student learning, for
teaching and for the book itself. This chapter elaborated on the need for, and the
possibility of, a coherent solution to the problems associated with an education in
which all the parts are not well connected.
24 1 What Is Our Purpose?

Chapter 2 is titled ‘What should we use?’ and this question is asked in consid-
eration of our educational purposes. Chapter 2 provides a deep sense of the MELT,
explaining in detail the six facets of sophisticated thinking and a consideration of
how much guidance students need in terms of learning autonomy. Chapter 2 does
this by delving into each facet in turn, interpreted in research stories from primary
school (Place Value in the Preface), high school (Parachute in this chapter, below)
and the account of a university graduate (Silver Fluoride in Chap. 2). Chapter 2
details the educational literature that informed the creation of MELT, and notes that
much of that literature is descriptive in nature and lacks a theoretical underpinning.
Chapter 3 of this book, ‘How do we arrange?’, provides numerous examples
of teachers using MELT to arrange and prompt more sophisticated thinking across
the educational trajectory. These examples help to introduce others’ pedagogical
interpretations of what form MELT had needed to take on and how it needed to be
implemented in order for it to work in each of their contexts.
Chapter 4 ‘What do we trust?’ pulls competing theories together in productive
tension and places them as the underpinning of MELT. By providing the theoretical
underpinning of MELT, the chapter specifically positions competing theories together
on the learning autonomy continuum, with the aim of arousing awareness and choice
of where to operate on or across this continuum.
Chapter 5 is titled ‘What does it mean?’ and provokes a consideration of seminal
and recent learning theories and what they mean for contemporary educational prac-
tices and teacher action research in light of MELT. Unpacking and placing learning
theories on MELT’s continuum of learning autonomy is very practical for teacher
understanding of theories and for their application of these to classrooms and online
learning. Chapter 5 shows the connections between four contemporary learning theo-
ries, some of which are perceived to be in direct opposition, and the ways that teacher
action research can bring theory to life. The chapter contains a chilling warning of
continuing to treat educational theories as competitive rather than complementary,
as Machine Teaching comes to the fore.
Chapter 6 asks ‘How do we relate?’ in regard to humanity’s relationship with itself
and the planet, and why things seemed to have panned out in a way that leads us
inevitably to environmental devastation and social upheaval. The chapter proposes
ways in which MELT may be part of a solution that doesn’t cause more problems.
Chapter 7, ‘How much guidance?’ addresses the scaffolding of student learning,
using MELT’s consideration of learning autonomy. The chapter considers those
involved in education and the amount of guidance that may be needed to make
MELT work in various settings. Autonomy in MELT is a relationship word, and is
intimately connected to ‘ownership’ of teaching and learning. The need for ownership
and empowerment is a major factor when considering how much structure and what
sort of guidance is needed by students and teachers alike. The coherence of student
learning journeys maybe possible through teachers, parents, schools and universities
pulling together in the same direction, as directed by policy, but policy is not so
good at motivating that pursuit in the long-term. In order to promote ownership and
empowerment, it’s good for teachers to be autonomous. But students exposed to a
series of overly autonomous teachers may find that their education feels broken and
incoherent. How much guidance do we need for teachers and for students?
1.6 Structure of This Book 25

In summary, this chapter explains the need for the MELT, Chap. 2 details them,
and Chap. 3 provides examples from ECE to Ph.D. level. Chapter 4 provides the
theoretical underpinning, Chap. 5 considers contemporary learning theories in light of
MELT, and Chap. 6 draws together the relationships that MELT may forge. Chapter 7
concludes with considerations for operationalising MELT.

1.7 Conclusion: Student Learning that Resonates

The billion human brains that will be born between 2023 and 2030 need something
different from the learning and education that has occurred so far across 100,000 years
of human history. That billion will inherit the leadership of the earth somewhere from
2040, with all of the accumulated problems caused by humanity until that time. Those
billion need diverse learning environments that resonate with their complex learn-
ing capacities, that connect to multiple educator perspectives and theories, and that
enable them to address local and global issues in ways that do not cause more prob-
lems than they solve. The complexities of human learning demand an expansive and
encompassing conceptualisation of learning that mirrors different disciplines, learner
ages, teaching theories, learning throughout prehistory and educational research. The
billion need to be those whose knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, creativity and
discernment are so powerful that they can anticipate problems caused by proposed
solutions, and forge solutions that don’t cause more problems. The facets and their
elaboration across the continuum of learning autonomy of the MELT are proffered
in the next chapter as a conceptualisation that can help address this educational need.

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Chapter 2
What Will We Use?

2.1 Introducing the Models of Engaged Learning

and Teaching

This chapter provides a deep and nuanced understanding of the Models of Engaged
Learning and Teaching. Together, these models comprise much of what we may
use across education to connect human brain development and education theory to
diverse practice. Each of the models shares the six facets of sophisticated thinking
that were foreshadowed in Chap. 1 through the analysis of Parachute, as well as the
consideration of learning autonomy that is detailed below. The focus of Chap. 1 was
on the role of education as a means of developing learners born from 2023 to 2030,
who will be the problem-solvers, critical thinkers and researchers leading the planet
from 2040. In order to achieve that purpose, the logic of Chap. 1 naturally led to the
need for a conceptual framework that is broadly representative, across many perspec-
tives, of learning and ideas about learning and teaching. Thus, Chapter 2 addresses
this identified need by presenting the MELT as a viable option for a conceptualisation
that we can use to span education and connect disparate parts.
In Sect. 2.2, this chapter presents an account from a university graduate
who developed MELT skills at university and used these after graduation. Then
Sects. 2.3.1–2.3.6 detail the six facets of MELT, including their affective domain,
guiding questions and descriptions, and learning autonomy. Section 2.3.7 considers
sophisticated learning as spiralling, recursive and messy and looks at the ethical
and social dimensions of MELT. Section 2.4 in conclusion, is about engagement,
adaptability, fluidity and ownership.

© The Author(s) 2020 29

J. Willison, The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching,
SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2683-1_2
30 2 What Will We Use?

2.1.1 A Holistic View

The MELT don’t provide grounds for a proposal that education should develop
new theorisations or characteristics. Rather, the aim is to consolidate the past
100 years of research and reflect human learning over the past 100,000 years in
the MELT. Taken individually, each MELT facet and the consideration of learn-
ing autonomy is, in many respects, common, unsurprising and even too familiar. To
reduce the effect of ‘familiarity breeding contempt’, the facets and learning auton-
omy are presented in a way that is intended to bring them to life, re-kindling a
sense of their importance and demonstrating their synergistic power when taken as
a whole. In order to achieve this, each facet and learning autonomy level is con-
sidered through the perspective of three educational contexts: primary schooling
(Place Value from the preface), middle years of schooling (Parachute from Chap. 1)
and a volunteering situation of a university graduate (Silver Fluoride, below).
Through these multiple perspectives, the richness and complexity of each MELT
facet and learning autonomy are partially revealed.
However, it is only possible to fully understand the MELT by perceiving the
resonant energy of the set of facets and the continuum of learning autonomy together.
This potential, this energy is more complex to convey. The stories give some idea
of how the facets and learning autonomy work together, functioning as indivisible
parts of one precious jewel. Just as no facet of a jewel exists in isolation, all the facets
of MELT work together to crystallise into something of shape and enduring beauty.
While the set of facets must be understood holistically, it can be helpful to delineate
sophisticated thinking into separate facets. MELT takes what often remains implicit in
education—the skills of sophisticated thinking—and makes them explicit. Learning
autonomy intersects with the six facets of MELT in unpredictable, nonlinear ways.
As noted in Chap. 1, the facets of MELT represent the ‘what’ of learning, while
the continuum of learner autonomy represents the ‘how’, that is, the way in which
the facets are operationalised by teachers and brought to life for students. In MELT,
learning autonomy is considered to be a ‘relationship’ word, connecting learners to
each other, to teachers and to the learning context.
This chapter pays more attention to the facet embark & clarify than to the other
facets. This is because it is difficult to convey the sense of purpose epitomised by
embark & clarify; students often find it hard to work out what their teachers want
them to do, or to work out what they themselves will pursue. This difficulty is partly
down to the fact that there are so many different ways to embark & clarify and the
subject and discipline differences of how to begin often eclipse the similarities of
complex starting processes. When learning something new, it is essential to begin
correctly and to become increasingly clear about one’s direction; the other five facets
of the MELT depend absolutely on getting the purpose right. Except in the case of
the simplest forms of learning, the embarking processes require clarification, often
many times, over extended periods. It can be necessary to re-embark on a project
time and again and re-clarify direction and purpose. The stories Place Value and
Parachute, from primary schooling and secondary schooling, respectively, and the
2.1 Introducing the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching 31

Silver Fluoride account (from a university graduate, below) provide an understanding

of the richness of the facet and the challenges it poses for engaged learning and
teaching. A clear sense of how to embark & clarify frequently emerges out of the
other five facets, with the end of one journey becoming the beginning of the next. A
description of the familiar aspects that comprise the MELT follows.

2.1.2 The Origins of the MELT

The MELT began with a blank whiteboard and a question: what are we as teachers
doing when we facilitate sophisticated student thinking? The resources that Kerry
O’Regan and I used to answer this question were the literature and reflections on
our teaching of well-scaffolded inquiry-based learning [2]. The facets of the MELT’s
were informed by the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Information Liter-
acy (ANZIIL) standards [3], the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO)
taxonomy [4] and Bloom’s taxonomies [5, 6]. Bloom’s taxonomies consist of two
separate hierarchical frameworks with fundamentally different premises for the cog-
nitive domain [5] and the affective domain [6]. The values, attitudes and emotions
associated with the affective domain are embedded in each MELT facet. This means
that the MELT comprise one framework with cognitive domain and affective domain
integrated into the facets.
A crucial intentional structural feature of MELT is that it represents the affective
domain but does not elaborate on it. Affective aspects are presented using single-
word adjectives describing a learner, whereas cognitive aspects are described and
elaborated much more richly. This is not because the cognitive aspects are more
important than the affective aspects. Rather, it is because assessing affect is risky [7]:
assessing something so important yet difficult to probe can be counterproductive.
However, the affective aspects are pivotal for whether learning happens or not. For
example, students are more likely to learn if they are willing to take risks, where, for
example, a creative writing student who’s encouraged to experiment is more likely
to come up with an original metaphor.
The design intention for MELT was to enable a conceptualisation that ran from pri-
mary school to post-graduation [8]. Most educational continua represent an increase
from lower ability to higher, from less sophisticated to more sophisticated thinking.
Yet each student potentially engages in thinking that is sophisticated within the con-
text of their current educational level. Rather than describing an incremental, linear
type of improvement, Kerry and I perceived a need to describe a continuum that spi-
ralled so that it could represent learning from ECE to Ph.D. level, flowing throughout
the years of education. This is because any domain with a linear increase will strug-
gle to remain pertinent across the whole educational trajectory, and is therefore not
helpful for forging connections across education.
32 2 What Will We Use?

2.1.3 Learning Autonomy

The continuum of learning autonomy [8] in the MELT is a way of describing an

educative scaffolding process that may spiral over terms, semesters and years of
education and is identical in character to, and informed by, Vygotsky’s zone of
proximal development [9]. As noted in Chap. 1, for the MELT, learning autonomy
involves the movement of students between lower and higher levels of control over
their own learning; back and forth, like the tides [10]. Table 2.1 shows more detail
than Chap. 1 for a version of MELT that is designed for teachers, where educator
scope for autonomy is delineated into five levels.
Learning autonomy emerged in our early research as a decisive factor for helping
educators to conceive of ways to facilitate the learning of the facets, and to understand
the ways in which students were actually performing [8, 11]. Drawing on Dewey [12]
and the science education literature, we used terminology like ‘closed inquiry and
‘open inquiry’ [13] for the endpoints of the continuum. ‘Scaffolded’ was a mid-
point between ‘closed’ and ‘open’, and this three-level framing still seemed to leave
educational leaps in the continuum that were conceptually too far in practice for
students. So two levels on either side of ‘scaffolded’ were added, giving five levels.
A student-oriented three-level version of learning autonomy and teacher ‘prox-
imity’ was developed, comprising emulate, improvise and initiate as mentioned in
Chap. 1, and shown in more detail in Table 2.2. Three levels are in keeping with
levels of delineation that have been widely used to convey Vygotsky’s ZPD from a
teacher’s perspective; model, scaffold and fade [14].
There is no clear border between the end of one level and the beginning of another.
Interpretation of autonomy is dependent on a deep knowledge of context and students,
and the continuum of learning autonomy is a tool for planning and analysing, not for
measuring in ways that produce meaningful numbers (though we tried this approach
initially) [15]. The overlap between educator-provided scope for learning autonomy
and student learning autonomy as experienced by them is shown in Table 2.3.

Table 2.1 Teacher extent of scope for learning autonomy

Prescribed Bounded Scaffolded Open-ended Unbounded

Highly Boundaries Scaffolds Students Students
structured set and placed by initiate, with determine
directions and limited educator guidance from guidelines for
modelling directions shape the educator. learning that
from educator from educator independent are in accord
prompt channel learning, in with subject,
learning, in learning in which… discipline or
which… which… context.
2.1 Introducing the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching 33

Table 2.2 Three-level continuum of learner autonomy

Emulate Improvise Initiate

Follow your Work creatively You drive the learning,
teacher’s lead, so that within your teacher’s deciding your purpose
you learn ways of guidelines and improve and how to achieve it.
doing things and about or adapt what was
things. given to you.

Table 2.3 Overlap between teacher scope for learning autonomy and the continuum of learning
autonomy
Scope for Learning Autonomy (provided by educators)
Prescribed Bounded Scaffolded Open-ended Unbounded
Emulate Improvise Initiate
Continuum of Learning Autonomy (what students do)

For each facet, consideration can be made for the level of educator-planned learner
autonomy, called the scope for learning autonomy, and the actual autonomy that stu-
dents work with, called simply learning autonomy, shown together in Table 2.3. This
delineation between teacher intention (scope) and actual student learning autonomy
is important for three reasons:
1. It clarifies the difference between teaching intentions and the lived reality of
students.
2. It provides insights into the process of differentiating the curriculum, so that each
student is more able to engage in the learning that they are ready for.
3. It challenges our concepts of assessment, including what is assessed and why.
This is because many assessments place a uniform demand on student learning
autonomy, as a result of which some students are under-prepared and others are
under-challenged.
MELT are able to connect ECE to Ph.D., across disciplinary and transdisciplinary
contexts, because the learning autonomy question is always pertinent across formal
education: ‘how much structure and guidance do students need?

2.2 Silver Fluoride

The higher education perspective given below in Silver Fluoride is an account by

Kevin, a graduate whose oral health degree was influenced by MELT. In an interview,
Kevin reflects on his planning for a volunteer placement in rural Cambodia after
graduation, and what happened when he went and enacted his plans with the people
34 2 What Will We Use?

in that country. The version of MELT that Kevin’s degree used was the Research Skill
Development (RSD) framework, and this influenced the terminology that Kevin uses
to describe his sophisticated thinking. Kevin’s account and the earlier stories Place
Value and Parachute are then used together to bring the seven core characteristics of
MELT to life across the years of learning.
Silver Fluoride
Before I left for Cambodia yes—because I actually took a silver fluoride which is a
product that we didn’t even actually come into contact with in the Bachelor of Oral
Health here. When we went for a placement for Canberra there was a tutor there that
was working with us and she used it [silver fluoride] because she trained I think in
Darwin or somewhere out and she was working out in the sticks and so they had that
as a prevention for decay and all that sort of stuff so they were using that product
a lot, but we didn’t come into contact with it because it stains teeth and there’s all
these things that they don’t like aesthetically so that’s why we weren’t using it, but
it’s like an amazing product because I was really looking into that because I thought
that might be really beneficial for Cambodia because they don’t get care often and
they’re considered more rural so I was doing a lot of research with that and I ended
up purchasing some and taking it over with me and I was using it when I was over
there [16].

2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy

The stories Place Value and Parachute, along with Kevin’s account in Silver Fluoride,
are used next to provide a deep understanding of each of the MELT facet’s verb
couplets, affective adjective, key question, detail and then a consideration of the
extent of learning autonomy for that facet.

2.3.1 Embark & Clarify

Process Affective dimension Question

Embark & clarify Curious What is our purpose?

Detail: Students respond to, or initiate their own, direction, and clarify it while
considering ethical, cultural, social and team (ECST) issues.
To embark is to begin the journey, but how do students clarify what their pur-
pose actually is? Do they know their starting point, where they are going and how
they might get there? There are many different ways of commencing. This variety
of starting points is not only due to the fact that different disciplines have different
processes and terminologies, but also because sophisticated thinking is non-linear; it
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 35

jumps around and is hard to capture. Embarking processes often require other facets
of MELT to be actuated before what is embarked on becomes fully clarified. For
example, in disciplines that start with a research question, where did that research
question come from? Who framed it, and how did that educator, student or team
come to that phrasing? Formal research questions sometimes start as questions of
speculation and wondering about possibilities, or some intellectual dissonance that
makes one curious. Sometimes the questions emerge as a synthesis of the litera-
ture, through conversations, or by clarification through teaching, and these typically
require all the facets of the MELT.
The intentionally general verb embark is the first facet listed here because it is a
logical starting point. However, it is frequently not the first facet that students begin
within their learning endeavours. Sometimes we stumble on an issue or idea, some-
times we are inspired by curiosity about a phenomenon or issue, and sometimes we
immerse ourselves in a lot of reading around a topic. Formal research questions are
typically a ‘re-embarking’. That is, they follow on from a research journey that has
involved much reading and synthesising of literature, observation, piloting, hypoth-
esising, discussing, reflecting and deciding about which of all possible questions is
the best one to pursue. The same is true for the processes of defining problems when
problem-solving, or clarifying what decisions need to be made in evidence-based
decision-making: the process of formulating a point of embarkation and clarifying
takes time. The point of departure is so complex that it commonly requires all six
facets of MELT to clarify and re-embark.
For students, a sense of purpose is vital in the voyage of discovery that we call
learning. However, a sense of purpose is difficult to nurture if learning is prescribed
by teachers, because compulsion or coercion increases the risk of compliance, where
the purpose is stated and injected rather than internalised by the learner themselves.
On the other hand, when students choose the direction of their own learning, there
are many complexities for them and their teachers to deal with if they are to become
clear about their purpose.
The central question for embark & clarify is ‘What is our purpose?’ The verbs
embark & clarify and the question are in the plural form because of the social dynamic
in teaching and learning. However, ‘What is my purpose?’ is the question for a student
to ask themselves if engaged in an individual project. For educators trying to launch
students into sophisticated (but guided) learning, the question is ‘How do I convey
the purpose to students?’ Like all other facets, the nature of this facet can sometimes
be better understood through the key question. Even better, the combination of the
process verbs, description, key question and affective domain descriptor together
provide a well-rounded sense of the parameters of a particular facet. To understand
the mentality behind MELT, it is essential to understand the characteristics of each
facet, for each MELT facet must be set into its context, and adaptations are typically
required. Nowhere is the need for adaptation truer than the word of embark, which
is almost always too general to be of direct use with students.
Embark emerged from the first ANZIIL standard, ‘Recognises the need for knowl-
edge’ [3], which is one of the dozens of ways of commencing complex thinking.
‘Embark’ includes asking, hypothesising, identifying problems or patient needs,
36 2 What Will We Use?

aims, goals or potential, immersion in a reading, story or context, and so on. It is an

intentionally general verb, and its conceptual power lies in its inclusion of multiple
ways of beginning. In particular, it embraces the numerous ways in which sophis-
ticated thinking begins, as operationalised by those who know best; the teachers,
academics, tutors, parents and students. Embark connotes a journey, a voyage of dis-
covery where there may be many points of disembarking and re-embarking, as well
as hidden or anticipated perils. Clarify suggests an ongoing process, where things
may be initially muddy, which is OK as long as clarity comes over time: ‘In a world
deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power’ [17].
The facet embark & clarify also addresses one of the holes in Bloom’s taxonomy:
because Bloom’s research strategy was to gather teachers’ perspectives, the hierarchy
has content knowledge as the foundational taxon, and so is suggestive of learning
always commencing with content knowledge. This is frequently the case in education,
but by no means is it or should it be always the case. As a hierarchical structure,
Bloom’s taxonomy locked in a mentality of content knowledge acquisition first,
whereas MELT treats Bloom’s verbs as fluid, non-sequential, but vital. Knowledge
is always important in learning, but it is not always the starting point, especially in
the context of connected learning that happens online.
The ethical, social and cultural considerations of engaged learning are the only
elements mentioned in two facets, in embark & clarify and in communicate & apply.
The six ANZIIL Standards, as the starting point for the six facets, articulated the
ethical, social and cultural dimensions in the ‘standard’ concerned with communi-
cation. However, in 2012, a review of the facets by a variety of academics who had
used MELT led to their strong demand that ethical, social and cultural dimensions
also be represented not only in communicate & apply, but also embark & clarify. The
academics perceived that the ethical, social and cultural dimensions were so crucial
to engaged learning that they needed to be explicit first and last. The reasons for
this come through clearly in Silver Fluoride, as Kevin engages with people living in
villages in Cambodia through the use of an outmoded Oral Health treatment. Kevin’s
ethical decision is to prioritise dental health over aesthetics in that context, rightly
or wrongly. There is always the need for teachers to consider the ethical, social and
cultural dimensions first and last, and for students to learn to do so.
In terms of the social dimension, often people embark on sophisticated learning
individually. However, MELT articulations tend to be in a plural form, for example,
‘embark’ rather than ‘embarks’, to emphasise the social aspects of learning. Educa-
tion frequently entails social interaction, with the teacher and other students playing a
major role in the learning environment even when students are working individually,
as shown in Parachute. Determining purpose as an individual is difficult, and it is
often even more complicated for teams to mutually develop a sense of direction that
is clear to all involved.
The ethical and cultural elements of sophisticated thinking often do or should
dictate direction, and need to be considered early in order to avoid conflict and unfair
or adversarial processes or outcomes. The sorts of questions teachers or students
ask, project goals they set or problems they identify all are best scrutinised from an
ethical perspective, early on. For example, a project in mathematics that asks ‘What
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 37

did the ancient Greeks contribute to trigonometry?’ may steer students away from
all the work that happened in the Middle East between the era of the last influential
Greek mathematicians (around 2,200 years ago) [18] and the mathematical concepts’
reception in Europe (about 900 years ago) [19]. The 1,300 years in between saw much
translation, development and addition of concepts by scholars in the Middle East and
India, so they ended up not just with the Greeks’ trigonometry, but also the Arabic–
Hindu number system (that is the same system used currently in the West, including
in Place Value), algebra and sophisticated trigonometry applications, all from the
Middle East and India [19]. A culturally aware question, instead of the one above,
would be “Who contributed to the development of trigonometry, and what were
their contributions?” This leaves the question open, rather than eliminating entire
cultures’ contributions. Of course, the process could be scaffolded: “What did the
ancient Greeks contribute to Trigonometry” could be asked first, then ‘What did the
Middle East contribute to Trigonometry?” Alternatively, different cultures could be
allocated to teams who would be asked to report back to the whole class.
This example necessarily throws up ethical dimensions too: is it ethical to give
no attribution of ideas to their developers? The wrong or incomplete attribution of
ideas could be seen as unethical, a form of plagiarism. Therefore, it makes sense that
ethical and cultural dimensions are located also in communicate & apply, where, for
example, citation issues may be portrayed as ethical and cultural issues, rather than
as a bureaucratic enterprise. So the ethical, cultural and social dimensions need to be
part of the product or outcomes of sophisticated thinking, but especially integral to
the learning processes of communicating & applying and embarking & clarifying.
In Parachute, Shelly decided to explore differences in parachute shapes, while
Katie emulated the teacher’s lead to explore differences in materials. Shelly in effect
self-identified ‘shape’ as her independent variable, and to do so required high levels
of cognitive ability. She also operationalised this independent variable using two
shapes: square versus round parachute. Katie, following a process that had been
modelled by the teacher, faced the difficult prospect of clarifying and understanding
the teacher’s intention in order to answer the question, ‘what is my purpose?’ Shelly
embarked by posing a research question, and then she seemed to formulate a null
hypothesis ‘If the key factors are the same, the parachute should come down at
the same rate’. However, in the simple structures of Year 8 science, students were
asked merely for an aim. Whether embarkation entails developing an aim, a research
question, a hypothesis, a null hypothesis or a combination of these, serious work is
typically required to conceptualise and articulate a way of embarking.
For Kevin in Silver Fluoride, embarking involved clarifying the aims of his visit
to Cambodia around the general idea of providing dental help to people who usually
received none, all on a volunteer’s budget. Embarking for him involved the process of
getting to the question ‘what would happen if I used silver fluoride?’ This question
was prompted by his memory of a placement experience from his degree where
a tutor had mentioned silver fluoride use with people in remote contexts. As his
bachelor’s degree did not cover silver fluoride formally, Kevin needed to be open-
minded in order to consider whether this compound could be relevant in the context
of a developing nation. The ethical and social issues were paramount, as dentists in
38 2 What Will We Use?

developed nations have stopped using silver fluoride due to cosmetic concerns [20].
But Kevin inferred that rural Cambodians would prioritise keeping their teeth over
concerns about stained teeth. Kevin could have been wrong, and this was an ethically,
culturally and socially charged endeavour in which he took a calculated risk.
The children in Place Value were in play mode around the tree, and were driven by
curiosity and mimicry of other children, engaging with the familiar and the unfamiliar.
The children were having fun doing what they wanted; the curriculum was unknown
to me as an observer, but the learning seemed to be substantial. The children were
also driven by an impetus towards togetherness, and this togetherness did not restrict
their individual exploration.
Some of those children were in the classroom the next day, and had to understand
the complex ideas underlying the mathematical concept of ‘place value’. However,
it was difficult for them to read the term correctly, let alone anticipate or deduce the
purpose of the activity. Nevertheless, the children were lively and enjoyed raising
their voices in a chant with the teacher. It is not clear whether students were able to
connect the original chant of ‘place value’ to the sequencing activity they engaged
in. But we will see in later facets how complex the ‘place value’ concept is, and how
the concept itself is a voyage of discovery requiring many points of embarking and
re-embarking before it can be fully grasped.
Embark & clarify, the MELT verb-pair denoting commencement, has proven
to be fit-for-purpose because it is necessarily broad. As such, it encapsulates the
many starting and re-starting points required for engaged learning and teaching, from
clarifying what a teacher wants, to determining what a patient needs, to selecting
independent variables, to wondering what to play with under a tree. You will see
in Chap. 3 that there are many ways educators and students have brought embark
& clarify to life, and that teachers choose verbs that are appropriate, context-based
ways of commencing. Example verbs that educators have used for ‘embark’ include
the following:
• Ask,
• Question,
• Specify aim,
• Determine goal,
• Define problem,
• Define specifications,
• Diagnose need,
• Identify issue,
• Recognise,
• Speculate,
• Immerse,
• Probe.
Affective aspects
Embarking is complex and, like all the facets, involves an interaction between the
cognitive and the affective. Shelly’s willingness to break away from the teacher’s
example was full of risks. Was she driven by some curiosity—provoked by an interest
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 39

in shapes or a TV show on parachute design? Was she driven by the prospect of getting
higher marks because she did not merely follow the teacher’s example? Whatever
drove her prompted a resilience, because throughout the difficult process, she kept
going.
It is possible that the children playing in Place Value barely noticed their learn-
ing, and it’s not likely that they consciously worked out what they were going to
play. Rather, their decision-making was intuitive, spontaneous and curiosity driven.
Open-slather learning can be bewildering, but somehow young children find it in
themselves to play and learn in very unpredictable ways. In contrast, the children
over seven playing nearby chose a fun activity (volleyball) with known and chal-
lenging parameters. There is a big difference between autonomous play and playing
a game with pre-set rules. In terms of measured outcomes, students may learn more
as a result of direct instruction than play, but that doesn’t mean that the learning
which comes from direct instruction is deeper, more comprehensive or more useful.
It may merely be more measurable. While the ability of students to propose research-
able questions is legitimately assessable, affective aspects of embark & clarify, like
‘curiosity’, are much more difficult to measure. This doesn’t make curiosity less
valuable or important; rather, it means that the complex and vital affective domain
needs to be thoughtfully taken into consideration by educators in all learning design.
In Place Value, the maths learning was at the opposite end of the autonomy spec-
trum to the play around the tree, with a specified curriculum and predetermined
answers. However, the teacher rarely corrected any child, instead gave cues like
pauses in pointing at numbers, and silences. Then she continued, asking, ‘is any
number in the wrong place?’ and gave students time to ponder. Perhaps most impor-
tant, she structured in opportunities for student self-correction later in the sequence of
events. She operated with tact, sensing that students needed feedback, but that feed-
back needed to be sensitive and non-accusatory in nature and, as much as possible,
to come from other students. Terms like ‘maths anxiety’ spring to mind, especially
if a child is struggling with more basic aspects of the lesson, like reading a num-
ber as ‘fourteen’ instead of ‘forty-one’. For the teacher, the affective dimension of
that lesson may have been something akin to ‘soothing’ or ‘reconciling’, rather than
curiosity.
In terms of ethical, social and cultural aspects, the teacher used the powerful
influence of spatial togetherness on the italitali mat and chanting of terminology to
weave a sense of social cohesion and support. For students, to even pronounce the
term ‘place value’ was challenging; initially, the students seemed to be confounded
by another maths term, reading the flashcard as ‘plus value’. Some of their earlier
experiences with pairs of numbers placed side by side would doubtless have involved
addition, which may have led to their confusion. So the knowledge base they needed
to draw on was shifting, becoming more sophisticated and more abstract. The concept
of ‘place value’ changes everything, and the students needed to work out what this
teacher wanted them to do with this place that was supposed to be so valuable, but
which maybe didn’t seem as valuable as their tree place by the water. The question
of what students ‘value’ influences every face-to-face class interaction, including for
students who prefer and value online worlds.
40 2 What Will We Use?

