Welcome

“We do not write in order to think, but think in order to write.”

This phrase keeps bouncing around in my head. I first recall coming across it in a book entitled “Write Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day” by Joan Bolker while I was working on my Masters dissertation. I never did stick to fifteen minutes a day but the fundamental idea that the act of writing is the key to thinking stayed with me.

As I’ve continued to reflect on my own thinking and on learning, I have become more and more convinced that thinking isn’t something that happens just in our heads. It does, but the challenge, the important part, is the act of bringing our ideas out of our heads. Rarely does an idea spring from our lips or our pens or fingers fully formed, beautifully clear so that all can understand. Very rarely.

I have become more and more convinced that thinking is an act that requires more than one person, or at least more than one perspective. When working with students and trying to convince them of the value of actively participating in the conversations in our classrooms, I like to say that “The learning happens in the air” – by which I mean that it is through the act of discussing something and wrestling with an idea in conversation with other people that we truly arrive at understanding. Learning is a social activity.

How does this equate with the solitary act of writing, in order to think? Writing brings the ideas out of our heads and makes them visible to us and to others. In my head my thoughts are incomplete, I can have a general sense of something and think I understand it, but only when it comes out of my head do I truly see it and get a sense of it. I, personally, find it very difficult to write something that doesn’t make sense to me. Writing pulls ideas out of my heads and enables them to form, giving me the chance to look at them from different perspectives.

So, welcome to my blog, where I will be writing in order to think. I will be writing a lot about education and about learning, and I’m going to try to make a habit of regular writing. Feel free to be a silent lurker, a role I myself have played for many years, though if you do like to solve the problems of the world over a beer/coffee/drink of your choice and would like to engage in the conversation, please do. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.