The affective descriptor for embark & clarify needs to be responsive to context.
For Kevin to begin to probe the merits of a medication which was not authorised
in his degree, he was driven by empathy for the people of rural Cambodia. Kevin
and eight other university students who completed the Bachelor of Oral Health were
interviewed one year after completion. Analysis of the interviews showed that for
them, embark & clarify was complex in the affective domain, initiated by numerous
and diverse interactions, and seemed to be much more nuanced and context-sensitive
than any other facet [21]. Sometimes, sophisticated thinking is driven by curiosity,
sometimes by empathy for patient needs and sometimes by passion for an issue [16].
This starting point may be initiated by a teacher, as shown in the class context of
Place Value, and in such cases, the challenge is to clarify what the teacher wants. In
cases where the starting point is initiated by a student, the process of clarification can
end up being even more complex, with students needing to fine-tune the question,
aim or need. In addition to curious, the study in the Oral Health context found other
affective descriptors that impelled graduates to embark: passion, ownership, interest
in learning, implications of not researching, boredom and the need to justify [16].
Therefore research is showing that embarking & clarifying has, to date, the most
complex cognitive and affective domains. An implication is that this facet requires
more context-specific modelling by teachers than currently occurs, more practice in
diverse contexts and more explicit connections between contexts. If that all were to
occur, then the metacognition of students in relation to how they embark will be
enhanced, and they will develop a sense of purpose for their own learning.
Einstein looked to the affective domain to explain his success as a learner: ‘I
am not especially gifted or talented. I am only very, very curious’ [22]. Einstein’s
self-characterisation is one reason that ‘curious’ is used as a placeholder for affect in
MELT. However, other affective descriptors are often more pertinent to the context
and should be chosen carefully by educators or students and used instead. At times,
identifying excess and deficit affect associated with each facet is useful, and for
embark & clarify these are obsessive and disengaged, respectively.
Autonomy
Each facet may place its own demands on students, experience by learning expe-
rience, task by task, assessment by assessment, project by project, including how
much autonomy is provided and how much each student operates with. The two sto-
ries and the graduate account are next compared and contrasted in terms of learner
autonomy in order to elucidate this concept. The children playing under the tree
embarked with a high level of autonomy, with no obvious supervision. They deter-
mined what they would play, where, with whom and for how long. But the next day
in the maths class, three of those same children were grappling with the teacher’s aim
for the lesson. Their embarkation was highly prescribed and required sophisticated
and abstract thinking. The students had an oral familiarity with numbers, but found it
difficult to get the right-to-left orientation correct. It was daunting for them to under-
stand what value a specific place or location gave a numeral compared to another
numeral. The class embarked on learning content knowledge specified by the teacher
and with which few students were familiar, and this required much clarification and
re-clarification.
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 41

Kevin determined to explore the value of silver fluoride without boundaries set
by others. The potential risks and benefits of the substance were his to weigh up, and
his innovative approach may have led to some severe problems. His decision to act
in such an autonomous way may have been driven by his empathy for the people, his
curiosity about a now-abandoned medical approach, or any number of other affective
factors.
Shelly took the opportunity to pose her own question, about parachute shape,
improvising in a way that was in keeping with the scaffolded scope provided, with
some teacher parameters and occasional guidance. Katie, in the same classroom,
emulated the teacher’s example and stuck to a prescribed question about parachute
material.
Shelly’s method of embarkation resulted in different ramifications to Katie’s.
Shelly’s own choice of independent variable led to unanticipated problems, making
engagement with the other MELT facets substantially more complex than it was for
Katie. The surprising element in Parachute is that Shelly seemed so clear so quickly
about her direction, and never wavered from it. Even though she experienced multiple
problems and hold-ups as she improvised and innovated, she actually submitted
her final report on time, along with others who emulated the teacher’s modelling.
For many students, regardless of educational level, this quick clarification would
not have happened, and they would consequently have failed to submit a report of
any substance. The pressures are often against a student to be too innovative, and
sometimes the perceived or actual risk causes students to emulate instead.
The two school stories and the graduate’s account show the diverse range of stu-
dent autonomy that was evident for embark & clarify. A similarly diverse range
of autonomy was also evident in the case of the other facets, as shown below.
Table 2.4 summarises the highest level of autonomy that was observed for each
facet as demonstrated by participants in the stories and account.

Table 2.4 The highest level of learning autonomy evident for each facet, story by story
Facet Place Value Parachute Silver Fluoride
Children Children in Shelly Katie Kevin
around tree class
Embark & Initiate Emulate Improvises Emulates Initiates
clarify
Find & Initiate Emulate Improvises Emulates Initiates
generate
Evaluate & Initiate Emulate Initiates Emulates Initiates
reflect
Organise & Initiate Emulate Initiates Emulates Initiates
manage
Analyse & Initiate Improvise Initiates Emulates Initiates
synthesise
Communicate Initiate Improvise Improvises Emulates Initiates
& apply
42 2 What Will We Use?

Within the same learning context, different students work at differing points on the
continuum of learning autonomy, regardless of teacher intention, and this is seen in
Parachute. Some students frequently seek out clarification, ask what is next, request
specified processes, and pursue a multitude of ways of working with the autonomy
akin to emulate, regardless of whether the teacher provides a learning task that is
engineered for students to improvise or initiate. In Parachute, Katie emulated the
teacher’s model for all six facets, while Shelly initiated evaluating, organising and
analysing and improvised in the other three facets. Same classroom facilitation, with
two very different student experiences. The same six-year-olds in Place Value were
playing highly autonomously one day and learning with prescribed facilitation the
next. This demonstrates that, in MELT, autonomy is not a characteristic that one
acquires, but something which varies according to the relationship of a learner to
teachers, other learners and the context.

2.3.2 Find & Generate

Process Affective dimension Question

Find & generate Determined What will we use?

Detail: Students find information and tools, and generate data/ideas using appropriate
methodologies.
The MELT facet find & generate is concerned with using methods to make avail-
able elements that we will use, as dictated by a particular purpose. These ‘elements’
could be the information or data needed to address a research question—tables of
results from published articles, for example, or data from one’s own experiments.
Elements could be physical or electronic tools, equipment or manuscripts. A chemist
once said ‘A couple of months in the chemistry lab can save you a couple of hours in
the library’ [23]. This facetious comment, written before the advent of the Internet,
is a reminder that seeking already-existing information can prevent the unnecessary
wastage of resources required to generate data. Seeking others’ information or gen-
erating one’s own data both require methodologies that are learned over time and
that are context-specific.
Kevin the graduate was prompted by his impending visit to consider whether silver
fluoride may be useful in Cambodian villages. With this purpose in mind, his self-
determined need was to look up product and usage information, find out about side
effects, and consider the costs, packing and customs requirements associated with
taking silver fluoride overseas. When in Cambodia, he also had to find patients whose
needs were well-suited to his treatment and not apply a one-size-fits-all strategy.
Shelly’s task looks more complex, as she needed to generate primary data and a
protocol to achieve this, as well as coming to the realisation that she had to control
the size of the parachute, and therefore use mathematical equations to calculate its
optimal area.
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 43

The six-year-olds in Place Value had to find the ‘place’ that bestows value on
numerals. For each two-digit number, the six-year-olds had to locate the numeral on
the left and interpret it differently than if it was by itself. This was not at all straight-
forward, as evidenced when the students read ‘forty-one’ as ‘fourteen’, and the group
of eight students inserted forty-one immediately after eleven in the sequence of num-
bers. Finding the right ‘place’ made all the difference in terms of determining the
correct number sequence, and the task was initially beyond the understanding of
almost the whole class. We wouldn’t normally think of reading two-digit numbers
as ‘finding’, but that may be because we forget how difficult the task is the first time
around, when reading numbers of more than one digit requires locating the left-hand
numeral in a two-digit number and assigning that number a special value. Locating
the place of value was potentially bewildering for those who did not know their left
hand from their right.
When three of the six-year-olds were playing around the tree the day before the
maths lesson, they had many shells, seeds and other objects to find. Sometimes, the
objects which they found prompted what they would do—a natural ‘object-based’
learning [24]. This type of learning was less about working out someone else’s
(cryptic) meaning about, for example, where ‘place value is found’. The type of
learning was more about a way of finding that gave way to more finding, as when
a child found a specific shell and suddenly noticed specimens of the same shell all
around them. The potential for finding was rich, with new things constantly being
washed up, blown in or dropped down. As the seasons changed, so did the weather,
the texture of the bark, and the character of nearby flowers and seeds. What was
findable in and under the tree provided a rich learning environment that prompted
the children to engage in multifaceted sophisticated thinking.
Affect
The place-holding affective adjective for find & generate is determined—a deter-
mined student pushing on to find relevant and useful information or to generate data.
Shelly epitomises this, as even in an eighty-minute episode she was fierce in her
determination to generate pertinent data despite the pressures of time, equipment
and lack of support. Shelly showed determination to not generate just any data, but
data that was trustworthy, as shown by her frequent writing, erasure and rewriting of
measurements.
For the children in Place Value, the safety of the tree provided many opportunities
to find and to generate ideas that they could further explore. There is a sense that
the ‘finding’ in this setting was expansive, in contrast with the classroom where
the finding process came across as almost pedantic. Under the tree, some children
moved from one activity to another, and you might call that ‘exploration’. But in
a classroom context, that same way of learning could be called ‘unfocussed’. How
did the children navigate affectively between these two learning worlds on a daily
basis? Did the classroom learning partially impel students, by the time they were
seven-year-olds, to play games with other people’s rules—like volleyball? Or is
the progression from unbounded play to play with boundaries just a natural part of
44 2 What Will We Use?

childhood development? Where the affective domain for find & generate is taken to
an extreme, it becomes pedantic; a deficit in this affect could be called slapdash.
Autonomy
The children in Place Value are again at opposite ends of the learning autonomy
continuum when tree-based finding is compared with classroom-based finding. In
the tree, what the children found was constrained only by what remained, what was
grown and what had recently washed up, dropped down and blown in, and so the
children improvised continuously in terms of find & generate. In the maths class,
their finding was prescribed down to a precise location: the number on the left, which
had a special value. In the classroom, there was no opportunity for the children to
improvise on that convention, with the expectation by the teacher that they would
emulate.
In Parachute, Katie emulated the teacher’s protocol and generated data in keeping
with prescribed learning autonomy. Shelly had some scaffolds set by the teacher,
but also had a high degree of independence within those scaffolds, improvising the
protocol to suit her questions and generating data as she went. Kevin innovated, with
the freedom to determine which product information or application processes he
needed to know about, including how he could get the silver fluoride safely overseas.

2.3.3 Evaluate & Reflect

Process Affective dimension Question

Evaluate & reflect Discerning What do we trust?

Detail: Students evaluate the credibility of sources, information, data and ideas, and
through reflection make their own learning processes visible.
The process of finding information or generating data naturally leads to questions
about the trustworthiness of that information or data. Should students believe others’
information, including the teacher’s, by default? A risk in the Information Age is
that students may become gullible consumers of information, and so the educative
process must include ways for students to learn to evaluate. Likewise, students should
not by default trust their own ideas or data, but should evaluate these and reflect on
the processes they use throughout their own learning, including self-reflection to
determine their own potential biases.
In Place Value, after the children called out ‘fourteen’ in response to the written
number ‘forty-one’, the teacher cued to students that there may be an error, by
repeating the first part of the number: ‘Four…’. A student then self-corrected with
this prompting, calling the number ‘fourteen’. When the class was prompted by the
teacher to indicate whether the initial number sequence was correct, many students
cried ‘no’, but no-one volunteered which number was incorrect until one girl standing
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 45

in the line of eight students pointed at ‘forty-one’. The teacher asked where ‘forty-
one’ should go. Many children pointed to the next position up, so the teacher prompted
the child holding ‘forty-one’ and the child holding ‘seventeen’ to shuffle and change
places.
It is one thing to know what is wrong, and another thing to make it right. The
evaluation process was incremental—students caused ‘forty-one’ to move to the
right-hand side of seventeen, but not past twenty or twenty-nine. It may have been
initially that the student holding the ‘forty-one’ saw it as ‘fourteen’, and so he was
correct in sequencing it between nine and seventeen. But with the realisation that it
was not fourteen but forty-one, there was no aspect that was correct in the sequence
‘17, 41, 20’. The salient aspect for evaluate is that the teacher prioritised evaluative
thinking by allowing the class to place forty-one incorrectly, knowing the contin-
uation of the exercise allowed for further correction. In other words, the teacher’s
Socratic questioning focused on the process of evaluation, not on getting the correct
answer. This approach can take some of the fear out of learning, if students can
incrementally correct rather than being corrected first-off. The teacher could also
have asked for reflection at the end of that task: ‘What was one number that started
in the wrong place and now is in the right place?’ and ‘What is more important—that
we got it right the first time, or got it right in the end?’ In that way, she would have
been helping students learn to be evaluative and reflective.
Kevin had to decide whether the silver fluoride’s negatives (such as staining of
teeth) were outweighed by the positives of tooth decay prevention. With this in
mind, his cost–benefit analysis for potential patients in Cambodia would be very
different from a cost–benefit analysis for urban dwellers in a developed nation. This
is because evaluation is context-sensitive, and in this case determined by cultural and
social factors, as well as by medical and economic ones.
In Parachute, Shelly engaged in evaluative thinking, measuring, writing, erasing,
re-measuring, rewriting and erasing numbers that represented her measured drop
times. When Mrs Breen asked, ‘Did you use several measurements?’ she was getting
at the underlying repeatability of measurements in science, not relying on a single
measure. This is a kind of incremental approach towards a ‘true’ value, where ran-
dom errors decrease as the number of measurements increases. Shelly answered ‘yes’
truthfully. And with her repeated rubbing-out of numbers, she indicated a dissatisfac-
tion with some of her measurements—an evaluative decision in which she was being
discerning. Perhaps this is because she realised a problem with the measurement,
such as stopping her timer too early or starting too late, or that the parachute didn’t
fully open. If that was the case, she was engaging in an evaluative search for accu-
rate measurements. It is also possible that she knew that measurements shouldn’t be
too spread out, which would indicate a lack of precision, and she wanted to elimi-
nate some recorded numbers that made her experiment seem to lack quality. Given
the rushed timeframe, whether she was evaluating the measures themselves, or the
appearance of her experiment, she demonstrated a high level of evaluative thinking.
Nevertheless, it was Shelly’s evaluative thinking in Parachute that shocked me.
How could a series of maths calculations leave her to critique not the actual numbers
she obtained, but the shortfall of materials (‘there isn’t enough’)? In the complexities
46 2 What Will We Use?

of a genuinely open inquiry, where Shelly autonomously determined independent,

dependent and key-controlled variables, she failed to make an absolutely vital eval-
uation of size. She seemed to believe that her hand-sized circle would be matched
in the area by a square bigger than her desk. Ultimately, she applied a wrong maths
formula—perimeter of a square instead of area of a square—but one would hope the
discrepancy would have been enough for Shelly to stop and think that there must be
a calculation error. This did not happen without intervention.
Affect: Discerning
Place Value’s maths lesson required students to be discerning, requiring more than
the evaluative element discussed earlier. Rather it was epitomised by the student who
took a risk and pointed at the incorrect number—a willingness to question and maybe
break through a group silence. Without this willingness, the teacher would have been
left merely telling the group what was wrong, or the group would have been stuck
with incorrect ideas.
Shelly was brave and smart in her parachute experiment. She was pressed for
time because she chose to do what the teacher really wanted—her own investigation
rather than what was modelled as an example. Everything had to be thought through,
quickly, in eighty minutes minus the teacher’s talk, making Shelly’s task seriously
complicated. In this case, she was asked to reflect on her learning: ‘list what went
wrong, and how you could improve’, but Shelly had no time to work on that before
she submitted her report. That was an opportunity missed, for her reflections on the
eighty minutes may have taught her much. Shelly showed herself to be discerning, for
example, by reporting only the positive aspects of her experiment when the teacher
asked her how she was going, and through her willingness to erase and re-measure
even under extreme time pressures. However, she did not see the size discrepancy
resulting from her maths calculations for square size was a major concern.
Being discerning is vital for tree climbing; you have to avoid stepping onto a thin
or dead branch that can’t hold your weight, in effect asking each time ‘is this branch
strong enough?’with a compelling motivation to get this evaluative question right.
The six-year-olds under the tree had no time pressure: if they were finding similar
items, they could use any selection criteria for any feature they liked: species, colour,
size, shape—there was no specific curriculum, and the exercise was self-correcting.
Did they learn through outside play to be more evaluative or more reflective than in the
classroom? For example, asking ‘is this seed safe to eat?’ is a very practical and nat-
ural question that fosters children to become discerning. Similarly, working without
externally imposed boundaries, Kevin needed to be creatively discerning, projecting
himself into an unfamiliar context, in effect asking himself before travelling ‘will
silver fluoride cause problems with and for villagers in Cambodia?’
Autonomy
Shelly sought for help, but only because she evaluated the plastic as too small to
make a large-enough square. She self-evaluated many components of her work,
especially the quality of data, by measuring, recording, erasing and re-measuring,
and was mainly working at an initiating level of autonomy, even ignoring the teacher’s
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 47

request for reflection on the process. The children in Place Value were probed with
Socratic questioning by their teacher to structure their thinking at the bounded level,
in order to enable their group evaluation. At times, one student’s evaluation became
a modelling for the others. The activity was more bounded than prescribed, because
students had several options when choosing what number was in the wrong place,
and then several options for where to move the numbers. Nevertheless, most students
showed evidence of emulating the teacher or experienced peers in terms of evaluation,
with only a few students improvising. Kevin’s own evaluative standards (prevention
of decay) and his decision to intentionally disregard certain criteria (aesthetics) all
emerged from his innovation and sensitivity to the context.

2.3.4 Organise & Manage

Process Affective dimension Question

Organise & manage Harmonising How do we arrange?

Detail: Students organise information & data to reveal patterns/themes and manage
teams and processes.
To organise information is to enable its effective use. Where there is a plethora
of information and data, organisational processes and formats help to enable sophis-
ticated thinking, especially analyses. Written, spoken and graphical conventions for
organising information and data enable subject-appropriate ways of communicating.
The management of resources (both physical and electronic), of people in teams and
of time all strongly influence how sophisticated student thinking may become.
The children in and around the tree in Place Value played until after sunset,
doing whatever they wanted in that timeframe. Learning wasn’t pre-planned; it was
managed by them—they organised their time, equipment, spatial arrangement and
the things they found. They could be up the tree, under the tree, or indeed anywhere
else, but perhaps something communal kept them within six metres of each other.
In the maths class, by stark contrast, there was strict management of the students:
the bell would ring one hour after recess; the teacher determined the time allocated
to whole-class tasks and then individual tasks; the space was teacher determined,
whether on the Pacific Island italitali mat, standing in a line in front of the class or at
individual desks. The tasks required pre-specified ways of organising the whole class
and individual activities. Organisation and management, as dictated by the teacher,
were directed towards achieving as much learning about place value as possible.
But how often were the students aware of teacher modelling and their own use of
managing and organising skills?
Shelly’s experience was closer to that of the children when they played outside
than their experience in the maths lesson. While she had about the same amount
of time as the six-year-olds in the classroom, between the teacher explanations,
48 2 What Will We Use?

clarifications and requirements, she had to determine exactly how to manage herself
and the experiment. For some aspects of organising the information, Shelly followed
a standardised structure that she had used before: title, aim, results, with observation
table and bar graph, and conclusion. However, for the table and graph, she had to
organise the data by determining what the table comprised, identifying the x-axis and
y-axis components of the graph, which required a degree of difficulty much higher
than previous work, and all in a rushed timeframe.
Kevin had to work out the constraints of international travel and the village sit-
uation himself, and that these constraints would determine what he could carry and
what he could manage to do. This included weight limits, knowing what goods could
be imported to Cambodia, and the equipment available. Every aspect of organise &
manage he determined and initiated.
Affect
Organise & manage can appear the least affective-oriented facet, but if students find
the whole learning process under-stimulating, tedious or overly complex, then poten-
tial learning gains may not eventuate, no matter the learning design used. Einstein
urged ‘Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony’ [25]. Organising
cluttered information and managing discord requires an affective element: harmonis-
ing. This affective element addresses the question, ‘how do we arrange?’ How do we
take cluttered, incoherent data or information and harmonise it in ways that enable
effective analysis? How do we manage our team to work harmoniously? In Place
Value, there are harmonious arrangements, with the children playing individually and
yet socially in the shared tree-space. The highly prescribed maths lesson presents the
harmonies of children on a pacific island mat chanting and learning together with the
teacher. By calling out eight children to the front of the class, rather than individuals,
the teacher managed the class harmoniously in the context of the cultural setting.
In Parachute, the time pressures brought discord to Shelly’s open-ended experi-
mentation, while Katie’s prescribed experiment was relaxed. Even if Shelly learned
more, what lesson did she walk away with? Given her level of anxiety, would her
learning in this lesson have been less about experimental design and more about
planning future work in which she could emulate the teacher’s example, like other
students?
Kevin was endeavouring to tread a fine line between the help that he hoped to give
and the actual helpfulness of his planning, knowing that success would depend on
how people in Cambodian villages actually reacted to stained teeth. That he used the
silver fluoride a lot when he was over there suggests that he began by anticipating a
high demand for the product, that he took a lot of it with him, and that this harmonised
with the reality of what the Cambodians in villages were willing to do to protect their
teeth.
Autonomy
Shelly struggled to squeeze her self-determined experiment into the 80 min allocated
to the lesson. Her time management was paramount, and at one point she created
for herself a resource management issue that didn’t exist: she decided that she didn’t
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 49

have enough material. She then spent time talking to me, trying to source more
plastic. Simultaneously, she was organising data into tables and graphs that reflected
her actual fields (time and shape) and measurements of time. Shelly improvised
organisational structures because not all options were fully open. For example, she
was provided with the structure of ‘aim, method, results and conclusion’, and was
aware that her teacher would mark her work according to (unknown?) criteria after
the class. But Shelly managed this experimental process amazingly well, to the extent
that she did finish and submit, albeit without the self-reflective part that her teacher
requested near the end of the vignette.
Manage & Organise were highly structured in the Place Value classroom, with
student bodily emulation of the teacher’s physical management. Innovation was
epitomised by the students by the seashore and by Kevin.

2.3.5 Analyse & Synthesise

Process Affective dimension Question

Analyse & synthesise Creative What does it mean?

Details: Students analyse information/data critically and synthesise new knowledge

to produce coherent individual/team understandings.
Analysis involves the complexities of breaking things down into their constituent
parts and bringing them back together in a way that enables trends (in quantitative
work) and themes (in qualitative work) to become evident. There is, then, a strong,
recursive interaction between organise and analyse, through determining how infor-
mation and data may be arranged to enable insight into what words, numbers, icons
and other representations mean. Synthesis is the process of creating something new
from all the constituent parts. At the most fundamental level, this entails an indi-
vidual’s construction of understanding, or a team’s construction of understanding.
Understanding may be manifest in all sorts of physical and digital representations,
from essays to multimedia mash-ups. While ‘understanding’ is the second-from-
bottom taxon in Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain, in MELT it emerges
non-sequentially, and in some ways is a culmination of sophisticated learning.
When students analyse & synthesise others’ information along with their own
prior knowledge, they construct understanding new to themselves in a process that
often involves creativity, or the creation of something new. Synthesis happens in
the context of students’ prior knowledge. In Place Value, the lesson focus is on the
value associated with the ‘place’ of a numeral in a two-digit number. Single-digit
numbers are relatively concrete, but a number represented by two or more numerals
is a substantial abstraction. Without an understanding of the value attributed to a
specific place (e.g. that the left-hand number in a two-digit numeral indicates the
number of groups of ten, and the right-hand number indicates the number of units),
students can make few conceptual advances in our decimal system of mathematics.
50 2 What Will We Use?

So, from the start of this activity in Place Value, there may have been some maths
anxiety, especially given that English was the second language for all the students,
so that their familiarity with number names would have been lower than if English
was their mother tongue.
Whilst we saw in Sect. 2.3.3 that the six-year-olds evaluated ‘forty-one’ as being
in the wrong place, this didn’t automatically entail that they could locate the right
place for the number. The students seemed to have trouble seeing the trend in numbers
as a whole and being able to place forty-one correctly after twenty-nine—in other
words, they struggled to analyse.
The teacher asked a question that seemed practical, but which actually required
analytical thinking. It was not a question which merely evaluated whether forty-one
was in an incorrect position; it also asked students to project the number to its proper
place: ‘So this forty-one should go where?’ For students to see the numerical trend,
to show analytical thinking, they needed to move forty-one up three places in the
line. However, the students indicated that it should go past seventeen only, and the
boy with forty-one moved up one place: ‘5, 9, 11, 17, 41, 20, 29, 57’.
If the process of evaluating forty-one’s position continued incrementally ‘it’s
wrong here…. It’s wrong here, ah, it’s correct here’, then it would have been a
trial and error process. This would be similar to (but more sophisticated than) the
evaluative thinking required to check whether a square peg fit into a round hole, and
then trying each subsequent hole until it fits. The teacher knew that forty-one was
still in the wrong place, but demonstrated pedagogical awareness that if she kept
on asking ‘are you sure?’ regarding forty-one specifically, she would be cuing that
forty-one was wrongly placed. Such a strategy may not even facilitate evaluative
thinking; it would merely train students to read the teacher’s cues.
The teacher instead asked, ‘Any other number is in the wrong place?’ Here, she
shifted the class focus from forty-one, towards looking at all the numbers afresh
and analysing the trend. One student evaluated ‘twenty-nine’ as being in the wrong
place. The teacher then asked a question about twenty-nine, the same question she
asked about forty-one. Again, in this context, this could have represented an attempt
to elicit analytical thinking: ‘Twenty-nine should go where?’
‘Besides seventeen’ one student called out—and the student with twenty-nine
shuffled left, passing forty-one and twenty ‘5, 9, 11, 17, 29, 41, 20, 57.
Indeed, this was the first time a student required a number to move two places at
once, and downstream at that. This one student had seen something in the trend (e.g.,
his internal reasoning may have been something like ‘twenty-nine is lower than forty-
one and higher than seventeen, so it should go between these two numbers’). This
process of seeing the trend rather than engaging in evaluative trial and error indicates
analytical reasoning. The sequence as yet was not perfected, but the student’s request
represented a major leap forward, from an incremental, evaluative process to a more
analytical one. The other students could see and hear this, and realised that they too
could do more than say ‘not here’—instead, they could project a number into its
correct location in the sequence. That leap of two places was a leap of insight for the
child, and may have triggered some new ways of thinking for other children.
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 51

Still, it is hard to see errors, let alone trends in numbers, and when the teacher
asked if there was any other number in the wrong place, the students called out
together, ‘No’. It may seem bewildering that thirty-one bright students ‘missed’ the
‘20’, especially after another number in the twenties (twenty-nine) was just moved.
‘Are you sure?’ she presses.
‘Twenty!’ a boy calls out
‘Right.’ Where should it go?
‘Besides seventeen’
Again, this child’s analysis went beyond seeing that twenty was in the wrong
position, into spotting the trend and placing the number in its correct place.
The students’ process suggested that some of the students could evaluate, on a
case-by-case basis, whether a number was in the right or the wrong position. But
to analyse entailed being able to move a number to its correct position, even if this
required big jumps. At the end of the activity, there were now two students who
showed evidence of being analytical, and they modelled this ability to the class.
In Parachute, Shelly worked out that there was a difference in parachute drop
times, and since she had controlled other factors, she inferred that the difference
was due to the parachute’s shape. She stated to Mrs Breen that ‘the round one takes
longer to hit the ground.’ To reach this analysis, Shelly shifted from one particular
observation (‘the round parachute in each drop took longer’) to a generalisation (‘the
round one [always] takes longer’). For her conclusion, she elaborated on that analysis
to form a full synthesis of her previous and current understanding of the nature of
science experiments, and of the analysis she conducted, to say, ‘If the key factors are
the same the parachute should come down at the same rate’. Because square versus
round parachutes didn’t have the same drop time, she synthesised her conclusion
as a generalisation: ‘the shape does matter to the time’. The finding that drop time
depended on parachute shape represented a substantial synthesis of empirically based
understanding, developed in an eighty-minute lesson by a thirteen-year-old student.
Kevin’s analysis included a conscious consideration of social, cultural and contex-
tual issues, in order to determine whether he was right in thinking that silver fluoride
may have been appropriate. There was also a technical side to his analysis—e.g.,
‘how poisonous is silver fluoride if ingested, or if it makes contact with skin?’ His
analysis may not have stretched to ‘how sustainable will this approach be for each
village?’ His final synthesis included the decision to take the compound, as well as
considerations on how much to take, and how he would store it while travelling and
when in the villages.
Affect: Creative
The Place Value maths activity was social, but frequently depended on an individual
to go against the consensus and call out an error. This may have meant that some
students who either saw a wrongly placed number, or who even saw where that
number should go may have been inhibited to say so, perhaps because of cultural
norms. The analytical learning evident in this activity seemed to rely on brave or
confident individuals. To understand deeply what ‘place value’ meant, students had
52 2 What Will We Use?

to be intuitive; students who were cognitively and affectively engaged in the task had
to be very creative to move from their original understanding to a newly constructed
understanding of the concept. This creativity was evidenced in the leap of imagination
required for one student to send one number multiple places downstream. Three
students from the class showed the creativity to conjure up different games from
scratch each day as they played by the seashore. Shelly’s analysis followed a scientific
protocol, but she creatively adapted it to her parachute experiment. Kevin showed
the creativity needed to think outside the content box of his study program. This
allowed him to consider, from a raft of potential contributions, what he could add to
oral health practice in a rural context.
Autonomy
In the Place Value maths lesson, the students’ analysis and synthesis were scaffolded
by the teacher, who put structures in place to help students analyse the numerical
trend and rearrange the numbers into their correct order. For some or most students,
this was too big a step. In the process, there was no modelling from the teacher. But
the teacher scaffolded the task so that students modelled to other students the process
of analytical thinking. Such peer-to-peer modelling was envisaged by Vygotsky in
the ZPD, and peer teaching is often regarded as more conducive to student learning
than teacher talk [26].
Kevin’s initiation of analysis was unbounded by any supervisory presence, but this
unboundedness didn’t mean ‘anything goes’. This was especially true in terms of his
patients’ health, which was in his silver fluoride-laden hands. If Kevin, for example,
ignored or overlooked a health warning, he may have endangered his patients. If
applied inexpertly, the treatment may have been ineffective or counterproductive.
Even though Kevin may have been working outside the boundaries of a specific health
system, his status as a professional required him to be aware of how ‘unbounded’
his work was, and therefore to redouble caution, checking and rechecking dosages.
Shelly initiated her own analysis & synthesis and this was in keeping with the
teacher’s more open-ended intention, and so the teacher had no preconceived answer
for Shelly’s self-generated question. The teacher could check the process and the
steps which Shelly used to get to her conclusion, but could not rightly correct the
findings themselves.

2.3.6 Communicate & Apply

Process Affective dimension Question

Communicate & apply Constructive How do we relate?

Detail: Students apply their understanding and discuss, listen, write, perform,
respond to feedback and present processes, knowledge and implications while
heeding ethical, cultural, social and team (ECST) issues and audience needs.
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 53

Communication frequently is thought of in terms of written, spoken, multimedia

and performance products for an audience, and application is thought to concern built
solutions to a problem. However, like all the facets, communicate and apply are pri-
marily processes that students engage in during sophisticated thinking, even though
they may also comprise final outputs. Students begin by applying their prior knowl-
edge to a task, and as they develop understanding, they apply that new understanding
to their task. The communication process has many aspects, and involves more than
speaking and writing—it also entails listening, reading, performing and responding
to feedback. In the process of applying this facet, ethical, cultural, social and team
(ECST) elements need to be emphasised, as mentioned for embark & clarify.
Whilst they seemed to be involved in individual agendas when I watched them
playing around the tree, the children in Place Value were vocalising the whole time.
Whether they were chatting, gibbering or explicitly communicating with each other,
I couldn’t tell. Although they were each doing different things, the proximity of the
six children to each other was striking; they were together in individual ways. The
three- to six-year-olds acted out the facet ‘apply’ through the use of their existing
knowledge and turning their thoughts to their environment—was there something
there which they didn’t know about, or suddenly thought differently about? Would
they apply their maths to counting objects? Would they arrange things on the mat
in ways they had seen others do in a shop setting? Or would they just bounce in
a branch, and somehow learn about natural rhythms, about the properties of living
wood, of the texture of bark, and develop tacit knowledge of how to grip a moving
branch?
In the village, many coconuts were harvested when green, a long time before they
fell naturally, and so the village relied on good climbers. The boys in the village told
me they could not climb a coconut tree until they were older than twelve—it required
skill with a machete and upper body strength. But did climbing in the tree by the
water provide a raft of knowledge and skills that could be applied later to climbing
coconut trees?
The next day in the maths class, the teacher’s use of a Pacific Island mat, the
italitali, culturally affirmed the children’s place in the Pacific. The communication
between students was initially communal, with students chanting together and
periodically falling into shared silence. When the eight students were allocated
their numbers, they read them, and used the information of the two single-digit
and six double-digit numbers to order themselves into a sequence. They used a
lot of whispering and pointing, pushing and shuffling to end up with a commu-
nication product––their sequence of numbers––reached by consensus, under time
pressure and maybe stage-fright. Standing there in their sequence, they hoped to
communicate visually, holding numbers so that they were visible to the twenty-three
others who remained on the italitali mat. Therefore, the group was exposed to
critique because their communication was in plain sight and open to a form of
peer-review. That the sequence was constructed by a group of students reduced
potential feelings of exposure when compared, say, to an individual sequencing
numbers on a whiteboard. Nevertheless, the eight students and their thinking were
exposed. Students on the mat scanned the sequence time and again, and endeavoured
54 2 What Will We Use?

to communicate through silence, speaking or pointing their answer in response to

the teacher’s communication prompt, ‘is there any number in the wrong place?’
This evaluative question prompted students to answer with something specific, in
contrast to a vaguer question, such as ‘is this sequence correct?’
Maybe it’s to be expected that the student who first communicated an answer
to this question was engaged in the process of forming the sequence, rather than
sitting passively on the mat. When number five pointed to forty-one, she broke the
stillness which had suggested collective acquiescence regarding the correctness of
the existing sequence. The student holding ‘five’ did not just evaluate the sequence
and diagnose that it was wrong, but actively indicated through pointing and speaking
which number in the sequence was incorrect. Once challenged, the class began to
agree with her, and in that way, her communication broke a silence. Once the silence
was broken, individual students worked up the courage to start challenging class
consensus, and this moved the community forward towards the correct sequence.
Once forty-one was challenged, students had to apply their knowledge to suggest
where forty-one should go. After this, many students communicated by pointing, as
if vocalising a specific place was too difficult or risky. The standing, pointing and
shuffling made embodied communication the number one communication mode in
the class. It was this form of communication that enabled some students to apply
their knowledge of two-digit numbers.
In Parachute, Shelly wrote in her report,
If the key factors are the same the parachute should come down at the same rate as it was
not proven here I have come to the conclusion that the shape does matter to the time.

This excerpt is cryptic at first glance. But it closely follows the ‘null hypothesis’
strategy used commonly in science, whereby scientists try to show that there is no
statistical difference, after which the discovery of a difference indicates that there
must be a genuine difference in effect due to the independent variable. Shelly merely
took averages, which are very weak descriptive statistics. Nevertheless, she adopted
the persuasive grammatical structures of science to communicate in writing. How-
ever, she had made a similar point earlier when talking to Mrs Breen, in a way that
was much easier to understand: ‘the round one takes longer to hit the ground.’ The
report is much more science-speak than her oral communication, and as her main
communication product, the report goes beyond communicating results and demon-
strates her findings using scientific discourse. In choosing a communication style
that was appropriate to the situation, Shelly did something that is vital in all learning
contexts. The fact that different styles and modes are required in different settings
suggests that ‘communication’ is not a singular skill. Rather, it comes in multiple
forms, each of which must be learned and incorporated into a personal repository of
styles to be drawn-upon as context demands.
When Kevin communicated with Cambodians in the village, he wanted them to
have confidence that what he was offering would work. But his audience may not
have wanted or understood a scientific discourse. In this situation, apply may have
seemed more important to Kevin than communicate: ‘I thought that might be really
beneficial for Cambodia because they don’t get care often.’ He wanted and found
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 55

something that worked, and was driven to be constructive, to build up. He anticipated
linguistic barriers, but knew that the care he could give would speak volumes.
For Kevin, communication included a willingness to listen to someone with an
experience that differed from his, someone with rural experience, and this included
practice that was contrary to standard practice in his degree. He used the silver
fluoride ‘a lot over there’, implying that he persuaded people in the village to tolerate
stained teeth in order to keep their teeth longer. Clearly, his intention was to be
constructive. This is where the ethical, cultural and social dimensions really kick
in. He applied the idea of silver fluoride, evaluated his use of it with people and
decided to continue to use it a lot. Communication and application were a type of
endpoint for his sophisticated thinking. But they are also a part of the process from
the beginning, including listening, finding out what was currently available and what
was applicable.
Affect: Constructive
The default affective adjective in MELT for this facet is constructive, used in the
colloquial sense of ‘you’re a constructive person’ or ‘that’s a constructive comment’.
A constructive student or graduate desires to build up rather than self-promote in
their applications and communications. Shelly endeavoured to not only be intrepid,
but to craft a quality finding.
Kevin was a constructive graduate who volunteered, prepared and purchased
equipment using his own money, well in advance. He communicated and maybe
persuaded as he went, and applied his knowledge with the intention to add value
to the lives of people who were otherwise unreached by dental services. In doing
so, he personified the end-game of research and problem-solving: ‘go to where the
silence is and say something’ [27]. Of course, it may be that having committed to
silver fluoride, Kevin was doggedly committed to use it or get rid of it. There is the
possibility that he foisted the product on a more vulnerable population, over-riding
their aesthetic concerns. Kevin, and each of us, ethically and culturally must priori-
tise others and not use coercion to peddle wares or to enforce our own values, like a
mini-colonisation.
The children in Place Value were preoccupied with play in the tree, and in that
setting they entertained themselves without needing any adult resources. The eight
children in line applied their understanding of place value and communicated this
to the whole class. Their willingness to do this and to be critiqued enabled an entire
constructive dialogue to be engineered by the teacher.
Autonomy
That communicative line-up in Place Value had predetermined boundaries, and even
with one ultimate correct answer, the scope was there for incremental improvement.
Giving the children some room to move enabled substantial learning. Kevin and
the children under the tree had unbounded autonomy to communicate and apply.
Shelly faced a mixed bag, with the prescribed structure of a lab write-up and her
own innovations to report, whereas Katie stayed within the modelling provided,
successfully emulating the teachers’ lead.
56 2 What Will We Use?

2.3.7 Spiralling, Recursive and Messy

Sections 2.3.1–2.3.6 are arranged in a logical and coherent order and present as a
more linear representation of the MELT facets. However, the reality of sophisticated
learning is that it is messier than a sequence. At times, several facets occur simulta-
neously, or facets like evaluate and reflect are tightly coupled to every other facet.
Simultaneously, purpose drives everything, frequently requiring a return to embark
& clarify. It is to capture the non-sequential nature of sophisticated learning that
MELT uses the word facet: It’s as if there are six faces of one precious learning
jewel, where different facets are emphasised depending on which way one holds the
jewel, yet all co-exist simultaneously.
There are different practical ways that facets may interconnect or be emphasised
in MELT. The ethical, cultural, social and team considerations are evident in embark
& clarify and in communicate & apply, and as noted earlier this is the only repeated
element in the explicit articulations of MELT. This double-mention was seen to be an
essential emphasis that needed to be articulated explicitly in those facets often seen at
the beginning and end of engaged learning. However, when students think in ways that
are sophisticated for them, all facets are enacted continuously throughout the whole
process. Most noticeably this occurs with evaluate, where questions, information,
management and communication are always evaluated, or should be, and at times
analysis is inseparable from evaluative process. The pentagon formulation of MELT
also urges ‘when in doubt, return to the centre’ to embark & clarify ‘what is our
purpose?’ This acknowledges the recursive, messy aspects of sophisticated thinking
and the strong need for learner clarity, or more precisely, for learners to develop
clarity of purpose. However, Chap. 3 provides examples where educators use the
pentagon configuration and place one of the other five MELT facets in the centre,
and this matches their emphasis for sophisticated thinking.
The cognitive and affective are not separated in MELT in the way that they were
in Bloom’s taxonomies. Separating these two sides of the same facet can provide a
licence to prioritise one over the other. However, a challenge of modern education
is to ‘cover’ the essential knowledge and skills for contemporary life, but in a way
that provides at least enough motivation for students to acquire these, a challenge
that requires simultaneous cognitive and affective considerations. I suggest that the
above sections unpack some of the complexities of the processes in each story and
account, and as educators, one of our challenges is to understand the complexity
for students of affectively engaging in sophisticated learning. In all of the research
on MELT implementation to date, student need and employ all six facets in activ-
ities that require anything more than dialogic-reporductive learning, and that such
learning is always multifaceted needs further research. If the facets of MELT are not
explicitly facilitated, at appropriate times, then the risk is under-developed student
thinking being applied across the years of education. Therefore, another challenge is
to facilitate the development of all of the facets that students need, in consideration
of context, content knowledge and diversity of learners.
2.3 Student Experiences of MELT Facets and Autonomy 57

In Sect. 2.2, the more cognitive descriptions of MELT were co-presented with the
un-elaborated affective domain, for these dimensions of learning mutually reinforce
and co-exist. When designing any learning tasks (including assessment), educators
need to consider affect, so that motivational elements in learning tasks are integral to
curriculum and lesson design. But this does not mean the affective domain needs to be
assessed, and the MELT’s single-word affect descriptors are a type of warning: don’t
treat the affective domain in the same way as the cognitive domain. The affective
domain is crucial because it is salient to ethical, cultural and social considerations
for engaged teaching and learning.
As with all MELT terminology, the affective adjectives are context-sensitive, and
should readily be adapted by educators to fit that context. For example, curious may
be, at times, a word that is contrary to ethical and moral imperatives, and a word
like empathetic may be more appropriate in the context of solving people’s problems
or dealing with patients. Kevin may have been curious to see if silver fluoride was
effective, but hopefully his primary driver was empathy for people who had minimal
access to dental care. In applying the affective descriptor for communicate & apply––
constructive––it is important to pay heed to ethical and cultural issues. Some people
may feel that ‘constructive’ contains overtones of colonisation, echoing Rome’s
mission to ‘civilise’ the world. In being constructive, one should avoid foisting one’s
own solutions or morals onto others; the ECST considerations are designed to check
such impulses. If Kevin’s silver fluoride solution proved to be socially or culturally
inappropriate when he was in a village, he would need to heed this rather than
persuading people with a medicine-only orientation, while defending himself as
being constructive.

2.4 Conclusion: Engagement, Adaptability, Fluidity

and Ownership

My operational definition of engagement is ‘frequently socially interactive and

always minds-on’, and the six facets of MELT require engaged learners and engaged
teachers. The shared conceptualisation afforded by MELT can broaden the commu-
nity of people who are involved in using and discussing the models, making con-
versations richer: Librarians, casual staff, principals, museum directors, office staff,
assistant lecturers, professors, parents and caregivers can be enjoined in conversations
with teachers and students, whatever the years and focus of study.
However, a shared conceptualisation does not necessitate shared terminology, and
adaptations to MELT are in the spirit of the models’ broad parameters. Adaptation
from a general description to context-sensitive applications is vital. At times, one
context, such as a school or a university program, may require several different
MELT that express core ideas in different ways. The challenge, then, is to help
students realise that there is just one shared model at work, to help them make
the connections between the different models, and to see how to generalise their
58 2 What Will We Use?

own learning as a whole. All of this is part of building and internalising their own
personal models of learning, which will become a thinking routine that can guide
them across their education.
Chapter 3 contains diverse examples of the explicit use of MELT. These examples
demonstrate how different groups have taken the ideas presented here, adapted them
and used them to help students understand what is going on in their learning. This
level of fluidity is liberating and demanding. As MELT is not a generic model that
guarantees effective learning through an off-the-shelf solution, but rather requires
significant input to reformulate and re-articulate, it places demands on teachers. This
is why the examples in Chap. 3 are so helpful: there is no need to re-invent the wheel
if you can find and adapt from contexts close to yours. Educators making choices on
how to adapt MELT to fit specific contexts and what to emphasise have a liberty that
defers to their professional judgement. However, they cannot ignore that we all need
to be better informed about how to enable sophisticated, multifaceted thinking.

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included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by
statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from
the copyright holder.
Chapter 3
How Do We Arrange?

One of the most common questions is ‘how do others use the MELT?’ When turning to
the MELT, educators want more than a philosophy; they are looking for a framework
that can give tangible starting points for facilitating sophisticated learning. This
chapter provides examples of the ways that others have arranged MELT, to inspire
educators to adapt the MELT to diverse contexts. Inspiration is provided through the
diversity of contexts and approaches, rather than a narrow range of age- or content-
specific resources.
Specifically, in this chapter shows how educators have used their own adaptations
of the MELT to benefit student learning, with examples and links applicable to
early childhood, primary, secondary, technical education, undergraduate, course-
based master’s, and doctoral programmes. There are also examples that span across
disciplinary learning and transdisciplinary projects, and those that are aligned to
Direct Instruction or to discovery learning.
In terms of modelling the MELT facets, they maybe taught and learned in the
sequence presented in Chap. 2. However, in reality, sophisticated learning is fre-
quently non-sequential, messy and recursive. A linear, sequential approach can be
used early-on with students in highly prescriptive activities, and in contexts where
they have little experience: this is the case whether in primary, middle and secondary
school, undergraduate, Master’s and sometimes the early months of Ph.D. studies.
Once students can begin to make some decisions and display autonomy in their
learning, they will employ the facets non-sequentially.
The figures below are screenshots of resources available online that are presented
not to read in themselves, but to refer to the associated weblink.

© The Author(s) 2020 61

J. Willison, The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching,
SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2683-1_3
62 3 How Do We Arrange?

3.1 MELT Connecting

MELT is applicable to many contexts. However, modifications necessary for MELT to

work are needed for each context. Furthermore, how MELT should be implemented is
determined by the specific contextual conditions. Only those individuals facilitating
the learning have the requisite knowledge of the students, topics, desired learning
outcomes and broader environment to make suitable professional judgements. For
MELT to be effective, teacher engagement and autonomy are necessary.
To facilitate teacher engagement, experience and emerging evidence have demon-
strated that the single most helpful factor for the successful adaptation and use of
MELT is conversation. Through mature, inter-professional conversation, the MELT
is defrosted and animated with the warmth of human interaction. These conversations
may take place between colleagues, classroom teachers and coordinating academics,
tutors at university, school and home, principals, librarians, learning advisors, and
parents. Engagement, based around MELT, provides common ground and fosters
discussions, collegial debate, disagreement, and ways to proceed. The most impor-
tant conversations, however, are with and between students. A crucial pedagogical
question is, ‘when and to what extent should we make the MELT facets and the con-
tinuum of autonomy explicit so that students may metacognitively follow, improvise
and initiate?’

3.2 Many Models Across Educational Levels and Contexts

For ease of access, the following sections are arranged according to educational
levels. However, approaches used at one educational level maybe pertinent to other
contexts. It is advisable to consider scanning several examples.
The approaches used are for:
• Early childhood—five-year-olds: song, rhythm and movement
• Year/Grade 4/5: problem-based learning pentagon for teacher planning
• Year/Grade 6: interactive introduction to investigation framework for direct student
use in term-long projects, with issues chosen by students
• Year/Grade 7: interactive introduction to investigation framework for student direct
use in guided transdisciplinary projects
• Year/Grade 8: interactive introduction to project-based learning pentagon for direct
student use in an intensive three-week STEM project posed by an industry partner
• Year/Grade 9/10: interactive introduction to MELT for direct student use in three-
term projects with issues chosen by students
• Technical and Further Education
• First year of university: interactive introduction to RSD and use across two
consecutive terms; multiple assignments in terms of marking criteria and feedback
• Second year of university: Human Resource Management
• Honours year: Medical Science
3.2 Many Models Across Educational Levels and Contexts 63

• Master’s year 1: interactive introduction to RSD and use across two consecutive
assignments, in terms of marking criteria and feedback.
• Master’s year 2: student self-assessment using RSD in the early phase of the major
research project (one semester full-time)
• Doctoral studies: self and supervisor assessment of the proposal.

3.2.1 Early Childhood

Marsha Seebohm (a music specialist teacher at Elizabeth North Primary School in

Adelaide) developed an exemplary tool for facilitating MELT in an early childhood
education setting. In 2014, Marsha adapted MELT facets as lyrics to the tune of a
widely-known folk song, ‘She’ll be coming ‘round the mountain when she comes’
so that it would be suitable for five-year-olds (Fig. 3.1).
Examples of children singing Research Mountain, and the actions associated with
the song, performed by an adult audience are available on the MELT website. As
a teaching tool, it is in keeping with the tenets of active, embodied learning which
are so important in early childhood education contexts. Marsha developed the song
to provide young students with a sung and performed heuristic for inquiry learning.
She is exploring the song’s use by teachers in their regular classes.

Embark & clarify

Find & generate’

Evaluate & reflect

Organise & manage

Analyse & synthesise

Communicate & apply

Fig. 3.1 Research mountain, a song for 5 year olds. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/k-12-

education#early-childhood
64 3 How Do We Arrange?

In addition to this example based on a folk song, another ECE version of MELT
in action (based on a nursery rhyme) is on the website at www.melt.edu.au.
In this example, and some of the others below, there is no explicit mention of
autonomy. Autonomy in these examples is an aspect for teachers who apply profes-
sional judgement in considering ‘how much structure and guidance do these students
need?’ and whether to introduce ideas around autonomy or not.

3.2.2 Year 4/5 Primary

Year 4/5 teachers involved in a Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM)
initiative at a government Primary School transformed the MELT into a Problem
Solving Pentagon. The school had been introduced to an engineering design frame-
work, the terminology of which was used to inform the Problem Solving Pentagon.
The teachers used this for their own thinking about design in their lesson planning,
but not explicitly to facilitate student learning. However, the motivation to develop
the model was to facilitate student engagement in intentional learning in STEM
(Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2 Primary/elementary

school problem-solving
pentagon. www.adelaide.
edu.au/melt/k-12-education#
primary
3.2 Many Models Across Educational Levels and Contexts 65

3.2.3 Year 6 Primary School

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a curriculum that is run in many countries,

with separate but related primary years, middle years and diploma (senior years)
programmes. The Primary Years Programme (PYP) of the IB involves a major student
exhibition. This exhibition provides the opportunity for students in Year/Grade 6 to
engage in sustained project-based learning for a full term, and then present their
discoveries at a public presentation. Likewise, the Middle Years Programme (MYP)
personal project is a major piece of work spanning around three school terms. In the
exhibition and the personal project, students provide evidence of their ‘approaches
to learning’ (ATL), which comprises ten major elements that span PYP, MYP and
the Diploma Programme (Table 3.1).
MELT facets directly connect to the ATL, so I ran IB teacher professional develop-
ment sessions that focused on the use of the MELT pentagon as a way that students
and teachers could engage directly with ATL. Students in government and non-
government schools in three Australian states and New Zealand used MELT to plan
out the beginning of their exhibition (Year 6) or personal project (Year 9/10). There
was a demand for these sessions because schools identified the beginning phase of
research in the Exhibition and the Personal Project to be a conceptual challenge that
was, at times, daunting. Teacher Professional Development on MELT in the IB was
provided on school sites and in state associations. These MELT workshops were

Table 3.1 The international baccelaureate’s approaches to learning, mapped onto the MELT facets
(see www.wcpss.net/Page/15023)
Approaches To learning MELT facet
Collaboration skills Explicitly mentioned in embark & clarify, organise & manage,
analyse & synthesise, and communicate & apply
Communication skills Communicate & apply
Organisation Organise & manage
Reflection Evaluate & reflect
Information literacy The six facets of MELT are based on six Information Literacy
Standards []
Critical thinking The six facets, modified as appropriate, represent the breadth of
critical thinking
Media literacy The six facets, modified as appropriate, represent the breadth of
media literacy
Affective Each facet has an affective component that is integral
Creative thinking ‘Creative’ is positioned as an affective side to ‘analyse and
synthesise’
Transfer ‘Apply’ overlaps with this
66 3 How Do We Arrange?

Fig. 3.3 The Inquiry framework (IF), used directly with Year 6 students, so they can improve their
understanding of their learning and communicate their reflective thinking. https://www.adelaide.
edu.au/melt/k-12-education#primary

requested to better assist students to directly engage with, and become increasingly
aware of, their own approaches to learning and how to represent that learning in an
assessable ‘Process Journal’ (Fig. 3.3).

3.2.4 Year 8 Subject-Specific: A Case Study

High School specific resources are available at https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/k-

12-education#secondary
A specific set of resources for high school is called writE science (Writing and
Reading Integrated with Talking about Experiments) which integrates a MELT frame-
work developed for Year 8 Science and presents explicit ways of developing the
facets. WritE science has been used to inspire otherwise uninterested students to
3.2 Many Models Across Educational Levels and Contexts 67

engage in hands-on labs to foster literacy—reading and writing. In effect, the strat-
egy provides a platform where an individual student’s preferences and strengths
maybe used to address areas of weaker ability.
Specifically, writE science resources were developed and used across school
terms, where these worksheets were applied each week to model and scaffold the
skills that students need to gain so they can work towards carrying out an open-
ended inquiry. Initially, writE resources present prescribed interventions early in the
first term. These worksheets guide students through bounded, scaffolded, and then
open-ended activities. In the last three weeks of term, students engage in inquiry
projects.
Subsequently, a similar structure has been used at other levels, because the design
is adaptable and widely-valued. This application has supported learning for first year
university students, master’s students, and Year 2 primary students.
The following writeE worksheets illustrate how much detail, examples, help and
modelling students may need to learn to be able to observe (generate data), to reflect,
to analyse and to organise. The prescribed end of the autonomy continuum is as
enduringly important for student learning as the unbounded end. As indicated in
the resource below, it is valuable to provide examples of some of the scaffolding
processes from prescribed to open-ended, so that students will be able to improve
and work towards performing a skill.
The left-hand screen grabs are provided as images, not to be read, to give you an
overarching sense of the process used. The resources are available at https://www.
adelaide.edu.au/rsd/schooling/secondary/resources/.

writE 2 As a part of a set, this writE science

sheet, writE 2, Observation, provided
early in a school term, gives students a
highly predictable structured text that
makes student note-taking in the
‘structured overview’ much more
effective. The sheet has metacognitive
and learning management strategies
(e.g., tick boxes) built-in. It explicitly
nurtures all six facets in a prescribed
way, and focuses on observation skills
for generating data.
68 3 How Do We Arrange?

writE 2, Part 1 It may be easier for students to find

appropriate sources in a web search than to
find information in the writE texts. So writE
2, Part 1 requires students to find keywords,
the line numbers the words fall on, and the
supporting details.

Using that knowledge base, students draw

inferences through analysis of text and their
previous experience. For this exercise,
students’ observation skills are nurtured
writE 2, Part 2 through a structure which organises the
observation data they generate.

WritE science helps to differentiate the

curriculum by using a structure, and after
students demonstrate proficiency, say in
note-taking, they may leave out similar
sections.

The six facets are needed for the skills of

observation (writE 2, Part 2), inference,
hypothesising and posing researchable
questions in (relating to independent and
responding variables). Week after week,
these skills are introduced, each drawing on
the six MELT facets and increasing
autonomy.

Observational skills are facilitated in this writE lab with a focus on four senses. In
science labs, teachers often ask ambiguous questions, such as ‘what happens to the
popcorn when heated?’ The question is ambiguous because there is a big difference
between observations about ‘what happens to popcorn while it is being heated?’ and
‘what happens to popcorn after it has been heated?’ Requiring students to write down
observations of an initial state helps them generate a baseline from which to compare.
This process goes beyond mere observing; it is the generation of data. Following a
focus on observation skills, write Science sheets are used for students to infer, iden-
tify independent, responding and controlled variables, hypothesise and pose research-
able questions. These resources together develop student sophisticated thinking in
a science lab context towards a culminating lab experience; designing their own
experiment in writE Science 10.
3.2 Many Models Across Educational Levels and Contexts 69

writE 10
In an open-ended group project (writE 10),
students generated their own research
questions as a culmination of their saffolded
learning. This sheet was the last in the
sequence, built on science-specific skills, and
revisited all six facets time and again.

The format repeats, enabling the

differentiation mentioned above, while
autonomy increases over the term. The reading
to the left reiterates experimental design
considerations.

writE 10, Part 1

The well-structured text above
provides students with relevant
knowledge on processes which they
must use in writE 10, Part 1. Some
students still need to take notes, and
space is provided for this in the
structured overview to the left. Others
who have demonstrated proficiency
can move directly into addressing the
complexities of their experimental
design.

For students who demonstrated

writE 10, Part 3 competency early in the writE science
sheets, the MELT Pentagon in writE
10, Part 3 asks them questions that
related to each facet. The design
encourages students to reflect on their
own thinking.

Finally, a story or application of the

exercise provided a creative way for
students to synthesise their learning.

Perhaps the simplest way to see the embedded differentiation in writE is to

view the structure across a school term in resources 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 and 10 at
https://www.adelaide.edu.au/rsd/melt/k-12-education#secondary .
70 3 How Do We Arrange?

By revisiting writE science in different terms, participating students engage

with numerous ways of generating data. These methods of data generation require
them to employ a variety of techniques from descriptive observation to measure-
ment. By connection, students begin to understand that others’ information has also
been ‘generated’. For students, this inquiry raises valuable questions about the trust-
worthiness of others’ information, because they realise all information has a similar
epistemological status to their own data.
These ideas of connecting specific tasks and skills to MELT facets happened
throughout the term in writE. Later in the school term, students were given a task
that facilitated their application of the Year 8 biology skills to the design of their own
experiment. In contrast with the popcorn example, there was no procedure given for
data generation. Small groups of three students needed to devise their own question,
including independent and dependent variables (embark & clarify), determine their
own method of generating relevant data and apply it to the other four facets of
MELT. This scientific strategy remains steeped in the literacy strategy and both have
structural similarities of prescribed research to open-ended research. The aim is to
facilitate student movement from emulating to improvising to innovating.

3.2.5 Year 7–10 High School Transdisciplinary Projects

In this case, students were provided with workshops that introduced each school’s
version of MELT, often named the Investigation Framework, for Year 9 or 10. The
introduction required students to reveal the sophisticated thinking they used in a
highly interactive learning task run during the workshop. Based on their own ways
of explaining their thinking, the six facets were introduced and mapped onto their
own thinking, so that the students could connect with the wording (Fig. 3.4).
Another approach provides a MELT pentagon which explains the facets in a
rudimentary way. Then, students are invited to apply the six facets to a scenario,
such as a climactic scene in a widely-viewed movie like Apollo 13. Equipped with
this group practice of mapping MELT to skills used in the movie, students use the
MELT to plan for and reflect on what they will need to learn in order to complete
their sustained transdisciplinary projects.

3.2.6 Technical Education

In Technical and Further Education, the Innovative High Achieving Template for
Enhancing Maths was developed as a tool for enhancing learning and support-
ing numeracy skills (Fig. 3.5), with its consoling motto, ‘Keep calm, and carry a
pentagon’.
3.2 Many Models Across Educational Levels and Contexts 71

Fig. 3.4 Skills that students identify that they use to engage in inquiry mapped onto MELT facets.
Right column—student inventory of skills used during a learning activity in a workshop. Left column
skills are matched with the MELT facets on the left

Fig. 3.5 The innovative high achieving template for enhancing maths. https://www.adelaide.edu.
au/melt/conferences/short-papers-arranged-by-theme#keep-calm-and-carry-a-pentagon
72 3 How Do We Arrange?

3.2.7 Undergraduate

Many discipline-specific examples of MELT, especially in terms of assessment,

at the undergraduate level are found at: https://www.adelaide.edu.au/rsd/examples/
discipline/.
Much of the MELT evaluation studies have been conducted at the undergraduate
level. One major study spanned 29 courses in five universities [2] and found that in
the timeframe of a semester, explicit skill development makes a substantial difference
in student learning. However, it was also found that there was a risk that the thinking
skills developed may atrophy. A follow-up series of studies looked at the explicit use
of MELT across multiple semesters of a degree in Media [3, 4], Oral Health [5] and
Animal Science [6].
An example of MELT use across two semesters is in first year human biol-
ogy, using the Research Skill Development framework: https://www.adelaide.edu.
au/melt/university-learning#discipline
Some aspects of this use follow (Figs. 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8).
The rubric below is available in Word form www.adelaide.edu.au/rsd/examples/
discipline/#humanbiology as are dozens of discipline- and task-specific rubrics.
Comparing the rubric below with the one above, both use the six facets, but with cri-
teria specific to the task. The above rubric is for a bounded activity, and has two levels

Fig. 3.6 First year human biology diagnostic task: Early in the first semester, students were given
two sources (left) from which they were required to take hierarchically structured notes (right). These
notes were assessed according to the six facets as used in a task-specific marking rubric (Fig. 3.7).
3.2 Many Models Across Educational Levels and Contexts 73

Fig. 3.7 The rubric structure framed by the six MELT facets was used consistently for assessments
throughout two consecutive semesters. The rubric below is specific to a bounded investigation, and
Fig 3.9 is for an open-ended investigation, where the facet similarities allowing students to connect
the skill set they have been building throughout the year due to the consistent use of MELT facets
74 3 How Do We Arrange?

Fig. 3.8 Students engaged in an open-ended group project gather life data from tombstones to
address their own research question

delineating student autonomy. The rubric below is for an open-ended activity, and
so delineates learning autonomy into four levels, in the context of the competence
expected in first year biology (Fig. 3.9).
Outcomes of this style of use of the RSD have shown substantial benefits for
university students in a variety of disciplines and universities [2].
First Year Mechanical Engineering: Optimising Problem Solving Pentagon
In 2014, upper-level undergraduate mechanical engineering tutors (University of
Adelaide) found that their first year students were not enthusiastic about learning to
communicate in a course that focussed on graphic, written and spoken communica-
tion skills. These tutors, themselves second to fourth year undergraduate students,
took the broad MELT parameters and created the first pentagon version, for direct
use with the first year students they sought to support. Since that version of MELT,
many of the models are introduced in a pentagon configuration especially when the
explicit representation of students’ autonomy may detract from the learning priorities
(Fig. 3.10).
Further examples are similar in principle to the human biology rubric above, and
include second year, third year and honours learning activities. Many details relating
to these activities can be found on the RSD website www.rsd.edu.au.
Outcomes of the use of OPS have shown substantial benefits for First Year
Engineering students [7].
3.2 Many Models Across Educational Levels and Contexts 75

Fig. 3.9 MELT facets frame the assessment rubric for open-ended human biology field research
conducted in first year university

Fig. 3.10 The optimising

problem solving pentagon.
https://www.adelaide.edu.au/
melt/ua/media/24/ops_rev5-
1.pdf
76 3 How Do We Arrange?

Fig. 3.11 The work skill development (WSD) framework. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/monash.

edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/1719401/WorkSkillsDevt-2019.pdf.

3.2.8 Work Integrated Learning

The RSD framework, the first of the MELT has been used to assist in evaluating
learning that takes place in industry settings. However, since the terminology of
research may not resonate with most employers, Sue Bandaranaike from James Cook
University adapted the RSD to develop the Work Skill Development (WSD) frame-
work. Sue Bandaranaike envisioned that the WSD would be used with students and
their employers during co-ops, internships, and other work placements—collectively
called Work Integrated Learning. WSD use in employment contexts has led to a num-
ber of benefits for students, especially their capacity to articulate employability skills
[8] (Fig. 3.11).

3.2.9 Course-Based Master’s Degree Programmes

MELT has been used in assessment orientations, in ways similar to first year
biology examples. Numerous resources, such as examples, tools, descriptions and
peer-reviewed journal articles, are available on a master’s-specific subsite of the
MELT site https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt-1.dev.openshift.services.adelaide.edu.
au/melt/university-learning#masters-by-coursework.
3.2 Many Models Across Educational Levels and Contexts 77

3.2.10 Academic Research: Doctoral, Master’s and Early

Career Research (ECR)

The Researcher Skill Development framework comprising a learning autonomy

continuum delineated into seven levels, the RSD7, was formulated to bring in the
unequivocally capital ‘R’ research into the learning process. The RSD7 can be use-
ful for direct conversations with postgraduate doctoral degree (Ph.D.) students and
early career researchers who are thinking about their academic trajectory. It enables
conversations or personal reflections on what capacities and skills a researcher can
employ, which skills and level of autonomy they seek to develop for the future, and
ways to achieve skills and increased autonomy. A study showed substantial benefits
arising from the long-term use of the RSD, commencing in Year 1 human biology
and then through to the use of the RSD7 in a Ph.D. preparation year (called ‘Honours’
in Australia) for medical science [9] (Fig. 3.12).
Academic programmes based on sophisticated postgraduate research have also
employed MELT successfully. For example, the International Bridging programme
at the University of Adelaide asked each doctoral student and their supervisor to
assess the student’s research proposal using a six-level marking rubric based on the
RSD. An article explains the processes used, including the specific marking rubric
generated and outcomes on the process [10] (Fig. 3.12).

Fig. 3.12 The researcher skill development (RSD7) framework. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/

ua/media/48/rsd7_13nov_15_jm.pdf
78 3 How Do We Arrange?

Fig. 3.13 Monash university’s digital skill development framework. https://www.monash.edu/__

data/assets/pdf_file/0010/1652437/DSD-document.pdf

3.2.11 Interdisciplinary Studies and Digital Literacy

Two transdisciplinary contexts at the master’s level that use MELT-informed rubrics
include addiction studies and climate change [11]. MELT characteristics provided
advantages for facilitating fluid conversations across disciplinary boundaries.
Monash University adapted MELT to be used across disciplines in terms of Digital
Literacy, and produced the Digital Skills Development framework (Fig. 3.13).

3.3 Outside the MELT Parameters

MELT characteristics pertain to a broad range of teaching and learning contexts, from
early childhood to early career research. However, some contexts have requirements
that may fall outside of typical educational settings, but which can still benefit from
applying MELT characteristics. One example, provided by the University of Ade-
laide, consists of a MELT version that has been tailored towards the Peer Assisted
Study Scheme (PASS, developed at the University of Wollongong). PASS leaders
3.3 Outside the MELT Parameters 79

Fig. 3.14 The pillars in

evaluation (PIE). https://
www.adelaide.edu.au/melt/
ua/media/27/pie_poster_
2017.pdf

started with MELT, and adapted it to include new parameters which were better-suited
to their sessions than the existing ones. These were organised around supporting stu-
dents dropping in and seeking help for academic purposes and personal development.
One beautiful characteristic of their model, the Pillars in Evaluation (PIE), was the
facet ‘dynamism’, emphasising the centrality of fluidity (Fig. 3.14).

3.4 Conclusion: Commonality with Adaptability

Kevin, the graduate who recounted using Silver Fluoride in Cambodia experienced an
undergraduate degree that used various versions of MELT—including the Research
Skill Development framework and the Clinical Reflection Skills framework—in the
first four semesters of the Oral Health degree. In the final year of the degree, students
were required to engage in open-ended inquiry. Another graduate of the Oral Health
programme said about the development of their sophisticated thinking from the first
year that:
You have to research it, you don’t get fed stuff anymore. You have to go, research
it, sit down, analyse what’s important and what’s not. So yes, it slowly did lead up to
a better research in the third year. I think if we started researching in the third year,
we wouldn’t produce a high-quality piece of work at all (italics added) [5].
This graduate appreciated that, as a student, starting the process of developing
sophisticated thinking skills from first year enabled those skills to slowly build up
and resulted in better research in the final year because of that ongoing, explicit
80 3 How Do We Arrange?

development. Another graduate of the programme found this scaffolded, incremental,

developmental process:
… encourages all its graduates to have a mindset of research on focused learning, lifelong
learning and to know that study doesn’t stop at the end of the course… (italics added) [9].

The common framing of MELT adapted context-by-context and over time, enables
students to take the specifics of any given learning activity, assessment task and
individual course and begin to see the big picture by connecting all the parts that
may otherwise seem separate. They will perceive, for example, not separate activities,
assessments, courses or even separate facet development, but a multifaceted ‘mindset
of research’ or other such sophisticated thinking gems. In a similar vein, a student
engaging in the research-oriented fourth year of a Medical Science degree looked
back on the use of the MELT and found:
Since the beginning [of First Year], they have given us assignments based on this criteria.
You might not have liked the assignments, but because they have been consistently applying
this structure to all of our assignments, we have come to think that way for science… [9]

The MELT used as a thinking routine, became for the student a heuristic to think
scientifically.
As MELT expands across years of study, disciplines, and learning contexts, stu-
dents are increasingly likely to be exposed to more than one application of the model.
Two of the big advantages of repeat exposure are that (a) it improves student self-
assessment and peer assessment, where students become attuned to the standards
of the context, and (b) they become better able to work with increasing levels of
competency and autonomy in each context.

References

1. Einstein Bubble in Cartoon: Brown, P. (1993). Managing your time. Cambridge: Daniels
Publishing.
2. Willison, J. W. (2012). When academics integrate research skill development in the curriculum.
Higher Education Research & Development, 31(6), 905–919.
3. Wilmore, M., & Willison, J. (2016). Graduates’ attitudes to research skill development in
undergraduate media education. Asia Pacific Media Educator, 26(1), 113–128.
4. Ain, C. T., Sabir, F., & Willison, J. (2018). Research skills that men and women developed at
university and then used in workplaces. Studies in Higher Education, 1–13.
5. Willison, J., et al., (in press). Graduates’ affective transfer of research skills and evidence-based
practice from university to employment in clinics. BMC Journal of Medical Education.
6. Willison, J. W., Al Sarawi, S., Bottema, C., Hazel, S., Henderson, U., Karanicolas, S., Kempster,
S., et al. (2014). Outcomes and uptake of explicit research skill development across degree
programs.Sydney: The Office of Learning and Teaching. https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.
au/dspace/bitstream/2440/92390/3/hdl_92390.pdf.
7. Missingham, D., Shah, S., Sabir, F. & Willison, J. (2018). Developing and connecting engineer-
ing skills for researching and problem solving. Journal of University Teaching and Learning
Practice, 15(4).
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8. Bandaranaike, S., & Willison, J. (2015). Building capacity for work-readiness: Bridging the
cognitive and affective domains. Asia-Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education, 16(3), 223–
233.
9. Willison, J. & Buisman Pijlman, F. (2016). Ph.D. prepared: Research skill development across
the undergraduate years. International Journal of Researcher Development, 7(1), 63–83.
10. Velautham, L., & Picard, M. Y. (2009). Collaborating equals: Engaging faculties through
teaching-led research. Journal of Academic Language and Learning, 3(2), A130-A141.
11. Venning, J., & Buisman-Pijlman, F. (2013). Integrating assessment matrices in feedback
loops to promote research skill development in postgraduate research projects. Assessment
& Evaluation in Higher Education, 38(5), 567–579.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not
included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by
statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from
the copyright holder.
Chapter 4
What Do We Trust?

4.1 Gullible Consumers or Discerning Users?

In the Information Age, students, teachers and learning communities are at risk. The
question of what to trust is central throughout formal and informal education. From
stranger danger to fake news, from misleading websites to scam journals, questions
of trust are tangible. This partially accounts for the frequency of use of the term
‘critical thinking’ in education. Of course, it is not only students that are challenged
by fake information in the Information Age—educators also have to make sense of
competing educational perspectives, such as the debate about whether comparative
testing facilitates or hinders learning. Information that displays markers of credibility
cannot be taken at face value: there are many errors in peer-reviewed journal articles,
even in journals with tight quality controls [2].
Another, more buried, aspect of trust concerns the educational perspectives that
we hold to. Why is it that some educators lean towards modes of instruction that
are highly directed, some towards those that are open-ended, and others somewhere
in-between? This too is a question of trust in regard to pedagogies of choice, and
determines where we put our concerted efforts, what we can and will achieve as indi-
vidual teachers, as a whole school community or as a system. But why do some hold
a more objectivist rationale, while others are geared towards social constructivist
approaches to education? What we trust also determines the types of controversies
and arguments we enter into, as well as the resource allocations that affect our stu-
dents’ learning. Building on the core characteristics of MELT as depicted in Chap. 2,
and the diversity of its use as shown in Chap. 3, the purpose of this chapter is to
use the MELT for reframing the competition between different educational perspec-
tives and dealing with some trust issues. My aim is to show how each perspective may
complement the other through the MELT.

© The Author(s) 2020 83

J. Willison, The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching,
SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2683-1_4
84 4 What Do We Trust?

In the following section, I present a vignette about Tara, a Year 8 student who
engages with a canonical science experiment and declares ‘I told you science is stupid
‘cause you don’t know if you’re right.’ There are good reasons why Tara declares
science to be stupid, and something not to be trusted. This chapter applies the MELT
in order to help you ask, ‘what do I trust?’ It is a challenge to suspend judgement,
or at least to give licence to the possibility that educational perspectives other our
own may have some merit. We will use the facets of MELT to interpret Tara’s story
and consider two facets in detail that are crucial to the issue of trust: evaluate and
reflect and analyse and synthesise. We will then use this interpretation to broaden
our look across the educational landscape, and turn the question of this chapter to
‘why do we distrust other educational perspectives so much?’ with consideration for
the implications of what we trust and distrust.
The story is called Shrink. It describes a situation where I engaged with Tara and
her work partner Shannon as a Participant Observer [3] in another teacher’s class.

4.2 Shrink

By the time I sit behind Tara and Shannon on the experimental bench that runs along
the rear wall, Mrs Stuebalm is already asking the class a recollection question: ‘What
happens to a gas when we heat it?’
‘Expands,’ exclaims one of the boys.
Tara calls out, ‘Matures.’
I wonder to myself why Tara uses that word.
‘This afternoon we are doing another experiment, and I want you to predict what
will happen,’ says Mrs Stuebalm. ‘What do you think will happen if we heat a solid?’
‘Expand,’ says one of the boys near the front.
‘Yes. A very good word,’ commends Mrs Stuebalm.
The boy throws his chest out.
‘Metal burns and shrinks when you heat it,’ adds another boy
Mrs Stuebalm seems to avoid his statement, and immediately asks the students to
start writing their predictions in their exercise books.
Mrs Stuebalm refers to a diagram depicting a metal ring. The ring’s inside diameter
is slightly smaller than the outside diameter of an accompanying metal ball.
She explains, ‘What you’re trying to do is put the ball through the hoop. You need
to be careful, because you could burn yourself. Decide what to heat, the ball or the
ring. You have to push it through the ring.’
Tara collects the equipment and sits down next to Shannon at their lab bench.
They light the Bunsen, and start heating the ring. Soon, Tara lowers the ball through
the hole in the ring, and says, ‘We did it!’
She looks very satisfied at their success.
Suddenly, Mrs Stuebalm calls out, ‘OK everyone, pack your equipment away.
Write down the equipment and tell me what happened to your ball and ring.’
I return to Tara to ask her, ‘What was your prediction?’
4.2 Shrink 85

‘Metal would burn and shrink… and that’s what happened. It shrinks to let the
ball through.’
I’m caught by surprise, but Shannon rescues me.
‘No it doesn’t. It expands.’
‘No, the ring shrinks,’ retorts Tara.
‘It expands.’
‘It shrinks, because the ring becomes thinner and thinner, until the ball gets
through,’ explains Tara, getting extremely frustrated with Shannon’s thinking.
Shannon is also annoyed with Tara, and retaliates, ‘The hole has to get bigger to
let the ball through, so the metal must expand.’
Tara and Shannon call in Mrs Stuebalm, but the conversation goes round and
round in similar circles.
Returning to the front, Mrs Stuebalm asks the class, ‘What happens to the solid
when it’s heated?’
‘Expands,’ someone calls out.
Mrs Stuebalm nods confirmation.
Shannon whispers to Tara, ‘I told you.’
Tara sits quietly, looking annoyed. I return to her to try and understand her point,
and she continues her explanation: ‘I mean it shrinks outwards. Like, the metal inside
shrinks towards the outside.’
‘You’re saying the actual metal bit gets smaller?’ I probe.
Tara nods.
‘What actually happens is the metal expands and moves out,’ I explain.
‘I told you!’ triumphs Shannon again.
Tara grows even more frustrated, but presses on: ‘The outside expands to give the
inside room to shrink… see, I said science is stupid, ‘cause you don’t know if you’re
right.’

4.3 MELT Analysis of Shrink

In order to consider the question ‘what do we trust?’ I begin by unpacking Shrink

through the lens of MELT, considering each facet and focussing especially on eval-
uate & reflect and analyse & synthesise. Then, I use Shrink as a reflective surface
from which to gain perspective on three theories of education.
As with the earlier stories in this book, Shrink provides examples of students
employing all six facets of the MELT. The scenario in which Tara and Shannon find
themselves is a very prescribed and ostensibly simple lab task (see Fig. 4.1). The lab is
intended to demonstrate, unequivocally, the canonical idea that ‘metals expand when
you heat them’. The trouble is that Tara constructs a counter-intuitive interpretation
of the results, even though she makes the same observations as Shannon and others
in her class.
While this scene is set in a science context, the ramifications are relevant to the
ways in which students develop an understanding of core concepts in any subject or
discipline. Any student may guffaw, ‘I told you this subject is stupid. You don’t know
86 4 What Do We Trust?

Fig. 4.1 Two students heat a metal ring, so that its expansion allows a metal sphere to pass through
it

when you’re right’. And the issues for student learning are immense when educators
try and fail to help students gain fundamental understanding.
Tara was working hard conceptually to make sense of the practical, and even
though the classroom consensus was that ‘metals expand when you heat them’, Tara
would not be persuaded. When I interviewed her one month later about this incident
[3], it turned out that she had some good reasons to think metals shrink when heated.
She had previously watched her dad soldering, and noted that the soft soldering
metal ‘shrinks in’. Likewise, throw an empty aluminium can on the fire, she said,
and it shrinks. While both these observations are better explained by other concepts
(capillary action and chemical change, respectively), I could see that she was basing
her current observations on her past knowledge, and that she was striving to make
sense of the phenomena. Tara didn’t just acquiesce to the classroom consensus or
the curriculum; she was willing to challenge both based on what she perceived to be
relevent experiences.
In that willingness to challenge the prevailing classroom knowledge, she epit-
omised the sort of student we are striving to educate—not a gullible consumer of
facts, but a discerning user and generator of information. If we are concerned about
our students blindly accepting clickbait headlines and ‘fake news’ by default, we
also need to be concerned about how they deal with things that just don’t add up
for them in our curricula. Tara judged the classroom content, and her verdict was
‘science is stupid’. It turned out that she was partly right, in that the experiment,
used in science classrooms for a hundred years, is deeply flawed in its design. That
the equipment is constructed in such a way as to provide ambiguous data, making it
open to interpretation, has been known for some time [3].
4.3 MELT Analysis of Shrink 87

All the facets of MELT are present in this story and, as pointed out in Chap. 2,
this seems to be typical of even slighly complex learning activities. Even though
the location of the lesson on the continuum of learning autonomy was prescribed
in terms of aim, method and final answer, Tara demonstrated something unique in
terms of her learning autonomy when engaging with evaluate & reflect and analyse
& synthesise. Shrink involved a prescribed practical which was designed to con-
firm canonical knowledge. However, the complexities and potential sophistication
of student engagement with the practical are laid bare when scrutinising it from the
perspective of MELT’s six facets and autonomy.
Embark & clarify: in the context of the learning topic, the students knew they were
doing something concerned with heating solids. The teacher, Mrs Stuebalm, intended
for students to learn or confirm that metals expand when heated. Perhaps students
other than Tara left the class feeling that they had experienced, constructed and agreed
on a scientific ‘fact’ about metals. And in many ways, Mrs Stuebalm provided a
wonderful learning environment, managing the practical risks (naked flames, red-
hot metals) and allocating time for an experiment, despite the packed curriculum. As
such, the lesson was an ethical and moral endeavour which socialised students into
the conventions of science in a way that they could engage with.
However, there is an enduring question for education in this story: how clear was
the lesson’s purpose to the students? It is difficult for teachers to provide a sense of
purpose to students engaging in a series of learning activities across terms and years.
If students can’t see connections between different activities or develop a sense of
purpose, what are the implications for their learning?
Find & generate: the data generated in this practical came from visual observa-
tion—primarily, students observed that the ball didn’t fit before heating, but did
fit immediately after heating. All students ‘observed’ that the ring’s inside diameter
grew larger, and Tara and Shannon interpreted this observation in contradictory ways.
However, there were no measurements of the ring’s actual dimensions, partly due to
the dangers of measuring a red-hot ring and the difficulty of obtaining the equipment
needed for accurate measurements of the ring’s diameter.
Organise & manage: this practical was very quick to complete, and one where you
could imagine students having the time to think about its implications. However,
for the sake of presenting a succinct story earlier, I didn’t mention that the students
actually performed several heat-and-expand practicals back-to-back, including one
involving liquids, and that these practicals required time to set up, conduct, pack up,
clean up and write up. As in Parachute, students’ ability to develop deep concepts
was determined to some extent by their ability to organise & manage. This classroom
reflected a packed curriculum which, for some students, seemed to impede learning
for the sake of coverage.
Communicate & apply: the girls followed a prescribed practical structure to write up
their experiment: aim, equipment, results and conclusion. They were not required to
draw a diagram, even though a before-and-after diagram would have captured some
of the complexity of their thinking. The ongoing communication process was vital
88 4 What Do We Trust?

to Tara and Shannon’s ability to consolidate understandings, and here it was their
disagreement that sharpened what they understood to have occurred. Throughout
the practical, Tara applied her previous knowledge to the task, making observations
based on that knowledge. Her observations and inferences supported the application
of her personal theory that metal shrinks when heated.

4.3.1 What Did Tara Trust?

Evaluate and reflect: there was little class time to reflect, but as a participant observer
in the classroom [3], I had that rare opportunity to interview Tara and Shannonn after
the passion of the classroom evaporated. When reflecting on this practical one month
later, Tara still thought she was right, and that the classroom science didn’t make sense.
Her evaluation was quintessential of personal constructivist thinking, and it is rarely
so evident as in this account that a student is constructing and weighing up knowledge:
‘I said science is stupid’. It may be that the classroom knowledge with which she was
presented made her feel stupid, as it didn’t fit with her previous experience. Perhaps
it unsettled her that self-reflection and attempts to self-correct were of no help ‘cause
you don’t know if you’re right.’ There is a sense of frustration created by self-doubt.
Not only could she be wrong in science, but she would not know that she was wrong,
even when she spent time trying to unravel why she was wrong.
Analyse & synthesise: everyone, including Tara, inferred that the hole grew larger
because of the observation that the ball fell through the hole at the time the ring
was heated. However, Tara’s theory-laden observation (‘it shrinks inwards’) led her
to strengthen her theory that metals shrink when you heat them. Her classmates
considered her to be wrong, even though her analysis made sense in the context of
her prior knowledge and her observations. However, instead of being steered into
self-correction like the students in Place Value, Tara ended up in frustration that you
‘never know when you’re right’. This is partly because the practical was prescribed
in terms of content knowledge, understanding and procedure, with no room for any
understanding other than the science canon. Such an approach makes sense insofar
as we don’t really want students to develop a belief that metals shrink when heated.
However, Tara reacted against the correct answer because it conflicted too starkly
with the theory she had built for herself.
Tara’s analytical thinking was shown in her claim that ‘it shrinks outwards. Like,
the metal inside shrinks towards the outside.’
‘You’re saying the actual metal bit gets smaller?’ I probed, and Tara nodded.
‘The outside expands to give the inside room to shrink.’
Tara’s juggling of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ shows that she was considering the width
dimension. If one thinks of width, then since metals expand when heated, they would
expand in all directions, outwards and inwards. That would make the hole smaller.
Because the hole got larger, the opposite must be true: metals shrink to create a bigger
hole.
4.3 MELT Analysis of Shrink 89

Tara demonstrated ingenious, creative and discerning thinking here to craft her
inference based on her observations and prior knowledge. Too bad the class had to
pack up, debrief quickly and move onto the next topic. Imagine if the teacher had
asked the students to design another experiment to show their ideas, giving them the
chance to test some of these or at least think them through. What is a pity is that Tara
was thinking in terms of analysis & synthesis, but her teacher failed to reward these
cognitive skills. For a student engaging in analysis like Tara, science then becomes
a ‘belief-based subject’ in which she should follow the mandates of the teacher, and
that such emulation is the only satisfactory way of operating when learning in the
classroom. How do those of us with educational responsibilities balance the need to
teach students correct content knowledge with the fact that their analytical thinking
may sometimes lead them to conclusions which contradict the curriculum? This is
another form of the question ‘what do we trust?’, because what we prioritise indicates
what we trust and value.
Within the framework of Bloom’s Taxonomy, the knowledge that metals expand
when heated is fundamental to students developing an understanding of why metals,
liquids and gases expand when heated. This is connected to a fundamental theory of
matter (called ‘kinetic theory’) that is often taught in the first year of high school.
Without a fundamental understanding of this theory, it is impossible to apply it
correctly. Tara could have been guided to consider ‘What will happen if you heat
the metal ball?’ If she had made a prediction consistent with her existing ideas, she
would have said that the ball should pass through the ring, since it would shrink when
heated. And on observing that the ball did not pass through the ring, she would have
been challenged by the phenomena. However, there was insufficient time for this to
happen. In terms of the teacher picking up Tara’s fundamental error, Mrs Stuebalm
did hear Tara’s idea. But instead of engaging with her, she proceeded immediately
to the front of the room to facilitate a classroom conversation in which the only idea
discussed was that metals expand when heated.
Student evaluation, even though hierachically located at the top of Bloom’s old tax-
onomy [4], and second from the top in the new taxonomy [5], acctually is a frequent
and recurrent necessity of sophisticated thinking. Evaluation occurs almost always
when students are formulating knowledge by internally processing data, information,
details or facts. Some of the students in the class depicted in Shrink already had the
knowledge that metals expand when you heat them, while some may have barely
noticed what happened in the practical and just adhered to the teacher’s explanation.
There may have been some students who had never heard about thermal expansion,
but managed to observe the data and construct a phenomena-based knowledge that
metals expand when heated. Others may have arrived at the correct conclusion by
tuning into the class discourse, relying on the social context, including spoken and
written language. Shannon and I were working hard to help Tara comprehend our
knowledge, and were using a lot of language and pointing to do so, but Tara’s prior
knowledge and theories rendered our words senseless to her. She personally con-
structed and consolidated something that had to make sense to her and, fortunately,
she would not acquiesce, because acquiescence would show that she had given up
on sophisticated learning in science.
90 4 What Do We Trust?

Even in the very simple learning activity of Shrink, the empirical substance
of which took less than five minutes, learning was very complex and the think-
ing required to engage with the phenomena of metal and heat was sophisticated.
Section 4.5 shows how the multifaceted thinking in Shrink renders the perspective
of any individual learning theory incomplete, and not to be fully trusted to guide
the realities of learning and teaching. First, three major theoretical orientations to
teaching and learning are summarised and then used to provide perspective on Shrink.

4.4 Three Theoretical Orientations to Learning:

Objectivism, Social Constructivism and Personal
Constructivism

As in most areas of human endeavour, the field of education is characterised by fierce

debates about theory. Such debates are necessary: ideally, the theories which provide
the best explanation for phenomena become the most popular, allowing disciplines
to progress. In the sciences, the ‘fittest’ theory is the one which is best able to predict
phenomena in advance. The scientific enterprise can appear to be frustrated when
two long-lived theories, such as relativity and quantum mechanics, fail to connect or
to generate compatible predictions [6]. However, some scientists believe that such
incompatibility is not a concern, and that each theory is a useful tool of the mind that
makes powerful and useful predictions about phenomena that have stacked up over
time [7]. For others still, such a clash suggests that both theories may be inadequate,
and some deeper theory may be needed.
There are many ways to arrange theoretical orientations in education, and one
way of organising them is into objectivism, personal constructivism and social
constructivism, three enduringly relevant theoretical perspectives.
Objectivism
Objectivism has as its root a noun, ‘the object’ [8] which is pre-eminent and must be
studied rigorously so that scientists can slowly, progressively and communally reveal
an underlying objective reality. A basic tenet of objectivism is that communities of
researchers can be confident that, by utilising certain methodological standards, they
develop increasingly accurate knowledge about phenomena in the world [9]. A paral-
lel term is ‘positivism’. Some say that objectivism was the ‘default epistemology’ for
teaching in Western schools up until the 1980s because it was the only epistemology
available traditionally [10].
Objectivism is based on the paradigm that knowledge and truth exist outside the
mind of the individual. As such, knowledge and truth are ‘objective’ not subjective
[11]. A teacher or instructional developer who uses a design model based on objec-
tivist thinking analyses the conditions which bear on the instructional system (such as
content, the learner and the instructional setting). She uses the analysis to design and
prepare the learning environment so that it achieves the intended learning outcomes
[12]. Objectivism is typically tied to didactic modes of teaching and learning, like
rote learning. It is also tied in with behaviourism [11] and the type of cognitivism
4.4 Three Theoretical Orientations to Learning … 91

that employs a one-to-one correspondence between content and what is learned [13].
Direct Instruction and aspects of national assessment regimes are strongly influenced
by objectivism, as is much online learning design and, curiously, the implementa-
tion of ‘constructive alignment’ [14]. ‘Curious’, because the word ‘constructive’
was coupled with ‘alignment’ to connote a constructivist orientation [14]; however,
in use, the phrase often boils down to mean ‘curriculum that is well structured to
achieve its intentions’. The quote above about ‘default epistemology’ is close to the
mark; teachers who haven’t consciously thought through their own ‘epistemology’
or theory of learning will often work from the default setting of objectivism.
Personal Constructivism
Personal constructivism involves internal cognitive processes that build conceptual
understanding, based on the foundations of a student’s prior knowledge. Learning is
a dynamic process, and the way in which learning happens is mediated by internal
factors like language, culture and social context. Some personal constructivists see all
learning, including research, as a process of trying to ascertain and approximate the
nature of objective truth, while others believe that truth itself is internally constructed
and does not exist outside of a learner’s mind [10, 15, 16].
Social Constructivism
Social constructivism pertains to learning that is co-constructed through interpersonal
mechanisms, especially through forms of communication like language. While it is
conceivable that a social constructivist may believe in an objectively real world in
which we can construct a viable (but never true) understanding, most would hold that
the world only is ‘real’ insofar as individuals or groups of individuals understand it
to exist [17, 18].

4.5 Understanding the Three Theories Using the Example

of Shrink

Shrink is one example in which a teacher employs Direct Instruction using a pre-
scribed practical to engineer understanding of content. All three theories in 4.4 may
shed insight into this one practical. One probing question is ‘Why did Tara and
Shannon make the same observations, but produce such different explanations?’
Their analysis was based on different starting points, including their prior knowl-
edge and experience. In science, the dependence of observation on theory has been
discussed for a long time [19]; often, we see what we expect to see. However, in this
practical, the girls make the same observation that the ball goes through the ring, and
both reason that the hole, therefore, got bigger. Then Shannon says, ‘The hole has
to get bigger to let the ball through, so the metal must expand.’ Metallic expansion,
however, results in a greater volume and surface area of metal. This is the opposite of
most experiences with holes, where to expand a hole, we must take something away.
If you have a hole in a wall, and a picture plug is too big to go in, you get a bigger drill
bit and take away more of the wall. The analysis made by Shannon, Mrs Stuebalm,
92 4 What Do We Trust?

the rest of the class and me represented a consensus, but it was not in keeping with
our general knowledge of holes. That ‘metals must expand’ may have been for some
a recall of the science canon or just a commonly known ‘fact’. Others’ analyses may
have been deductive rather than inductive: ‘metals expand when you heat them. We
heated the metal ring, so the metal expanded to make the hole bigger.’ What type of
reasoning was this experiment, designed in the 1900’s, designed to elicit? [20, 21].

4.5.1 Objectivist Perspective on Shrink

From an objectivist perspective, Shannon appropriately apprehended the intended

lesson of Shrink, but it is not clear whether the experiment merely confirmed her
prior knowledge, or whether she learned something from it. The lesson featured a
very clear design pathway intended to lead students to the conclusion that metals
expand when heated, a concept that is experienced, talked about between partners,
written down in lab books, and discussed in a whole-class debrief. Like Shannon,
most students found it easy and efficient to follow the lesson’s designed logic.
Concrete and shallow understandings are often the forerunners of children’s capac-
ity to think abstractly. It is beneficial to have correct knowledge which concurs with the
experiences of the real world, and this provides students with confidence. When they
are able to remember facts efficiently, students find it easier to get into a ‘learning flow’.
Such a state of flow is hard to enter when students have to work things out from first
principles each time. Loading up the long-term memory with a host of relevant knowl-
edge and vital concepts is extremely expedient for learning, and this resonates with the
children’s willingness in Place Value to chant together, to rehearse knowledge in order
to develop stronger recall. Many students across formal education ask to be told what
to learn, so that they know ‘what to do’. Some treat this process as mere spoon-feeding,
but the desire and capacity to emulate are common in human evolutionary experience,
and frequently reflects the way human minds work when learning.
Moreover, certainty in what knowledge is needed is something that many students
desire and request. Students feel more confident and less afraid of learning when they
understand which knowledge they should prioritise. While learning, students don’t
know where they are going knowledge-wise, and therefore want an educative pres-
ence to guide them. Our online and virtual environments provide much opportunity
to test and correct student conceptions, such as Tara’s, and lead them into the canon
of each discipline.
From an objectivist perspective, a one-to-one correspondence between what is
taught and what is learned is the ideal, and this is most likely to happen if students
attend to the lesson and the teaching material is well structured, with minimal dis-
tracting elements. Students acquire a whole lot of ‘misconceptions’ through play and
discovery learning, and these conceptualisations tend to be resilient into adulthood.
Furthermore, child-determined play fails to address many concept-based aspects of
modern learning, and so time spent ‘learning through playing’ needs to be strongly
facilitated.
4.5 Understanding the Three Theories Using the Example of Shrink 93

4.5.2 Personal Constructivist perspective on Shrink

From a personal constructivist perspective, Shannon’s prior knowledge was in keep-

ing with the idea promulgated in class, and so her notion was conceptually rein-
forced, resonating with her understanding. Tara should have experienced a dissonance
between her prior knowledge and what happened with the ball and ring as designed by
the experiment. That she didn’t experience dissonance showed that her prior knowl-
edge was resilient, and that it became the lens through which she made observations.
Frequently, prior knowledge is not replaced by canonical knowledge, but students do
learn to give the correct answer at times, even if they do not understand or believe the
answer. For example, adults tend to maintain childhood conceptions of the phases of
the moon, even after correctly answering multiple-choice questionnaires on moon
phases when in school [22].
The metal expansion practical was unintentionally designed in a way that allowed
for alternative interpretations, depending on students’ starting knowledge and expe-
rience. Tara’s interpretation was sensible and viable, and it would have been edu-
cationally useful if she had been given opportunities to further test her concepts
using predictions about phenomena and data. Over time, she may have found inter-
nal inconsistencies in her understanding, especially if she had encountered dissonant
experiences, such as the ball failing to pass through the ring when the ball itself
was heated. In that case, she might have formulated new ideas in keeping with the
scientific concept that metals expand when heated. However, these would have been
based on her old ideas, which are often resilient [23] and may have ended up being
the ones she remembered in the long run.
Through its ambiguous design, this practical allowed Tara to reinforce her prior
concept. In the future, this practical should be redesigned so that it provides unam-
biguous data. For example, such a redesign could involve cutting the ring so that it
had a gap, which would lead to the hole shrinking when heated, as a result of metal
expansion of the ring’s width, where not only would the outside diameter increase,
but also the inside diameter would decrease [3].
Eliciting student prior knowledge that is in contrast to the canon can prove to
be counterproductive. Sometimes, the students are not consciously aware of their
understanding until they are asked to articulate their thinking. Once their under-
standing is brought to the surface of consciousness, students’ concepts may become
more resilient, or they may be defensive of their own ideas [24]. Even approaches
that pay careful attention to conceptual traps, misconceptions and blockages, such as
Threshold Concept-based design (see Chap. 5), may not overwrite past knowledge.
Research in the area of student development of misconceptions has shifted from per-
turbing students with ‘discrepant events’ [25] to encouraging students to place their
concepts and newly introduced concepts side-by-side and contrast them [20]. For
example, Mrs Stuebalm could ask Tara to predict what would happen to the metal
ball when it was heated. If the observation that the ball would not pass through the
ring perturbed Tara, but she still did not agree with Mrs Stuebalm’s concept, the
teacher could ask Tara to compare and contrast ‘expand’ and ‘shrink’.
94 4 What Do We Trust?

4.5.3 Social Constructivism on Shrink

From a social constructivist perspective, Tara had limited opportunities to construct

understandings together with other students, with the teacher or with the whole class.
If the social environment had been more clearly thought through, maybe Tara would
have come to share the consensus concept, or maybe she would have convinced others
of her idea in the short term. Tara showed evidence of previous social interaction—
sitting around a campfire with empty aluminium cans placed in it and watching
her father weld. This social interaction reinforced her idea that metals shrink when
heated. Only well-engineered social environments would have a chance of changing
this, and even if Tara were to be exposed to such an environment, there is no guarantee
that her new ideas would line up with the science canon. Definitely, there should be
more opportunity to deconstruct the experiment and find flaws in it, such as the
ambiguous observation data, where ‘hole gets bigger’ has two opposite, but viable,
possible inferences. A preference would be for Tara to design, in partnership with
other students, further follow-up experiences in which students made predictions
about metal and heating.
Some of the experiences inside the classroom reinforced Tara’s idea. When she
commented that gases ‘mature’ when heated, she was not corrected by the teacher.
However, as with Place Value, the lesson was designed to let students predict and
then maybe self-correct through observation, and so Mrs Stuebalm refrained from
correcting Tara’s early predictions. Therefore, the teacher subtly endorsed the rele-
vance of chemical change for student thinking about observations early in the class.
Moreover, another student made a prediction which may well have influenced Tara
later: ‘Metal burns and shrinks when you heat it’. It may be that this reinforced Tara’s
existing thinking or it brought back to mind her experiences with aluminium cans
around campfires, legitimating the idea that metals shrink.
Future classes would need much more time for negotiation of ideas, preferably
with small group presentations on the different major concepts, as well as time for a
class debate. If students were encouraged to prepare their points with diagrams and
evidence-based arguments, this would emphasise that learning and rational argument
are more important than repeating the ‘correct’ answer. And canonical ideas would
probably prevail if this environment were skilfully facilitated by the teacher.

4.5.4 All Three

The issue of whether each student trusts the teacher, their own rational thinking or the
social discourse is an important one. Objectivism, personal constructivism and social
constructivism each provide a different basis for teachers, parents, administrators and
researchers to understand, plan for and determine how to ‘measure’ learning. From
the MELT perspective, all three theoretical perspectives are pertinent and valid. All
three can inform the learning that takes place in classrooms [18]. As we saw earlier,
theoretical purity is not the default in the sciences, with competing paradigms such
as relativity theory and quantum mechanics enduring together.
4.5 Understanding the Three Theories Using the Example of Shrink 95

Instead of being used to direct educators into a narrowed perspective, these three
theoretical observations could collectively serve teachers and students to provide
understandings of a rich educational experience that is in keeping with the way that
learning has taken place over tens of thousands of years. To help make connections
between the different perspectives, the next section shows the theory underpinning
MELT, and how this theory enables MELT to connect multiple theories.

4.6 Theoretical Underpinning of MELT

Shrink and its analysis are now taken up to consider the theory that underpins MELT.
While Chap. 2 outlined the literature that informed MELT, the MELT comprise a con-
ceptual framework for learning and teaching, not a theory. A conceptual framework,
such as Bloom’s Taxonomy, provides a structure for thinking, and is not by default
theoretical. To a large extent, Bloom’s Taxonomy, the ANZIIL framework, and the
SOLO taxonomy are themselves descriptive. The MELT function at a level that is
explicitly connected to practice. However, there is theory underpinning MELT, and
aspects of epistemology and theory provide a fundamental understanding of the ways
that MELT may provide a conceptual glue between disparate paradigms, theories and
practices.
The MELT were designed to provide bridging points between different educa-
tional ideas, by addressing multiple theories, and this is enabled in practical terms
through the consideration of learning autonomy. The MELT always need to become
fluid through the warmth of conversation or the heat of the argument. In a similar
spirit, Dewey wrote
It is the business of an intelligent theory of education to ascertain the causes for the conflicts
that exist and then, instead of taking one side or the other, to indicate a plan of operations
proceeding from a level deeper and more inclusive than is represented by the practices and
ideas of the contending parties [26].

These conflicts, before the Second World War, were over similar issues to the
issues that are debated today, including the efficacy of inquiry-based learning versus
a focus on content acquisition and mastery [26]. In Dewey’s terms, no ‘intelligent
theory’ for education has emerged that has provided a ‘plan of operations’ that
includes different perspectives, although classroom teachers themselves frequently
take a practical orientation that is ‘inclusive’ in Dewey’s sense. The MELT provide a
plan of operations that is inclusive because it spans the gamut of approaches through
its elaboration of learning autonomy. This section shows how the MELT proceed
from a ‘level deeper’.
The MELT are theoretically underpinned by conceptual metaphor [27], which
allows for the development of an educational perspective from a deeper and more
inclusive level. The idea of conceptual metaphor is that for all but the most con-
crete representations, human conceptual structures resonate with metaphor. From
this perspective, ‘objectivism’ is based on a thing, the object, [6] being real, tangible,
96 4 What Do We Trust?

comprehensible, so ‘objective truth’ is where there is a correspondence between the

senses and an idea, between what is tangible and what is thought. Objectivism is a
complex philosophical position, and within the MELT, it is treated as an extrapolation
of a tangible ‘object’ to a conceptual metaphor [27]. This means that objectivism
is treated as a metaphorical perspective or ‘reference point’ from which to view
learning, not as the correct way to perceive learning.
Bestowing metaphor status elevates objectivism above being a theoretical per-
spective that may be proven wrong to an enduring and valuable way of providing
insight into engaged learning and teaching. This status also demotes objectivism
from being the theory that influences how learning should happen. The net result
of this elevation and demotion is to place objectivism on equal footing with con-
structivism. This equivalent status enables all three theories under discussion to pro-
vide valuable perspective on contemporary learning, in keeping with a continuum
of learning autonomy, which provides equivalent status to teacher-directed learning
and student-initiated learning.
Likewise, constructivism is based on the action ‘construct’—to build, or the noun
‘construct’—what is built. This ‘bricks and mortar’ idea is related to the internal hid-
den learning processes in which construction happens. With the different emphases
of each, personal constructivism focuses on internal sense-making, whereas social
constructivism emphasises the role of language and human interaction in mediating
what actually gets to that internal world.
From the formulation of the first MELT, objectivism, personal constructivism
and social constructivism were held in tension as helpful and mutually reinforcing
metaphors that provide insights into learning and teaching [21]. Rather than treating
them as theories that compete, they are more like points of reference [21], places
from which to stand and capture insights into educative processes.

4.6.1 Theory on Learner and Teacher Autonomy

Clashes between those with differing theoretical referents and metaphors occur when
there is a consideration of how much learning autonomy should be provided to spe-
cific groups of students. No one argues about whether students need to be or become
autonomous learners, but they do argue about when this should happen. Vygotsky’s
use of ‘zone’ in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) [17] connotes a metaphor-
ical region in space, an awareness of a breadth of possibilities. He did not articulate
a PPD, a ‘Point of Proximal Development’, a place where things are ‘just right’, or
a narrow band of performance. In the zone, the part that is closer to the learner is
higher in learning autonomy as it pertains to the capacity of the learner without sup-
port. Further from the learner (towards the outer edge of the zone) is a point beyond
her own capacity, but she can successfully demonstrate intended performance at this
outer border of competence with support from experienced others. That is, she will
demonstrate less learning autonomy at this point, and benefit from more guidance,
emulating others. With learning that is enabled by such support, a learner increases
4.6 Theoretical Underpinning of MELT 97

Table 4.1 Emphases for objectivism, personal constructivism and social constructivism in terms
of the continuum of learning autonomy. (The heavier the shading, the more emphasis)
Prescribed Bounded Scaffolded Open-ended Unbounded

Objectivism

Personal
constructivism

Social
constructivism

in her capacity to perform at a more rigorous, sophisticated level. Over time she
becomes able to self-direct and self-regulate her learning at this hightened level of
competance, improvising or even innovating, that is with higher learning autonomy
and with higher competence than before. However, when new concepts are encoun-
tered, new skills needed or higher levels of rigour are required, a movement back to
the outer edge of the zone, towards lower learning autonomy, with guidance from an
experienced peer of teacher, is often needed again, with its modelling and structure.
Thus, the ZPD suggests movement from lower to higher learning autonomy, from
lower levels at the further reaches of the zone to higher levels closer in to the learner’s
exisitng capacity. Further out, with modelling and guidance, each student learns how
to add sophistication and rigour to their learning, and then when the student applies
this learning by herself, she works with higher learning autonomy in the edge of the
zone that is proximal to the student’s capacity. For this reason, MELT implies the
need for movement from low learning autonomy to high, and back [28], like a tidal
zone in the complex ecosystem of learning.
From an objectivist perspective, learning autonomy should initially be low, pro-
viding structured learning environments in which students can acquire a content
knowledge base and practice the skills of the discipline. From a social constructivist
perspective, autonomy for students should primarily be high, allowing for student
ownership and collaborative action. From a personal constructivist position, students
are primarily engaging in internal sense-making that emphasises evaluation, reflec-
tion, analysis and synthesis. These facets span from the highly prescribed to the
unbounded, with a concentration of effort that is at the scaffolded level, as shown
visually in Table 4.1.

4.6.2 Autonomy and Metaphor Together

From the MELT perspective, objectivism, personal constructivism and social con-
structivism don’t need to be competing theoretical perspectives but can be treated
as metaphors that mutually support each other. Each brings to the educational table
98 4 What Do We Trust?

its own set of strengths. An objectivist perspective will emphasise the development
of students’ knowledge bases and cognitive skill sets, in keeping with prescribed
and bounded learning autonomy. Objectivists, of course, can and do provide more
open-ended tasks, but this is typically once the student is demonstrably ready with
the required knowledge and skills.
Those who are more closely aligned with personal constructivism will engineer
learning environments that enable students to overcome or skirt misconceptions and
to develop robust understanding. There may be some rote learning and more open
investigation, but there will be much scaffolded learning. Social constructivists will
maximise motivation, social interaction and student ownership of learning, treating
students more as if they are in a learning partnership with teachers, allowing, as often
as possible, for open-ended and unbounded learning autonomy.
Treating each theoretical perspective as a metaphor that connects to parts of the
continuum of learning autonomy may facilitate a more complementary approach to
education than currently exists, as each perspective then merely emphasises a dif-
ferent place on the continuum. Objectivists know that learning the facts and details
of a discipline through discovery modes is inefficient, and that it is easy for stu-
dents to develop misconceptions, and so become frustrated and anxious. Personal
constructivists know that didactic teaching and rote learning do not prompt deep
understanding, that misconceptions developed while learning are substantial and
long-lived, and that frequently there must be structure to learning. And social con-
structivists see that unless students own their learning and engage in social processes,
their motivation to engage and capacity to learn will be diminished. MELT’s contin-
uum of learning autonomy calls for each perspective to speak to and complement
the others, to provide for each student the full experiences of the entire continuum
and a shuttling back and forth across it as they traverse the years of education.

4.7 Trusting the MELT?

One aspect of research that we have found so far is that educational gains made over
the timeframe of a semester using MELT can be subsequently lost: skills tend to
atrophy unless they are explicitly reinforced after they are learned [29]. Facilitating
learning is a long-term business, where students’ motivation is crucial to what they
attend to long-term. Empirically, MELT requires significant timeframes and repeated
exposure. Because engagement is a long-term process, MELT must be tested over
educationally significant timeframes—a minimum of a term or semester. Neurolog-
ically, long-term memory consolidation is thought to take place over years, not days
or even terms [30].
Of the many MELT, only three have undergone some long-term evaluation—the
RSD [31–33], OPS [34] and the WSD [35, 36]. Conceptual frameworks cannot be
effectively evaluated through any one trial because ways of interpreting and imple-
menting a conceptual framework vary markedly. What is needed are sustained use
by practitioners and substantial, diverse and numerous evaluations in many contexts.
4.7 Trusting the MELT? 99

Chap. 5 strongly endorses educator action research (AR) as a powerful, context-

sensitive means of evaluating MELT, especially if the idiosyncratic aspects inherent
in AR can be connected together in a common reporting strategy framed by MELT.
In addition to AR, other research methodologies that probe MELT use are needed:
• Fine-grained participant observation studies.
• Studies of change in student performance over educationally significant time-
frames (a minimum of one term, but generally multiple terms or semesters). Gen-
erally, multiple measures with qualitative and quantitative data triangulation are
needed.
• Longitudinal studies that follow cohorts.
• Randomised controlled trials, if ethics and practicalities allow a true randomisation
of student and teacher.
Further ideas and support for research into MELT are available on the website
[37, 38]. The simple way to proceed to build the knowledge base for all educators is
to start with one cycle of action research, with the intention to use MELT to enhance
student sophisticated thinking.

4.8 Conclusion: Conversations and Arguments

Although in education we tend to prioritise our theoretical perspectives, education

theory has not overwhelmed practice in the same way that, for example, physics
practice is dictated by theory. We do need, however, to keep our educational convic-
tions, because the care and drive to teach is one of the beauties of human existence.
But conviction does not have to entail self-aggrandisement, the belief that ‘I am
right’ and ‘others with different opinions are wrong’. Nietzsche said, ‘Conviction is
a more dangerous enemy of truth than lies’. A rephrasing may capture the heart of
this chapter on ‘what do we trust?’—‘Conviction that I am right is a more dangerous
enemy of truth than lies.’ Is your conviction about the value of a specific way of edu-
cating students? Keep your educational convictions, and act on them consistently.
But be a little tentative about how right you may be and how wrong others may be in
the light of the complexities of human learning. This requires us to consider what we
trust and why, and to hold a little more tentatively our own theoretical or practical
philosophies.
The MELT foster argument, but not necessarily in order to bring people to a
shared viewpoint. That would be an unrealistic goal, given the range of beliefs,
values, ontologies and epistemological perspectives that exist even within any one
school system. So MELT are not about ‘pulling together’ in the same direction, so
much as helping people commit to their best teaching while considering expanding
along the continuum of learning autonomy, to provide each student with a little
more shuttling, and connecting a bit more to others’ teaching. The sheer volume of
disparate teaching efforts is a huge untapped resource in education. Disparate efforts
100 4 What Do We Trust?

can nullify each other, but they can also co-exist and conceptually connect through
a consideration of the MELT’s continuum of learner autonomy elaborating as they
do the facets of sophisticated thinking.

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Chapter 5
What Does It Mean?

This chapter focuses on what the MELT mean for education theory and practice. A
number of contemporary learning theories (in addition to those discussed in Chap. 4)
sit comfortably on the learning autonomy continuum of MELT. Some of these sit at
the prescribed end, some at the unbounded end and others in the middle. What this
means is that the MELT can function as a kind of conceptual glue that holds these
often-competing theories in tension: by placing them on the same page, the intention
is to open up the conversations between people who hold to each one. Then, based
on this complementary view of educational theories, the second half of the chapter
considers what MELT means for enhancing learning and improving curricula and
pedagogy through teacher action research. This addresses one of the major issues
identified in Chap. 1: how to use MELT to engage with educational theory in ways
that make practical sense to educators.

5.1 Situating Contemporary Learning Theories/Ideas

This chapter focuses on four educational conceptualisations that have influenced

teaching practice in recent years. These conceptualisations entail competing perspec-
tives on teaching and learning and were chosen from a range of possible contenders
because they sit fairly well on one end of the learning autonomy spectrum or the other
and so provide a kind of ‘argument from extremes’ perspective. However, there are
still substantial differences between those conceptualisations at the same end of that
spectrum. These four conceptualisations are Meyer and Land’s Threshold Concepts
[2], Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory [3], Siemens’ Connectivism [4] and Schön’s
reflective practitioner [5]. These three theories and Schön’s conceptualisation have
influenced education at various levels, from the national curriculum level, to the level
of teacher decisions on a minute-by-minute basis. Because of their history and poten-
tial future influence on practice, seeing how these theories and ideas may connect
together from the perspective of MELT is vital.
© The Author(s) 2020 103
J. Willison, The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching,
SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2683-1_5
104 5 What Does It Mean?

5.1.1 Threshold Concepts [2]

Threshold Concepts (TCs) are the pivotal learning concepts in each subject or dis-
cipline. Within Meyer & Land’s theory, these concepts are difficult for students to
grasp, making it hard for learners to ‘enter through’ into discipline-specific ways of
seeing the world. For example, in physics, the fundamental concept of inertia (that
objects keep moving at their current speed unless a force slows them down or speeds
them up) seems counter-intuitive to many. Without understanding the concept of iner-
tia, it is impossible to comprehend Newtonian physics, even if students master the
equations associated with motion. TCs are usually difficult or troublesome for learn-
ers, and pedagogical structuring is frequently required to enable students to cross the
threshold of understanding. The learning involved in crossing this threshold may be
frustrating and frightening, and the concept to be learned can seem alien or wrong.
In the case of Tara in Shrink, the correct explanation of phenomena was opposed to
her own interpretation, and so she deemed it ‘stupid’. Sometimes, threshold concepts
are very difficult to understand in ways that can be operationalised, as in the case of
‘controlled variables’ in Parachute. Sometimes they involve arbitrary conventions
represented in absolute ways, such as the left-hand numeral in a two-digit number
being worth ten times its face value (as in Place Value). Once a TC is crossed over,
the concept often seems ‘obvious’ to the learner, after which it is easy to forget the
struggles that such learning requires.
As ‘thresholds’, such concepts are considered non-optional entry points into learn-
ing. Without a fundamental understanding of these concepts, subsequent learning
will be superficial and may eventually collapse. In Shrink, the idea that metals shrink
when heated would ultimately dismay Tara if, for example, she built a brick cooking
place with a metal plate measured to fit snugly between the bricks. She ‘knows’ that
the metal plate will ‘shrink when heated’, leading her to believe that there is plenty
of room for the plate. However, in reality, the plate will expand, buckling or breaking
the brickwork. If Tara were to become a designer working with metals—a jeweller
or architect, for example—her misconceptions could have dangerous and expensive
consequences.
Threshold concepts are by definition conceptually demanding, and this demand-
ingness needs to be interpreted according to the age and experience of the learners.
For example, an MBA student who has twenty years’ industry experience may find
it easy to grasp the concept of ‘distributed leadership’, while MBA students with
no professional experience are likely to find the concept much more difficult. Con-
versely, people with twenty years’ experience of top-down leadership may find the
concept of distributed leadership an even more difficult threshold to cross. In this
latter case, where a TC is counter to a person’s experience, educators may need to
plan for the student to ‘unlearn’ an old idea before learning a new one. If there is
one thing that is clear from the literature, it is that prior understandings are resilient
and difficult to displace [6]. Awareness of TCs helps educators to consider students’
existing preconceptions; as such, educators will be less likely to allow students to
stumble around with incorrect ideas.
5.1 Situating Contemporary Learning Theories/Ideas 105

TCs help to explain why students need more than an internet connection if they
are to become adept at a particular discipline. Accessing information can lead to
a bewildering array of relevant or irrelevant knowledge. Without grasping funda-
mental threshold concepts, students risk building incorrect models. Threshold con-
cepts require knowledge that is frequently best attained through repeated exposure,
experience and educative guidance from an experienced hand.
In terms of MELT, the educative guidance required to cross over thresholds (from
a TC perspective) falls within the prescribed and bounded scope provided by edu-
cators. Here, modelling of and guidance into content and concepts are a part of the
educational experience that students may need before they are ready for self-initiated
discovery. Merely ‘telling’ a student about a threshold concept does not guarantee
that they will internalise it. True understanding of a TC requires more than hard
thinking; it may require every facet of MELT, including the application of current
ideas and observation of where these fall short. Most commonly, this happens in an
environment of low student autonomy, where teachers provide students with a highly
prescribed learning environment and the students emulate. This can be a good way
to help many students move across a threshold, because the teacher will be aware
of conceptual sticking points. However, if a lesson pertains to a threshold concept
that some have already grasped and others have not, there can be frustration. If the
teacher assumes the TC as background knowledge, those who have failed to cross
the threshold will feel left behind. Conversely, if the teacher approaches the TC as
something that all need to learn, those who have already ‘crossed the threshold’ will
feel bored. In such cases, it can be necessary to provide students who understand the
TC with more scope for their learning autonomy.
Once attained, TCs allow students to operate in a whole new way and, in terms of
the MELT, the attained concepts enable students to operate with higher autonomy,
more ownership and empowerment, until the next TC is encountered. MELT’s per-
spective on autonomy, as unpacked in Chap. 2, suggests a shuttling back and forth
between low and high student autonomy. Shuttling back to lower learning autonomy
(where teachers prescribe and/or students emulate) shows a recognition of the need
for students to be guided through new TCs.

5.1.2 Cognitive Load Theory [3]

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) considers the complexities of students retaining,

processing and applying information in sophisticated ways. CLT builds on the fairly
stable idea that human brains dedicate a lot of storage to long-term memory (LTM),
but that there is also ‘working memory’ (WM) which has very short-term retention
of new information and limited storage. WM is a key place where new information is
processed, as well as connected and applied to information stored in LTM. Currently,
it is thought that humans only deal with around three chunks of new information
simultaneously, but that they can also draw simultaneously on their almost unlimited
LTM. People learn new information using their senses, and in educational contexts,
106 5 What Does It Mean?

visual and aural inputs predominate. CLT theorists talk about the ‘visual scratchpad’,
which has a memory of half a second, and an ‘auditory loop’ which can retain
information for up to thirty seconds. If this information is held temporarily in the
WM, it can be juggled conceptually.
There are several instances in Place Value where the cognitive load is associated
with conflicting concepts of value accorded to left–right positions of numbers. This
was in evidence when the teacher asked, ‘is there any other number in the wrong
place?’ At first, the whole class called out ‘no’. There were multiple loads on their
working memory, and together, these may have been partly responsible for the group’s
unanimous incorrect answer. Some of the cognitive load at that point relates to the
question asked early in the lesson: ‘Is place value on your right or on your left?’
Within a two-digit number, the digit of higher value is on the left (e.g. in ‘44’, the
left-hand four is worth forty and the right-hand four is just worth four.). However, in
another mathematics convention, numbers of a higher value are placed on the right
in a sequence (e.g. 9, 14, 27). This right–left difference for these two conventions is
hard enough to grasp when students are learning about double-digit place value for
the first time, but much more so when some of these six-year-old students may not
be clear about which side is left. In Place Value, this set of inherent complications is
magnified: students on the italitali mat viewed the number sequence back-to-front—
it decreased from left to right because it was sequenced from the perspective of the
eight students that were facing them. To students on the mat, it appeared as ‘57,
41, 29, 20, 17, 11, 9, 5’. With this extra extraneous load on each student’s WM,
the processing time required for the analysis became longer, increasing the risk of
inaccuracy, confusion and a feeling of dissonance, all of which may provoke early
maths anxiety. In effect, the ‘grammar’ of mathematics, like any language, is complex
and often has internal inconsistencies which can overload WM. Not until students
internalise this grammar can the load on WM be lessened when students are dealing
with two-digit numbers and be more able to, say, add together two-digit numbers.
We can only process small amounts of new information at a time. These small
chunks of information build-up and eventually become part of our personal knowl-
edge base. For short-term memory to be consolidated into LTM requires time,
rehearsal and the application of information.
From a CLT perspective, the problem with providing students with higher levels
of autonomy is that their STM can become overloaded with new bits of information.
Like threshold concepts, CLT provides a rationale for laying down the foundations of
a knowledge base, with minimal distracting elements, and slowly building up oppor-
tunities to apply that knowledge. From the perspective of these theories, teachers
should not consider allowing students to initiate until students have demonstrated a
mastery of the appropriate content. Shelly struggled in Parachute because she did
not have the necessary basic concepts in place, such as the formula to calculate the
area of a square. Kevin’s success in Silver Fluoride is based on the fundamental
knowledge and skill base that he developed during his degree, and which therefore
prepared him to initiate sophisticated learning.
CLT and TCs are contemporary learning theories/ideas that provide an impetus
for learning to be engineered, prioritising the lower end of the learning autonomy
5.1 Situating Contemporary Learning Theories/Ideas 107

continuum, where teachers prescribe and students emulate. But another current and
influential theory sits at the opposite end of the continuum of learner autonomy:
connectivism.

5.1.3 Connectivism [4]

Connectivism focuses on knowledge being distributed in networks and doesn’t dif-

ferentiate information from knowledge and learning. Siemens positions ‘knowledge’
as a construct that can exist externally to a learner. Information and knowledge can
be stored, for example, in papyrus scrolls and hand-copied books. Information and
communications technology (ICT) merely speeds up the sharing of information, as
did the move from hand-copied books to the printing press. However, modern ICT
is qualitatively different from those technologies in that it also enables the consumer
to be a producer, and to dynamically engage with and change the knowledge rep-
resentation. This can involve commenting on, modifying or creating from scratch,
uploading a video, or compiling mash-ups.
For Siemens, the goal is to put knowledge into action at the point of application.
Where the student lacks that knowledge, he or she draws on ‘the ability to plug into
sources to meet the requirements…’ (p. 2). When knowledge is not the Bloom’s
Taxonomy-like foundation for learning, but rather the learner’s purpose is, control
shifts from a knowledge-giving teacher towards the learner. For connectivism, then,
knowledge is not a fundamental basis for learning. Rather, knowledge is an enabler,
a part of the learning process, not the beginning of it. Importantly, knowledge is, in
effect, injected when needed in the learning process, and this resonates with non-
sequential, multifaceted learning. For example, if a student is exploring how to code
a robot so that it is able to walk up a ramp, the student may go online, or visit other
knowledgeable students in the class to get that information at the time the student
perceives she needs it. This could be contrasted with the teacher providing all class
members with the information that he thinks necessary about uphill coding, at the
time he thinks it needed. For MELT facets, connectivism elucidates that ‘clarify…
the knowledge required’ does not necessarily come first. It may be well into an
investigative process before further knowledge needed is factored in by the learner
themselves.
According to Siemens, the acceleration of knowledge production means that cur-
rent knowledge becomes quickly outdated. This short life expectancy of knowledge
currency means that learning ‘can now be off-loaded to, or supported by, technology’,
contrary to theories like CLT and TC, which focus on students’ cognitive processes.
‘Know-how and know-what are being supplemented with know-where (the under-
standing of where to find knowledge needed)’ (p. 2). From the MELT perspective,
finding others’ information requires all six facets, especially clarification of what
is sought, methodologies to find and the interrogation of sources and their content.
Siemens further probes the times when knowledge is not the starting point for learn-
ing: ‘How do learning theories address moments where performance is needed in
108 5 What Does It Mean?

the absence of complete understanding?’ (p. 5). In contemporary, interconnected

learning, there is certainly a case for high levels of autonomy and prioritisation of
just-in-time searches to get the job done, and this is true for professionals as well as
students.
Connectivism emphasises interconnectedness among students, as well as between
students and educators: ‘We can no longer personally experience and acquire learn-
ing that we need to act. We derive our competence from forming connections of
each other’ (p. 2). Students connect to each other in a way that is analogous to
the connection between partners in a business. The bigger the business, the less
each partner knows about the whole enterprise, and the more specialised individual
knowledge becomes. The company’s knowledge resides in the interconnectedness,
in the networks between different employees, as well as between employees and
knowledge-containing devices. At face value, for MELT, this interconnectedness
enables foregrounding the self-determination of what to know, how to know it, and
therefore of higher student autonomy. However, given the nuances of autonomy,
such enabling really depends on the nature of the relationships, and if there are any
educative relationships.

5.1.4 Schön’s Reflective Practitioner [5]

Schön’s reflective practitioner (RP) is an individual who has powerful internal

resources at hand. Such an individual has the capacity to reflect on the action and
teach themselves as they go. In some ways, the RP concept is the opposite of connec-
tivism, in that the RP’s knowledge is not distributed and networked, but localised.
In other ways, RP and connectivism are complementary, as they both defer towards
higher learner autonomy (improvise and innovate). Within both perspectives, student
ownership of the learning is paramount.
Schön’s two big self-teaching tools are reflection-in-action and reflection-on-
action. Reflection-in-action occurs when a professional faces indeterminate deci-
sions, that is, ones in which the correct choice is not obvious. According to Schön,
practitioners make off-the-cuff decisions using a detailed and nuanced ‘know-how’.
Whereas some may write off this idea as a ‘gut-feeling’, Schön considers such
decisions to reflect an underlying expertise and experience. Like practitioners, stu-
dents can learn to take what they know and act. However, Schön’s second reflective
component is a vital component of this process.
The second component of Schön’s model loosely corresponds to the standard view
of reflection: reflection-on-action. This type of reflection is carried out after the effect,
sometimes spontaneously (in musing or conversation) and other times systematically
(in diarising or recording). Reflection-in-action can be done with specific frames of
reference in mind, such as conceptual frameworks or theoretical positions (like CLT
or connectivism) . The ‘reflective surface’ one uses for reflection determines the char-
acter of those reflections. For Schön however, the emphasis of reflection-on-action is
5.1 Situating Contemporary Learning Theories/Ideas 109

the process of looking back at the indeterminate decisions made through reflection-
in-action, and teaching oneself. Therefore, knowledge external to the learner and
others’ theories are secondary to internal decision-making, which provides a pow-
erful impetus to learn. Together, reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action make
Schön’s Reflective Practitioner a strong learner, able to improve and exercise high
levels of autonomy.
At the same time, not only do each of the theories sit on the continuum of learning
autonomy, but also in their various foci, each requires all six MELT facets. For
example, given MELT’s ancestry of Information Literacy standards, with their focus
on ‘information-seeking behaviour’, the know-where of connectivism requires all six
facets of MELT. As stated earlier, know-where is ‘the understanding of where to find
knowledge needed’, and in many ways it is a form of ‘know-how’. One reason for this
is that ‘where’ is not merely the location of a source, but the level of relevance and
trustworthiness possessed by that source. Likewise, ‘know-where’ cannot connote
something effective for learning if it were to merely ‘relocate’ knowledge from
one position to another. In addition, there must be analysis and synthesis that are
dependent on effective organisation and that are enabled by, and lead to, effective
communication. Across all these MELT facets, the students increasingly need to
clarify their purpose, especially if the beginning is vague due to a lack of clarity
from teacher instructions or due to the student’s own lack of specificity. As noted in
Chap. 2, in the flood of irrelevant information, clarity is power [7]. Einstein makes
the same point on the Chap. 3 title page: ‘Out of clutter bring simplicity’ [8]. To
paraphrase and synthesise both quotes ‘powerful thinking results from learning how
to clarify the clutter’ and this requires all six facets of the MELT. Thus, the MELT
perspective about sophisticated thinking is not so much ‘higher order thinking’ in
keeping with Bloom’s taxonomy, but multifaceted thinking.

5.1.5 Corporately Destructive or Mutually Informative?

The four contemporary learning theories/concepts described above are current and
appealing. However, when we compare them to each other, we find apparent ten-
sions between them in terms of what teachers ought to emphasise. These tensions
may be relieved by placing each of the theories/concepts along MELT’s continuum
of student autonomy. Doing this provides an understanding which propels shuttling
back and forth along the continuum. There are various challenges to each of the four
perspectives above, especially from each other. While two are especially information
and knowledge focused, one of these––Cognitive Load Theory––posits that learning
occurs in an individual’s brain, while the other—Connectivism––defines learning as
something distributed outside any one’s brain. The other two perspectives empha-
sise deep understanding, and where Threshold Concepts prioritise the inculcation
of foundational concepts by teachers, the Reflective Practitioner employs and val-
ues learners’ existing resources and intuitions. Conceptualisations that have overlap,
then, occupy ‘competitive spaces’, and so, in effect entice adherents to warn about the
110 5 What Does It Mean?

perceived dangers or deficits of neighbouring competitors. For example, one article

focused on the new learning taking place due to learning technologies is titled ‘A
Pedagogical Paradigm Shift from Vygotskyian Social Constructivism to … Siemens’
Digital Connectivism [6]. This ‘shift’, demanding a conceptual migration, shows
that the notion of ‘academic tribes’ [9] is alive and promotes competition fostered
in defending or expanding the conceptual territory. This competition is useful if one
theory or concept may be or become the best, most parsimonious, most informative
for teaching and learning. Given the histories of education and most disciplines, this
is not likely, and so treating theory as literal, as really describing the learning condi-
tion, rather than as more metaphoric in nature, diminishes the potential for mutually
reinforced connections that the MELT continuum of learning autonomy makes pos-
sible. This competitive stance of territorial tribes has until now merely diminished
and made disparate the energies in education for teaching, learning and research and
reduced their effectiveness but could, in the near future, have more sinister effects.

5.1.5.1 Epistemologies of Machine Learning

Disparate and competing views make the educational enterprise, broadly speaking,
more vulnerable to vested interests and to the emerging new world order, especially
that mediated by machines. Just like the theorists above, humans currently working on
AI and Machine learning are working on issues of epistemology. Machine Learning
has to be on some learning platform or other and the issue of epistemology––or how
learning happens––dynamically influences and is influenced by that platform. At a
mechanical level, some AI learning platforms mimic the neuronal architecture of
the human brain, whereas some are altogether different. Quantum computers will
probably be a key component of AI operating systems, with possibilities including
‘a neural network encoded in the quantum properties of light’ [10]. We do not know
what will comprise the intelligence of AI because the possibilities are numerous and
broad, and include hybrid versions of old-style analogue computing and quantum
computing [10]. With the advances in quantum computing, it is difficult to know
which platforms or combinations will learn best in which situations. At a processing
level, it has been known for a long time that machine epistemology is or can be very
different from human epistemology [11] but because the structure of AI will not
be clear for a long time, the epistemologies of AI will likewise remain unknowable
until they fully emerge or diverge. Well before we can understand Machine Learning,
however, we will have to understand Machine Pedagogy, for this will dynamically
influence student learning in classrooms.

5.1.5.2 Epistemologies of Machine Teaching

AI used in schooling and university education for teaching will face unresolved epis-
temological questions just like all AI, but it is the pedagogy that machine teachers
5.1 Situating Contemporary Learning Theories/Ideas 111

use on children that will impact first. We do know that the machines that teach chil-
dren will need to choose or have chosen for them learning theories that are suited
to humans not machines. An AI teacher may derive human learning theories itself,
discarding all those that have preceded, and use a grounded theory approach [12]
because, after all, machines will use data from children learning, in order to formulate
their theories of teaching. Alternatively, specific learning theories may be prioritised
by some programmers of teaching machines. For example, one study found that ‘The
results suggest that integration of certain behavioral theories as features in machine
learning systems provides the best predictions’ [13] (italics added). Currently, stu-
dents learning to read, as mediated by reading robots, seem to develop a strong bond
to the robot, and these robots could be programmed with a Social Constructivist epis-
temology where correction may be secondary to connection. A robot programmed
with a behaviourist orientation, however, would favour correction over connection
in order to provide correct stimuli leading to correct response. This raises an issue
that has been endemic in education. What works ‘best’ depends on what you value
in your measurements, with objectivists valuing, and so measuring, quite different
things from constructivists.
In the short to medium term, it is likely that parameters for learning theories
that machine teaching will operate by will be set by human programmers. This
may result in some incredibly consistent teaching, and maybe even highly creative,
varied machine teaching, engaging students within the boundaries set. But it also risks
escalating paradigm wars to new levels, with AI programed to follow parameters that
prioritise one end of the learning continuum or the other. It could result in unequivocal
understandings about the superiority of a theory in a specific set of circumstances,
and/or in vested interests competing for the commercialisation of their AI/paradigm
package.
AI could, of course, be programmed with parameters that allow for and encourage
the full spectrum of theories, interpreted along the MELT continuum of learning
autonomy. The window of opportunity for educators to play a role in determining
such parameters is closing and with late 2023 being when the earth is predicted to hit 8
billion people alive at the same time, that provides 2020–2023 to make decisions that
will impact on the education of the next billion human brains. The main readership
of this book, teachers of young children to supervisors of PhD students, have a little
time to inject a deeper sense of humanity into the debate about Machine Teaching.
Maybe parents and other citizens would like to think too about the ramifications of
narrow or competing sets of learning paradigms for machine teachers. In addition,
all of us have to wonder if we want a future where human teachers are increasingly
irrelevant, and where maybe there is little point of human learners when machine
learners get all the jobs.
Each perspective in 5.1.1–5.1.4 provides a currently useful consideration for
engaged learning and teaching, each can be challenged by the other theories, and
each can be placed on the extent of autonomy continuum. Placing them in such a
way allows each theory to be held tentatively, without considering any of the four
to represent ‘the truth’. Weighing together different educational theories helps us to
understand how they can inform and improve engaged learning and teaching. When
112 5 What Does It Mean?

we bring in Machine Learning and Teaching, the stakes about differences in learning
theories become much higher, mission critical. While we have human teachers, or
maybe to keep teachers human, what are the insights that learning theories can pro-
vide to improving student learning, when viewed in a complementary way through
the MELT?

5.2 MELT for Curriculum Design and Improvement

Using MELT to connect different learning theories has practical implications for
student learning. Firstly, curricula need to have strong conceptual underpinnings.
Such underpinnings help teachers to facilitate student acquisition of a contemporary
knowledge base and investigate areas of interest in ways that develop sophisticated
thinking and rigour. Secondly, curricula themselves need to improve and adapt over
time in order to enhance learning and teaching. By using MELT, educators can hold
a variety of perspectives, such as Direct Instruction and discovery learning, so that
instead of conflicting, the perspectives can work in unison to inform curricula and
their improvement. MELT reduces educators’ obligation to choose one perspective
or theory only, and increases their capacity or willingness to hold several in pro-
ductive tension. Such multiply-informed curricula, taken together as a set over time,
may better scaffold the development of sophisticated thinking when compared to
a set of curricula informed by a narrow range of strategies. This is only true if a
way of connecting, like MELT, enables teachers to conceptually unite a variety of
perspectives so there is a legitimate coherence between them.
Which curricula are best able to provide learning that spans learner autonomy,
that enables the acquiring and construction of students’ own knowledge, and the
simultaneous development of the skills associated with sophisticated thinking? The
answer is not in the curricula, which vary enormously, but in how teachers bring a
particular curriculum to life, improving it over time through planning, implementa-
tion and revision. Ongoing improvement of this kind is here called ‘action research’,
and maybe an imperative to keep teaching human.

5.2.1 Teacher Action Research

Action research entails teachers intentionally enhancing the conditions for learning
through spirals of action and improvement, in contexts for which they have direct
responsibility. Much published educational research comes under this definition of
AR, although such research is frequently labelled as something else. The compo-
nent of the definition from which some people distance themselves is ‘have direct
responsibility for’. One reason for this distancing is that a phenomenon for which
the researchers have teaching responsibility entails a ‘subjective’ engagement rather
than ‘detached’ observation. In terms of standards of objective research, subjectivity
5.2 MELT for Curriculum Design and Improvement 113

is a no-no, but in terms of curriculum improvement, there are many advantages to

teacher-as-researcher, with a strong interest in attaining positive outcomes for student
learning.
The rich contextualisations and nuanced descriptions possible in AR mean that it
is more likely than many other research approaches to overcome the theory–practice
gap [14]. Through AR, practitioners can put theory into action in ways that make sense
to them. This means that the typical problem of ‘translation’ of research findings is
minimised, because during AR, theory is translated as the research is carried out. AR
should be communicated not as an account that is generalisable to any context, but
with rich descriptions to enable another practitioner to read, understand and transfer
thoughtfully to their own context [15].
Action research is a useful methodology for consolidating existing good practice,
because teachers often try one intervention at a time, leaving most of their practice
untouched. Some people with a strong policy orientation push for wholesale change
[16] rather than gradual change, but this can be highly problematic for at least five
reasons. One is that the useful, evolved and adapted knowledge of a community can
be thrown out in big change, whereas AR is good for consolidating practices which
already work. Second is that teachers can struggle to understand initiatives imposed
by others, whereas AR typically is the teacher’s own initiative. Third, policies are easy
to implement badly, but difficult to implement as intended. Fourth, different teach-
ers have differing personalities and theories of education, both of which influence
implementation, and so large-scale changes can lead to highly variable outcomes.
Even providing a uniform curriculum to multiple classes through forced training and
tight invigilation of teachers is very difficult, and can be counterproductive. Fifth,
those who pilot initiatives and show good outcomes are often those who chose to be
involved. There is a risk that the second generation of implementers demonstrates
less effective outcomes than the self-selecting first generation [17]. Action research
inevitably leads to change, as suggested by ‘action’. However, such change can sim-
ply mean the maintenance or tweaking of existing approaches. This may be one of
the features that make AR effective.
AR accounts for who and what teachers actually are: people with emotions and
a teaching sense. They may slide between professional pride and care to apathy,
disengagement and anxiety. A motivational starting point in AR is for teachers to
resolve an issue that is important to them. This builds on their existing thinking and
can lead some to find a way out of anxiety or apathy. A disengaged teacher is an
ineffective teacher, and telling teachers what to do more forcefully or with greater
incentives does not always work. Giving a disengaged teacher some real say in design
or implementation can be a way to improve their teaching. Degrees of rigour and
sophistication need to be added to spirals of AR, which should increasingly reference
quality criteria [18] and enact these over time.
The ownership of a teacher AR is empowering and has the potential to produce
something akin to the Hawthorne Effect [19]. The Hawthorne Effect was named
after a phenomenon found during research on productivity in the Hawthorne fac-
tory. Researchers found that while an increase in luminosity increased productivity,
decreasing luminosity had the same effect. They surmised that the workers responded
114 5 What Does It Mean?

to the actions or presence of researchers, and this response was independent of

lighting levels—rather, it was cued by the change in levels.
The researchers’ findings from the Hawthorne factory may have been unhelpful for
employers seeking to fine-tune lighting levels. However, the findings are very useful
for those who want to improve student learning in contexts for which they have direct
responsibility. Students can tune into the fact that the teacher is doing research and
trying to find ways of improving their learning. Teachers will be interested in the
outcomes of their designed intervention. But the Hawthorne Effect suggests that any
intervention, if perceived as an innovation or change in practice, alerts students to
something, and this alert enhances their learning. As a result of the Hawthorn Effect,
one of AR’s apparent weaknesses—subjectivity due to teachers’ ownership of the
research outcomes—becomes a strength, actually enhancing student learning while
AR is happening.
Typical AR spirals proceed as follows: identify problem or issue, plan an interven-
tion, implement, evaluate and identify further cycles. But there are three problems
with this standard sequential model. First, such a sequential representation does not
capture the messy, recursive nature of actual research (including AR). Second, this
simplified sequence does not reflect forms of research other than AR, and so it reduces
the status of AR to something less than research, something you do if you can’t do
anything else. Third, and most importantly, this neat and linear conceptualisation
minimises the effectiveness of AR because it does not incorporate the conceptual
prompts or challenges needed to increase rigour and sophistication of research and
action over time. This compromises possibilities for improvement.
MELT’s six facets can help teachers inform their action research into curriculum
improvement so that they add rigour and sophistication over time. From the perspec-
tive of MELT’s six facets, AR involves messy, recursive processes where teachers:
identify the issue, problem or aspect that could be improved; imagine improvements,
find information that could be relevant, find relevant data or generate new data; eval-
uate information for pertinence and for trustworthiness; organise information so that
trends can be seen for detailed analysis and manage the time, resources and strategies
used; look at information from other classes, the web or the literature and synthesise
new, creative answers to address the issue; and weave communication and application
of knowledge throughout the whole process.
MELT, if used as a scaffolding for the structure of teachers’ AR conceptualisations,
has a four-fold imperative. Firstly, teachers can use MELT to inform curriculum
design. Over time, this could include making connections to others’ curricula, for
the purposes of planning and implementation. Secondly, when used as a thinking
routine, MELT help teachers to facilitate student awareness of their own thinking.
Third, teachers may use MELT skills to inform their own action research in terms
of planning, implementing and evaluating improvements in teaching, learning and
the curriculum. This enables an intersection of the learning, teaching and research
through MELT-informed conversations between educators and researchers. Finally,
by using MELT to inform their AR, teachers can come to understand how their
individual research may better connect to others’ curriculum research.
5.2 MELT for Curriculum Design and Improvement 115

5.2.2 Conjoined Action Research: From the Transferability

of Individual Studies to Generalisability When Using
an a Priori Framework

Educational researchers tend to value generalisable results over idiosyncratic

research such as AR. This may be a big problem for education, because applying
generalisable results to the classroom is difficult [20]. While the notion of gener-
alisable results is highly appealing, methodologies designed to achieve such results
have serious limitations. And while individual AR is not generalisable, each instance
of AR has the capacity for transferability. Moreover, if there are ways that different
instances of AR can ‘speak together’, then they may have elements in common that
can, over time, reveal trends that are generalisable.
In education, generalisability is sought through Randomised Controlled Trials
(RCTs). Whereas RCTs are often thought of as a gold-standard of research with
humans, in education they have many limitations because they possess low ecological
validity, are highly resourced and typically conducted in educationally insignificant
timeframes [16]. Here, ‘low ecological validity’ means that the research is far away
from ‘business as usual’ due to: the presence of researchers not normally on-site;
extra resources or funding that may not be available once the research is complete;
contact with parents and students to achieve informed consent; randomisation into
treatment and control groups, creating artificial groups of students or temporarily
isolating individuals; and a quick injection of treatment or control group learning
protocols [18].
RCT designs in education typically take place over educationally insignificant
timeframes, such as a lesson, a day or a week. The real-time measures immediately
after an intervention are a time-bound way of capturing student learning. RCTs pro-
vide an immediate extrinsic motivation to engage in short-term learning and testing
in ways that cannot easily be mirrored in the standard classroom. Informed consent
normally means that some students and parents opt-out, and so the cohort is less
representative than if all students were involved, and those who opt-out maybe those
for whom the intervention is less suited. Moreover, even with those who consent,
true randomisation is very difficult to achieve, due to timetable constraints.
A Nature journal survey of authors who published scientific, generalisable
research found study results were not replicated in follow-up studies conducted
by other researchers (70% non-replication) [21] or even by the same team (50%
non-replication) [21]. This means that generalisability in experimental work such as
RCTs ‘depends’ on the research team. RCTs within the complexities of education are
unlikely to be more rigorous than medical RCTs which involve, say, an intervention
requiring regular doses of a medicine.
Action research, on the other hand, is conducted in naturalistic ways and time-
frames. Here, ‘naturalistic’ means ‘implemented in classrooms with levels of resourc-
ing that are not added to by researchers’ budgets and collaborations’. The associated
timeframes tend to be educationally significant: a term, a year or multiple years.
Extended timeframes provide far more credence for classroom practice, because
116 5 What Does It Mean?

Table 5.1 Comparison between RCTs and AR

Generalisable   Transferable

Randomised Artificial   Naturalistic Action

Controlled Heavy Resourcing   Light Resourcing Research
Trials
Treatment,   Spirals of action,
finite time sustainable

teachers engaging in AR have to deal with aspects that RCT approaches see as
‘confounding’, such as student motivation to engage long-term in the learning.
Action research is powerful because it is fitted to the specific context in which
it is enacted, by the teachers who have responsibility and ownership of the learning
environment. This leads to ownership of the research, a strong interest in positive out-
comes and steering towards the best student learning possible. While the researcher
has a vested interest to confirm that their own approach works in AR (compromising
the study’s objectivity and generalisability), this is also AR’s strength, for positive
learning outcomes provide an endorsement of teacher professional judgement. The
teacher’s ownership of the research speaks to the heart of their educational prowess, a
self-validation but not a generalisation to other contexts. Table 5.1 shows the features
of AR when compared to RCTs.
Analysis of multiple MELT-informed AR studies could inform not only individ-
ual implementers, but assist a move from transferable to generalisable research. A
systematic review of studies about research-based learning found that the amount of
guidance provided by teachers to students was reported in an ad hoc manner. The
review’s authors, therefore, recommended that an a priori framework be used for
reporting [22]. MELT’s continuum of learning autonomy provides a cross-studies
language to describe ‘amount of guidance’, and along with the six facets, it provides
an a priori framework that is both adaptable and readily useable for reporting. Meta-
analyses of AR, if MELT facets and autonomy are used to connect multiple studies
together, may show that these studies have some generalisable findings. MELT as an
a priori framework for analysis and reporting can connect the reportable outcomes
of otherwise non-generalisable AR, providing a trend over many studies.
Action research can begin with low rigour and sophistication, but as AR continues,
it should demonstrate increases in rigour as part of the learning inherent in research
as a process. A practical way of adding rigour is ensuring that AR researchers use and
report on all of the facets of MELT. Increases in rigour can be assisted by reflection-
in-action, and simultaneously by adding to personal, idiosyncratic approaches, those
informed by the literature. As an example of increase in rigour, Table 5.2 considers
pertinent questions, facet by facet, early and later in AR cycles of actions. With MELT
to inform ways to lift rigour of AR processes, and to enable connections between
different AR studies, this gives AR the means to improve student learning in ways
5.2 MELT for Curriculum Design and Improvement 117

Table 5.2 Questions and issues for each facet and level of learning autonomy in relation to
commencing AR and maturing AR
Early cycle of AR Later cycles of AR
Embark & clarify What is my biggest problem? What problems are endemic
What is my purpose? across the years of Science,
English, etc.?
Find & generate Do I have an idea worth trying? What approaches are in the
What do I need? Who can I ask? literature? What data can I collect
that is relevant?
Evaluate & reflect Is this the best option to try? How trustworthy is the data I
What do I trust? collected?
Organise & manage How will I implement this? How do I sustain this with other
How do we arrange? teachers?
Analyse & synthesise How much did this approach How much did this change
What does it mean? improve student learning? colleagues’ understanding about
student learning?
Communicate How do I tell my students? How do I tell parents, school staff
& apply or an educational conference?
How do we relate?
Extent of Autonomy How much guidance do they Can students negotiate their own
need? preferred autonomy?

that RCTs cannot. Multiple AR studies of contexts with educationally significant

timeframes may over time show the benefits of interventions more effectively than
RCTs. If MELT is used to frame the reporting, multiple AR studies conducted in
naturalistic settings with little extra resourcing may coalesce on the same findings
over time. This would then provide rich descriptions for reported AR outcomes so
that they can be transferred to the classroom, and synthesis that shows trends across
many AR studies and contexts.

5.3 Conclusion: Multifaceted Use with the Same

Overarching Purpose

MELT helps teachers to interpret educational theories by plotting them along the
learning autonomy continuum. This allows them to connect to and use theories as
part of their teaching repertoire. For example, if a teacher needed to choose between
CLT or Connectivism to inform a contemporary curriculum design, each theory
implies a very different design with correspondingly different learning opportunities
for students. However, connecting these theories through MELT using the continuum
of learning autonomy to inform when and how to use each theory can help teachers
design a curriculum which is more holistic and helpful for engaged learning.
118 5 What Does It Mean?

Action research, informed by one or several theoretical frameworks, can be con-

ceptualised and reported in the terms of MELT. This use of MELT will not only
allow different educational theories and perspectives to speak to each other, but will
provide the scope to draw together separate instances of teacher AR and report the
analysis of the trends and synthesis as more generalisable results.
The huge untapped resource in education is the sum of separate efforts. These
efforts sometimes exist in conflict, but can reinforce each other through a consid-
eration of the continuum of learning autonomy and the six facets of MELT. The
conceptual power of MELT, as a consolidation of 100 years of educational research
and 100,000 years of human learning, is the connections it forges. This power can
enable students to connect all their learning together across the years and teach-
ers to connect to each others’ curricula and to educational theory as they engage in
systematic AR informed by MELT, in order to develop student sophisticated thinking.

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Chapter 6
How Do We Relate?

This chapter shows that what is needed in formal and informal education is not only
the connections between theories and practice that have been called for so far in the
book but also something that enables people to genuinely relate to each other and
disparate ideas. This chapter asks, ‘How do we relate?’ Like other MELT questions,
we can ask this question in relation to the small scale: within a class, or a small group
investigation before lunch. Or we can ask it in relation to a larger scale: how do we
relate learning from one lesson to the next, from one subject, one term, one year, one
stage of education to the next? Ultimately, the question becomes ‘how do we relate
our thinking about teaching and learning to that of other educators?’ The MELT
provide a conceptualisation that represents these different progressions, people and
perspectives, and that facilitates connected relationships.
This chapter focuses on the problems associated with the relationships between
humans, as well as relationships between humans and the planet. It looks at why
things have proceeded in a direction that was, to a large extent, inevitable in terms of
how human solutions to problems, including technology, caused problems that were
sometimes larger than the ones originally solved. However, now that we have a more
comprehensive view of the planet than ever before, the chapter moves on to consider
whether our future is, or may become, a little less inevitable. As noted in Chap. 5, part
of the solution to entrenched or emerging problems is rethinking what theory does for
education, and taking a complementary rather than a competing perspective of theory.
This will enable more unified efforts towards providing learning environments that
develop thinkers who can solve humanity’s and Earth’s problems.
First in this chapter is a story about cosmonauts and astronauts uniting in space
during the middle of the Cold War. This story is a reminder that connections between
clashing perspectives can be worthwhile and powerful, and that such connections
can be made against all odds. The story provides context for how we might relate to

© The Author(s) 2020 121

J. Willison, The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching,
SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2683-1_6
122 6 How Do We Relate?

those with perspectives on important aspects of life (including education) which are
the polar opposite of our own.
Energies of teachers and researchers need to unite around shared, adaptable and
culturally sensitive models for education that graduate students who have the research
mindedness to solve the many entrenched problems, and new problems that will
plague us from 2040, in a way that does not create additional problems. How do
we enable the next billion brains born to become primarily constructive people who
desire to build up society, the environment and each other? Student sophisticated
thinking requires faciliation by professional teachers who are not forced into ‘best
practice’ by others, but have the discernment to be constructive. For students and
teachers alike, to be constructive is not to be persuasive or building-oriented, but
nurturing and full of care.

6.1 Soyuz and Apollo: A Story About a Cold War Meeting

in Orbit

The communist USSR and the capitalist USA arguably represented the twentieth
century’s most polarised, long-term adversarial positions. But in the Smithsonian
Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, there is an amazing configuration: a
re-enactment of a moment from 1975, when, in the middle of the Cold War, the
USSR and USA cooperated at the highest, most sensitive and most complex levels
(Fig. 6.1).
In the museum is a thirty metre contraption comprising a USSR-era Soyuz craft
docked with a US Apollo module. Despite the two nations’ adversarial politics and
their appearance of extreme competition, especially in space, both realised that the
competition would kill them. To begin to unite on earth, they chose a symbolic act of

Fig. 6.1 Apollo and Soyuz coupled in the air and space Museum, Washington, D.C.
6.1 Soyuz and Apollo: A Story About a Cold War Meeting in Orbit 123

uniting in space. This act is not famous, but the docking of the craft may have been
the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
The Apollo–Soyuz Test Project required both groups, years in advance of 1975, to
share top-secret information on guidance systems, space hardware and software [2].
The two ships were very different. For example, their entry hatch sizes were incom-
patible, so a three-metre ‘docking unit’ needed to be engineered for the event. The
Soyuz normally operated on pure oxygen at 1/3 atmosphere, whereas the US craft
used air at 1 atmosphere [2]; the Americans would have blown up the Russians had
they docked and connected their triple-pressure atmosphere. The two teams had to
share trajectories, launch times, positional information and operational information.
Then the astronauts needed to engage with the cosmonauts socially—they couldn’t
dock and sit in separate capsules! They had to be willing to communicate with those
who had not only a different mother tongue, but a very different ideology. The lan-
guage barrier was perceived to be one of the biggest obstacles, and so the Americans
learned Russian before launch and spoke it in when docked, while the Russians
learned and spoke English [2]. The crews ate a meal together, shared memorabilia,
signed international certificates and hoped, as their respective presidents watched
via a live telecast (alongside millions of their citizens), that ‘our joint work in space
serves for the benefit of all countries and peoples on the earth’ [2].
I am writing this on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the first moonwalk, but
that event further escalated the Cold War, whereas the Soyuz–Apollo Project helped
to defrost it. The threat of mutual annihilation provoked by the nuclear and space race
was a sufficient stimulus to prompt changes in the way that the USSR and the USA
related to each other. However, to actually change political and public sentiment is a
highly charged affair, and the Soyuz–Apollo docking was a kind of circuit breaker
that allowed high-voltage differences to leak out over time. It is salient that the event
which generated more tension (the moon-landing) is famous, while the one that
began a genuine connection between warring parties (the Apollo–Soyuz docking) is
almost forgotten. As a species, we tend to prefer winning over cooperating, and this
is food-for-thought for anyone involved in educational disconnections.
Current global deterioration, one would think, should be enough to prompt a
similar response. However, we no longer feel the sense of urgency that came with
the possibility that one button-push could launch the world into a nuclear winter.
Our concerns about nuclear annihilation come and go with the news headlines. Our
biggest current earth-wide issues, however, arguably involve a slow decline of the
planet’s ecosystem, causing habitat destruction that is induced especially by over-
population pressures and the increasing prosperity sought by billions. This slower-
speed issue is hard to resolve without concerted, unified and sustained agreement by
many governments. While the overarching problem of the Cold War was evident, it is
difficult to even identify the problems facing Earth in 2020, and there are now many
more parties involved than the two main governments of the Cold War. Maybe a big
124 6 How Do We Relate?

circuit breaker equivalent to the Soyuz–Apollo is needed, or maybe a very different

kind of solution. We do know that we need a billion problem solvers whose solutions
anticipate and avoid subsequent problems.

6.2 Inevitable Earth

Humans for 100,000 years have been outstanding problem solvers. However, as
noted in Chap. 1, many of the solutions we have found have resulted in further
problems which are more difficult to solve than the ones we started with. So our
skill at solving problems was, in part, a function of the sheer number of problems
we caused, including the Cold War.
This capacity to solve problems while inadvertently causing more problems does
not mean that humans are wicked and greedy in a way that separates them from the
rest of nature. Rather, the process was inevitable. A species so well-equipped for
sophisticated thinking, with a body that could work in a way that corresponded to
that thinking, was powerfully adaptive to its environment for 100,000 years. Then
Homo sapiens began to adapt the environment to suit it, tens of thousands of years
ago [3]. At first, such adaptations of the environment were small: the intentional use
of fire to manage foliage and grazing [3], or the collection of grass seeds in the fertile
crescent in order to sow it in a specific well-watered location [4].
In addition to achieving what was intended, some problems’ solutions produced
unanticipated effects. Planting grass seeds allowed small populations to remain in one
place for longer, reducing the need to travel and more predictable food supplies made
it possible to establish larger family groups [5]. The consequent rise in population
afforded our ancestors more protection from predators and from competing bands of
humans [6]. Escalation of agricultural technology ensued, providing a competitive
advantage over humans who did not plant seeds [6]. Technology compounded, with
success growing on the back of technological success [7]. But no-one anticipated the
inevitable problems associated with such success. How could Homo sapiens have
anticipated such problems?
Until around 50,000 years ago, nothing humans did compared to the environmental
change wrought by beavers (as noted in Chap. 1). Had beavers been equipped with
learning brains and grasping thumbs, they might have caused far more environmental
degradation than they did, at a rate that would have put humans in the shade. However,
super-specialisation locked them into a niche that was hard to break out of, and even
in 20 million more years, beaver descendants may still be dam engineers. In contrast,
humans were generalists, able to run (slowly), climb (poorly), fight (weakly), build
(badly) and learn adaptively. While we may be slower than cheetahs, weaker than
gorillas and less architecturally intuitive than termites, our learning capacity means
6.2 Inevitable Earth 125

that we will almost inevitably land a human on Mars. That is, unless the compounding
problems associated with our compounding solutions catch up with us first! An Earth
human population which crashes to several million, say, following an environmental
cataclysm, is going to have problems visiting the neighbours on the other side of the
stream [8], let alone getting off the planet.
Given human brain capability and our anatomy, it was inevitable that human
capacity got us to this point of compounding problems. An interesting example of
inevitable, compounding problems cropped up yesterday when I attended a public
presentation on quantum computing [9]. The presenter argued that quantum comput-
ers would be able to hack existing digital security protocols within the next five years.
The only remedy he presented for this was the adoption of new quantum computer-
generated security systems. Such a state of affairs is reminiscent of a self-fulfilling
prophecy, where the need for a technology is, in part, created by the existence of
the technology. A reflection on the inevitability of this process may take some of
the pressure off us. We are a self-incriminating species, and it can help to pause and
understand that we are, or were, part of the biosphere—not especially weird or holy
or special.
However, understanding the inevitability of a deteriorating Earth is not an excuse
to say, ‘that’s fine’. We can now see the entirety of the planet and understand our
place in it. Indeed, since Yuri Gagarin’s journey in 1961, we have been able to see
the whole Earth from space [10]. With our information gathering and sharing, we
can now perceive in great detail our impact on the planet, and with that knowledge
we have a chance to make global deterioration a little less inevitable. More than
ever, we are able to see the extreme social stratification and isolation, environmental
degradation and species extinction, as well as escalations in our capacity to annihilate.
But our ability to observe these problems does not guarantee that we will do anything
effective about them.

6.3 Evitable Earth

If we continue in our very intelligent ways of solving problems, then maybe the fate
of the Earth is sealed: inevitable species extinction and a human population crash.
For a model of the scale of crash possible, the Mayan civilisation was thought to
comprise between 15 and 30 million people at its peak, and the population crashed
to thousands in several decades [11]. If a crash of similar severity were to hit the
planet in 2023, this would mean that the population of 8 billion humans would be
reduced to a few million. Such a crash has happened more than once in large and
small human populations, and it could happen on a global scale [11].
There are not currently any palatable solutions to mitigate the problems we face
with a large human population. In 1979 or earlier, China elected to minimise its
126 6 How Do We Relate?

population growth through the one-child policy. This resulted in the ‘prioritisation’
of boys over girls, with estimates of girls ‘missing’ in China varying from 20 million to
160 million [12]. As is common, our solutions often have perverse and unpredictable
consequences that cause more problems.
Therefore, it is no longer enough for us to merely solve problems. We need minds
that can genuinely anticipate problems that will result from solutions and mitigate
these or, even better, look for solutions that ‘first do no harm’. If our education systems
can produce critical thinkers capable of creative solutions that anticipate subsequent
problems, our earth’s immediate future may be a little less inevitable. In order to lead
us to a trajectory where planetary destruction is not assured, these thinkers will need
to be primarily ‘constructive’, rather than self-serving or ideology-based, and have
had a mind-expanding education. With a connected education informed by MELT,
they could prompt a less fated, more evitable earth trajectory with room for hope.

6.4 Retheorising Theory in Education, from ‘Competition’

to ‘Complement’

From a MELT perspective, each passionately held theory and approach can help
the community to build a little towards a mind-expanding education. Let educators
and parents with different perspectives talk and, if they are ‘poles apart’, at least
perceive the ground between the poles. For example, a big focus on content acqui-
sition may have some great advantages in terms of discovery learning, if students
have learned some key and pertinent ideas. Likewise, discovery learning might be a
great motivator towards learning content. In Parachute (Chap. 1), Shelly knew about
independent and dependent variables, and she may have acquired these concepts in
a prescribed context. She applied these tricky concepts in a personal instance of
discovery learning that was open-ended. Although she faced many difficulties, she
applied the concepts of experimental research effectively, and conducted research
that demonstrated sophisticated thinking in a science context.
From the MELT perspective, there is no philosophical law against jumping from
facilitating prescribed to open-ended learning nor from unbounded to bounded learn-
ing. But teachers implementing a curriculum need to have discernment and power
to implement their well-reasoned judgements about what is best for each situation.
MELT can enhance the capacity for discernment, because as an analytical tool, it is
functional, addressing the practical questions, ‘what do these students need?’ and
‘how much guidance?’
If we treat theories, by definition, as competitive, then we may continue to have a
problem. Given the complexities of learning and teaching, educational theories may
need to complement each other more and fight less. Seeing theories and perspectives
as more metaphorical and less literal might help educators to at least acknowledge
theories that are a pole away from their own perspective.
6.4 Retheorising Theory in Education, from ‘Competition’ … 127

In Chap. 1, I proposed the enterprise of educating human brains so that they have
the capacity to solve problems without causing unanticipated additional problems.
This educational wiring would involve brains that have a substantial content knowl-
edge base of fundamental concepts. It would also involve brains that take risks,
delve into issues and problems, and are highly discerning. While learning content
and learning through delving can be presented in mutually exclusive ways, in MELT
they belong to the same continuum of learning autonomy. Rather than conflicting
with each other, they are complementary.
Tara’s resilient understanding of content in Stupid was contrary to the scientific
canon. She showed that we cannot merely say, ‘Give students lifelong learning skills.
All the information they need is available, so they just need to know how to access
it.’ This is a very tenuous position to hold, no matter how often it is said. If we don’t
understand ideas, we won’t even know what we are holding, and we certainly won’t
be able to readily synthesise multiple ideas.
This next billion humans born from 2023–2030 may be the make-or-break gen-
eration. They will inherit all the problems of the planet, including those which have
been made, inevitably, by the 100 billion other brains that came before them. They
will enter formal education from 2024 onwards, and most of those billion will com-
plete their compulsory education around 2050. The problems we face and will face
are still improperly identified,hidden or not yet created, and the solutions are out of
our present-brained generation’s league. Overall, MELT is an opportunity to put into
the hands of the billion the sophisticated thinking tools that they will need. These
are the tools of the inquiring ape, because these tools of sophisticated thinking are
the best we have. But now we need to connect disparate efforts and contexts so that
we can ‘rachet up’ our sophisticated thinking to enable us to solve problems with
solutions that first do no harm.

6.5 Conclusion: It’s Only When We Relate to Divergent

Practices, Concepts and Places in Education that We
Will Solve Our Educational Problems

As a species, we named ourselves the ‘wise man’. For an animal that destroyed its
own environment through desertification, salinification, heavy-metal contamination
and warfare, the word ‘wise’ seems a little off-the-mark. Beavers, with their smooth
brains and genetically stored behaviours for dam construction radically altered their
environments, but at such a pace that ecosystems were able to evolve along with the
change. Our learning brain seems to learn too fast for ecosystems to catch up, but
not fast enough to enable us to craft solutions that don’t make things worse. We are
both too smart and not wise enough.
128 6 How Do We Relate?

If we haven’t been particularly ‘sapiens’, could we become a little more aware?

Business, military, health and even educational interests compel us on the same
inevitable trajectory as that taken by the 100 billion brains born so far. Maybe MELT
can help broker a broad union of educational perspectives so that, working in mutually
reinforcing ways, our species may become sapiens in action as well as in name,
following a new, more evitable earth trajectory.

References

1. Einstein Bubble in Cartoon: Paraphrased from Einstein, A. (1934). On the method of theoretical
physics. Philosophy of Science, 1(2), 163–169.
2. Redmond, C. (2004, July 19). The flight of Apollo-Soyuz. Retrieved from https://history.nasa.
gov/apollo/apsoyhist.html.
3. Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. New York, NY: Harper.
4. Diamond, J. (1997). Location, location, location: The first farmers. Science, 278(5341), 1243–
1244.
5. Holliday, R. (2005). Evolution of human longevity, population pressure and the origins of
warfare. Biogerontology, 6(5), 363–368.
6. Armelagos, G. J., Goodman, A. H., & Jacobs, K. H. (1991). The origins of agriculture:
Population growth during a period of declining health. Population and Environment, 13(1),
9–22.
7. Van Schaik, C. P., Pradhan, G. R., & Tennie, C. (2019). Teaching and curiosity: Sequen-
tial drivers of cumulative cultural evolution in the hominin lineage. Behavioral Ecology and
Sociobiology, 73(1), 2.
8. Diamond, J. (2013). The world until yesterday: What can we learn from traditional societies?.
London, England: Penguin.
9. Sparkes, B (2019). Quantum of promise. Public presentation. University of Adelaide, Adelaide,
Australia.
10. Faure, G., & Mensing, T. M. (2007). Introduction to planetary science. Dordrecht, Netherlands:
Springer.
11. Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. London, England:
Penguin.
12. Kennedy, J. J., & Shi, Y. (2019). Lost and found: The missing girls in rural China. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
References 129

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Chapter 7
How Much Guidance?

One great piece of feedback on the MELT, written on a post-it note during a workshop
introducing the models, was ‘obvious’. That terse slight in many ways reflected that
which the MELT was intended to convey: what educators do when they facilitate
learning effectively. It is common that an educator looks at a version of MELT
and says ‘this is what I’m already doing!’ That is perfect, for MELT provides an
articulation of what educators often do implicitly and makes it explicit. For the
person who said ‘obvious’, the question is whether their teaching approach is as
obvious to their students or colleagues as it is to them. The answer is probably ‘no’.
Educators use MELT for guidance when they perceive a need to move from leaving
understanding implicit to making it explicit, in order to
(1) improve their awareness of their own practice and its connection to theory;
(2) enhance student metacognition, especially students’ regulation of their own
learning;
(3) connect disparate teaching energies, practices, sectors and theories.
As noted in earlier chapters, learning autonomy in MELT is not a characteristic
that increases linearly, but a relationship: between students, between students and
teachers, and between students and concepts. Engaged teachers attend implicitly to
learning autonomy, because it is fundamental to ownership of the learning enterprise.
MELT supports an explicit exploration of learning autonomy.

7.1 Autonomy: Engaged Learning, Engaged Teaching

A lot was made in the previous chapters about the continuum of learning auton-
omy. Chapter 2 discussed the continuum in relation to students and Chaps. 4 and 5
discussed it in relation to theory and action research. To reiterate here, autonomy in
MELT is not an attribute to be attained to or an optimum level of guidance. A con-
tinuum suggests that there is a broad spectrum of possibilities, where all parts of the
continuum are vital for learning: there is nothing inherently superior about initiate on
© The Author(s) 2020 131
J. Willison, The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching,
SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2683-1_7
132 7 How Much Guidance?

this continuum, nor is there anything implicitly lesser about emulate. The important
thing is to ask frequently, ‘how much guidance do these students need?’ Autonomy
in MELT depends on the relationship between learners and what is learned, where it
is learned and who it is learned with. Learning autonomy distinctly ebbs and flows
in a tidal zone, moving from low autonomy to high autonomy and back.
Measuring or pinning down learning autonomy is awkward, because it is a messy
and recursive concept... Yet autonomy is absolutely central to daily teaching and
learning. Because learning autonomy is a ‘relationship term’ in MELT, not an abso-
lute quality, students don’t become autonomous. Rather, they operate at times with
higher levels of autonomy, depending on their familiarity with context and the rigour
needed in the situation, and they frequently cycle back to lower levels of autonomy in
less familiar contexts. This is what we found with employed graduates, who shuttle
back and forth between different levels of autonomy in employment, showing that
autonomy is non-linear and context-specific [2]. If MELT helps educators understand
how much learning autonomy is required by a student, that ‘measurement’ can make
a lot of sense for those who know and understand the context and inform teaching
practices in practical ways. However, to say ‘x% of students were working with high
levels of autonomy’ does not communicate anything meaningful to those without
knowledge of the context.
In practical ways, MELT promotes constructive alignment to engineer quality,
engaged learning. For example, MELT can inspire cognitive and affective learning
outcomes or goals (Chap. 1), inform the design of face-to-face, online and blended
learning environments (Chap. 3), inform the assessment of learning (Chap. 3) and
help structure evaluative elements of course effectiveness (Chap. 5). However, con-
structive alignment only comes to life through the efforts of engaged teachers, for it
requires teacher care and empowerment to realistically engage learners.
The MELT are used in a variety of ways for teaching, learning and researching, and
this necessarily includes the assessment of student learning. Crucially, the continuum
of learning autonomy suggests a student move from reliance on the teacher for
feedback towards self-assessment, and back again in fresh contexts. Assessment
rubrics, each informed by the six facets of MELT but with performance criteria
made specific to a task, provide something in common between assignments. Such
rubrics also provide something specific to that task alone. MELT rubrics straddle the
middle ground between rubrics that are too specific to allow students to generalise
their learning from it [3] and those that are too general and therefore provide little
guidance. Importantly, when students use teacher feedback from one assignment
to improve a subsequent assignment, the connections between assignments due to
MELT make a substantial difference [4]. As students calibrate to teacher expectations
using MELT-informed rubrics, they become more realistic in their self-assessment
according to the rubric, and more able to give useful feedback to peers [5]. As shown
in Chap. 3, an effective technique is to allocate marks to students’ response to peer
feedback, as well as marks for the feedback they give to others, as opposed to students
allocating marks to students.
While this book has emphasised learning autonomy, teachers themselves need to
model different levels of autonomy. Autonomy and ownership is a crucial dimension
7.1 Autonomy: Engaged Learning, Engaged Teaching 133

for teachers, because the MELT only work when educators make the models their
own. If we want students to become increasingly autonomous and take risks in
learning, then teachers themselves must have a license to act autonomously, at times,
in order to show students what autonomy looks like. There is a need, then, to consider
factors that increase or decrease teacher autonomy, because this implicitly affects
teacher engagement and effectiveness.
When teachers do not show initiative or willingness to improvise, this may speak
to the nature of the systems they teach in. This nature is often determined by what
learning institutions reward and what the consequences of non-compliance are. Cur-
riculum developers and policymakers should consider factors that mediate for and
against teacher autonomy and ownership, including curriculum and quality assurance
processes created for course, program and institution level.
MELT’s facets articulated along the continuum of learning autonomy provide
a framing that is ‘sufficiently well structured’ and ‘sufficiently nebulous’, as an
educator said [6]. Another educator likened MELT to a thin silver wire providing
the structure in which shimmery soap bubbles can emerge [7]. As the MELT draws
on 100 years of educational research and practice, it contains nothing of a surprise
in its separate elements. Rather, it is the juxtaposition of the facets with the levels
of learning autonomy that makes the MELT distinctive in structure. But it is the
educators who care, and their students, who make the MELT fluid through human
interactions.
Overall, the MELT help to:
1. Envisage connections by providing a conceptualisation that holds in tension dis-
parate educational practitioners’, administrators, communities and researchers’
perspectives.
2. Join together separate disciplinary and transdisciplinary usage.
3. Map the educational landscape, because they are informed by numerous
educational theories, conceptual frameworks and practices.
4. Spiral through education and become a thinking routine, from primary school
to Ph.D. level.
5. Delineate learning autonomy, unpacking how much guidance learners and
teachers need.
6. Differentiate the curriculum, where the consideration of autonomy promotes an
understanding of how to manage the curriculum for gifted and talented students,
students with learning disabilities, and the full range of ‘average’ students.
7. Couple cognitive and affective learning, foregrounding the relationship between
these domains
8. Prompt ethical, social and culturally minded teaching and learning.
9. Pose seven probing questions to teachers and students that are key across all
educational contexts.
10. Materialise in audience-dependent ways, where educators adapt and articulate
their own MELT, fit to the context and audience, even as the nature of the six
facets and of the continuum of learning autonomy are maintained.
134 7 How Much Guidance?

11. Engage teachers by absolutely relying on their professional sense of identity

and care as they use their own adaptations of MELT to engage learners in the
development of sophisticated thinking.
The four contemporary issues this book addressed were the following:
• Enabling educators to help students think in sophisticated ways.
• Connecting different aspects of education so that they mutually reinforce and
complement each other.
• Deepening educators’ understanding of the dimensions of student autonomy in
learning.
• Engaging with educational theory in ways that make practical sense to educators.
How much guidance do educators need to so enable, connect, deepen, and engage?
The answer is in your hands.

7.2 Conclusion: Structure Provided, Creativity Needed

The characteristics of MELT are based on 100 years of education research and mirror
100,000 years of human learning as experienced by 100 billion Homo sapiens. The
next billion brains born from 2023 to 2030 need something different to those which
have already been born. Existing members of our species brought us to the amazing
creativity, adaptability, and problem-solving that will enable, in all likelihood, a
human population of 8 billion alive in 2023. However, despite the massive problem-
solving endeavour of our species, we are facing the catastrophic consequences of our
solutions.
We need some guidance towards a mode of learning that will help the next billion
brains, at the very least, to do no further damage to our world. We need to earn the
name sapiens. MELT provides this guidance in a conceptual manner, but this guid-
ance should not be represented as a set of rules or mandates. The MELT’s adaptable
structure absolutely requires the breath of creativity to bring it to life in particular
subjects, disciplines and contexts. The MELT are fully dependent on Homo sapiens’
willingness to adapt, to heat solid structures with the warmth of human interac-
tion until conversations become fluid, and then crystallise in new shapes for student
learning. If there are any things that are unique about the MELT, these include the
articulation of the facets of sophisticated thinking along the continuum of learning
autonomy, and the consequent way the models are able to simply connect theories
with theories and theories with practice. The MELT’s shared questions are effective
prompts to engage teaching and learning. They continuously ask teachers and stu-
dents, ‘What will we use? What do we trust? How do we arrange? What does it mean?
How do we relate? How much guidance?’ and especially, ‘What is our purpose?’
Melting, flowing, shaping and crystallising need to happen time and again, so that
each of the MELT suits its context and is renewed when there are changes in that
context. Each adapted MELT model interlinks conceptually with all other MELTs,
7.2 Conclusion: Structure Provided, Creativity Needed 135

and can help teachers and students make the connection across education’s years,
subjects, ideologies, and contexts. The MELT provide the adaptive fluidity we need
to conceptualise the coherent and connected learning journey needed for the billion
brains born from 2023. The children of Kevin, Shelly and Tara could be beneficiaries
of an adept use of MELT, enabling them to experience and perceive their own forest
of engaged learning. If those billion brains experience a coherent and connected
curriculum, they may become sophisticated thinkers who craft solutions that first
cause no harm. As they become the generation to lead us globally, they could pull us
back from inevitable, accelerating, planetary degradation so that we all may enjoy
a more evitable Earth trajectory. Remaining endangered habitats may be preserved
despite increased human population and polar ice might remain frozen, because
education, early childhood to Ph.D. is fluidly connected with the MELT.

References

1. Einstein Bubble in Cartoon: Einstein, A. (2010). The ultimate quotable Einstein. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
2. Willison, J., Sabir, F., & Thomas, J. (2017). Shifting dimensions of autonomy in students’
research and employment. Higher Education Research & Development, 36(2), 430–443.
3. Adcroft, A. (2011). The mythology of feedback. Higher Education Research & Development,
30(4), 405–419.
4. Willison, J. (2012). When academics integrate research skill development in the curriculum.
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative
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included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by
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the copyright holder.
Glossary of MELT Terms

Analyse: to break down into constituent parts and pull together again in ways that
show relationships. In quantitative research, these relationships involve trends.
In qualitative research, these relationships involve themes. There is a close and
recursive relationship between analyse and organise. Moreover, at times, anal-
ysis has strong evaluative elements; however, at other times they are distinctly
different.
Apply: in the context of a learning task, put current knowledge and understanding
into use cognitively, affectively and/or physically. Also put newly-developed
knowledge into use in the context of a future task or problem.
Autonomy: the extent to which students drive the sophisticated thinking processes
in MELT, which is related to the extent to which educators set the learning
environment parameters.
Cognitive Load Theory (John Sweller): Human Working Memory has a small
capacity and easy to overload with incoming information, especially multi-
sensory information.
Communicate: ongoing process from start to finish of own or team’s articulations,
written, spoken and portrayed, with active listening and response. Frequently
this leads to products for an audience, who may provide part of a feedback loop
for ongoing improvement.
Connectivism (George Sieman’s): Information and knowledge are available to a
learner from networks of people, devices and other sources, and often accessed
at time of need.
Clarify: fine-tune one’s purpose through a deepened understanding of sophisticated
thinking.
Constructive: a desire to build up, not merely to persuade or gain self-benefit.
Creative: making something new to oneself and one’s team, whether through the
synthesis of parts or from scratch; not mimicry.
Curious: intoxicated by an issue or phenomenon and inspired to pursue it; not
disengaged.
Determined: continuing until one has an appropriate resolution; not a gathering of
information or generation of data that is slapdash.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 137
J. Willison, The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching,
SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2683-1
138 Glossary of MELT Terms

Discerning: insightful look at information and people, not gullibly consumed or

tricked into participating.
Embark: to set off on a learning journey, frequently involving re-embarking.
Engagement: frequently socially interactive and always minds-on cognitively and
affectively. Engagement in MELT involves social, cognitive and emotional
values and attitudes about learning and about teaching. The details of the
engagement are provided in MELT’s six facets of learning and extent of
autonomy.
Facet: one face of the precious jewel of sophisticated thinking.
Harmonising: taking clutter and wreaking order on it, taking discord and making
beautiful connections.
Learning: going to a conceptual and affective place where one has not been before,
requiring and enabling sophisticated thinking. Brain-wise, this is the result of
the formation and consolidation of synapses in multiple locations in the brain.
Machine Learning: Discernment of trends and themes from data inputted and
collected to synthesise understanding, with potential to influence subsequent
decisions, actions and data gathering.
Machine Teaching: Machines programmed to teach and/or using Machine Learn-
ing to teach in ways that increasingly target ‘optimised’ learning for each
student.
Manage: working with timeframes, teams and resources so that they serve and do
not hinder that which is embarked on.
Organise: arrangements that bring time, resources, information and data into shape
in a way that is conducive to making sense of information and data.
Reflective Practitioner: Donald Schon’s practitioner, who, facing uncertainties
reflects ‘in-action’ and later looks back to learn from the situation, reflect-
ing ‘on-action’. This self-teaching without external inputs is powerful and
meaning-oriented.
Scope for autonomy: the extent of the structure and guidance which is given to
students in any learning tasks. This does not guarantee anything about the extent
of student autonomy realised.
Sophisticated thinking: the thinking required for problem solving, critical think-
ing, evidence based decision making, researching, understanding and metacog-
nition, to name a few.
Synthesise: pull together disparate parts to make a whole that is new to oneself,
one’s team or one’s audience. Typically a creative act.
Teaching: guiding others towards a conceptual and affective place they have never
been before.
Threshold Concepts (Ernst Meyer and Ray Land): Core concepts in any subject
or discipline, that enable or prevent students from deep learning.
Index

A D
Affective, 6–8, 19, 22, 23, 29, 31, 34, 35, 38– Determined, 7, 14, 22, 40–43, 45–48, 62, 87,
44, 47–49, 53, 55–57, 65, 130, 131, 131, 135
136 Discerning, 7, 44–47, 83, 86, 89, 126, 136
Analyse, 7, 42, 47, 49–52, 65, 67, 79, 84, 85,
87, 88, 90, 92, 116, 117, 135
Apollo, 70, 122 E
Apply, 7, 36, 37, 42, 43, 53–57, 64, 65, 70, Embark, 7, 8, 15, 23, 30, 31, 34–36, 38–41,
87, 89, 106, 117, 135 53, 56, 65, 70, 87, 117, 136
Autonomy, 5, 8, 16, 23, 24, 30, 32, 33, 39– Empathetic, 57
42, 44, 47, 49, 52, 56, 61, 62, 64, 67, Evaluate, 7, 42, 44, 45, 51, 54, 56, 65, 84,
74, 77, 80, 87, 97, 100, 105–109, 111, 85, 87, 88, 114, 117
112, 116, 117, 129–132, 135, 136 Evitable earth, 19, 123, 125, 127, 133

B H
Beavers Harmonising, 7, 47, 48, 136
dams, 18, 19, 124
learning, 5, 18–20, 23, 124
I
C Inevitable earth, 19, 123
Cambodia, 34, 36, 37, 40, 43, 45, 47, 48, 55,
79
Clarify, 7, 8, 23, 30, 31, 33–36, 38–42, 53, L
56, 65, 70, 87, 107, 109, 117 Learning autonomy, 5, 6, 8–10, 16, 20, 21,
Cognitive Load Theory, 5, 103, 105–109, 23–25, 29, 30, 32–34, 41, 42, 44, 74,
117, 135 77, 87, 95–98, 100, 103, 105, 106,
Communicate, 7, 22, 36, 37, 42, 53–57, 65, 109–111, 116–118, 126, 129–132
66, 74, 87, 117, 123, 130, 135
Constructive, 7, 53, 55, 57, 91, 122, 125, 130
Constructivism M
personal, 90, 91, 93, 95–98 Machine learning, 110–112, 136
social, 90, 91, 94–98, 110 Machine teaching, 24, 110, 111, 136
Creative, 7, 18, 31, 49, 52, 65, 89, 111, 114, Manage, 3, 7, 42, 47–49, 65, 87, 124, 131,
125, 135, 136 136
Curious, 7, 8, 18, 34, 35, 40, 57, 91, 135 Metacognitive, 62
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 139
J. Willison, The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching,
SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2683-1
140 Index

O Synthesise, 7, 42, 49, 65, 84, 87, 88, 109,

Organise, 7, 42, 47–49, 65, 67, 87, 114, 117, 114, 117, 126, 136
136

T
P
Teaching autonomy, 5, 6, 8–10, 20, 21, 23–
Pacific, 4, 11, 47, 48, 53
25, 29, 33, 63, 96, 98, 100, 103, 110,
111, 117, 129–131, 136
Thinking routines, 3, 10, 58, 80, 114, 131
R
Threshold concepts, 5, 93, 103–106, 109,
Reflect, 7, 17, 22, 30, 33, 42, 44, 46, 56, 65,
136
67, 70, 84, 85, 87, 88, 92, 108, 114,
117, 136
Reflective practitioner, 103, 108, 109, 136
U
Understanding, 1–3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 19, 24, 29,
S 30, 34, 37, 43, 49–53, 55, 66, 70, 85–
Silver fluoride, 11, 24, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 89, 91–95, 98, 104, 105, 107, 109,
41–45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 55, 57, 79, 106 111, 117, 125, 126, 129, 131, 132,
Soyuz, 122, 123 135, 136