How to Make Good KnowledgeBuilding Discourse Better
Carl Bereiter
Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology
2010 Knowledge Building Summer Institute
How to Make Good Knowledge-Building
Discourse Better
Basic Premises
• Collaborative knowledge building takes place in
the discourse among collaborators.
• Research, private reflection, etc. contribute to
collaborative knowledge building only insofar as
they contribute to the discourse.
• Understand knowledge-building discourse and you
understand knowledge building.
• Improve the discourse and you improve knowledge
building.
Successful Knowledge-Building Discourse
Depends on Making Good Dialogue “Moves”
• Knowledge-building discourse advances toward a
knowledge-building goal.
• Good dialogue moves are strategic actions that
increase the likelihood of reaching the goal.
• As in chess, no move is good in and of itself. A
move is only good or bad in relation to the state of
play.
• Although there is more to dialogue and chess than
making good moves, success depends on good
moves.
Components of the
Dialogue Model
• Experts spend relatively more time on
problem analysis than novices, who try
too quickly to solve problem.
• The main problems in school learning
are problems of understanding.
• Problems are frequently changed,
elaborated, broken down into subproblems.
• Airplane design problem (1900): Planes
crash before going 400 yards.
– Essence of the problem for most
aircraft builders: Stability
– Essence of the problem for the
Wright Brothers: Control
Components of the
Dialogue Model
• Each type of idea helps produce
the other types.
• Thus it helps to aim for a new
distinction, new analogy, etc.,
rather than unfocused idea
generation.
• Abduction in knowledge
building: If X is true, this helps
explain Y.
• Important facts are facts that help
solve a knowledge problem;
distinct from facts that are
relevant to the topic but don’t
help solve a problem.
Components of the
Dialogue Model
• Whether a particular idea will
prove valuable in the end cannot
generally be known with
certainty.
• A significant challenge in all
creative work, in both the fine
grain and the large, is to identify
promising ideas and to avoid
wasting time on or becoming
entrapped by unpromising ones.
• More about “promisingness”
later.
Components of the
Dialogue Model
• Dialogue about the dialogue
–
–
–
–
How well it is progressing
What progress we have made
Where it is heading
What is hampering progress
• Personal and interpersonal
considerations as well as
cognitve
– Does everyone have a chance to be
heard?
– How are turns being taken?
– Are people listening to each other?
• Should some parts of the
dialogue model be getting more
attention?
Components of the
Dialogue Model
• Identify similar problems and
lessons to be learned.
Components of the
Dialogue Model
• At any point in knowledgecreating dialogue the truth or
trustworthiness of some
statement may be called into
question.
• Once a belief issue is raised in a
knowledge-creating dialogue,
however, it is important to ask
whether it matters.
• If a belief issue does need to be
settled, the dialogue may move
into some form of
argumentation.
• Often in knowledge-creating
dialogue the issue is whether the
available information is good
enough for its purpose.
Components of the
Dialogue Model
• Higher-level ideas are ideas that
have application outside the
current problem domain.
• In practical areas, higher-level
ideas sometimes prove important
in solving the immediate
problem: e.g., the Wright
Brothers’ “theory” of aircraft
control.
• Building higher-level ideas
always involves investment of
effort over and above what
appears necessary for solving the
immediate problem; but it is an
investment worth making.
Components of the
Dialogue Model
• Next steps may take the dialog
back to any of the other boxes.
• Or they may take participants to
activity outside the dialogue:
empirical research, consultation,
etc.
Example of a Good Knowledge-Building
Dialogue: Explaining Growth
• Initiated and carried on by middle-school students
for a period of 4 months.
• Exhibits a number of knowledge building
principles.
• The state of community knowledge clearly
advanced greatly.
• Dialogue compares favorably with what would be
expected of educated non-specialist adults.
• Examining the dialogue in relation to the model
reveals limitations and ways the dialogue could
have been more successful.
Critique of Student
Dialogue
• Clear problem: “What is it that
makes people grow, and what is it
that makes people stop growing
when they reach a certain age?”
• Spin-off problems: Explain hair
and nails growth, knowledge
growth, shrinking in old age.
• Some students were off and
running before a problem had been
formulated, whereas others
“problematized” their own
concerns and experiences.
Critique of Student
Dialogue
• Initial hypotheses about growth:
– Clock in the head
– Using up growth hormone
– Heredity
• New distinction: rate of growth vs.
ultimate size.
• New analogy, to clarify difference
between skeletal growth and growth of
hair and nails: “Your body is like the
infrastructure of the house. Built once.
Your hair and fingernails are like the
shingles and siding. Always being
replaced. This is just a theory.”
• No evidence of abduction.
• Facts brought in are problem relevant;
ideas steadily refined and revised.
Critique of Student
Dialogue
• Interestingness rather than
promisingness seems to have
been the guide.
• For experts in a discipline ideas
may be interesting because they
are promising. Not necessarily
the case with beginners.
– Example: Idea of cross-breeding
animals with plants to produce
animals that can manufacture food
by photosynthesis.
Critique of Student
Dialogue
• Frequent comments about how
well the dialogue was going—
how much they were learning,
how many good ideas had come
up.
• However, there was no
discussion about the state of the
dialogue and whether making
progress toward its objective, the
social dynamics of the dialogue,
or how it related to the state of
the art in the growth field.
• Meta-dialogue is possible with
students this age: “We’re doing
knowledge telling, not
knowledge transforming.”
Critique of Student
Dialogue
• Frequent comparison of human
growth to tree growth, reflecting
recent study of trees.
• Comparison helped to sharpen
the issue of what is meant by
growth: “I don't know if you
could really call [trees growing
new leaves] growing, but it's just
like growing fingernails and hair.
It just depends if you consider
that that’s growing.”
Critique of Student
Dialogue
• Frequent reference to truth and
evidence.
• It seems fair to say that the
discourse was carried on largely
in belief mode rather than design
mode.
– Student introduces explanatory
hypothesis and discussion turns
immediately to whether it is true or
not.
– Design mode questions of what the
hypothesis explains or fails to
explain and how the hypothesis
might be improved do not arise.
– Consequently little idea
development, little movement
toward greater explanatory
coherence.
Critique of Student
Dialogue
Higher-level ideas would have included
concepts and conceptual tools applicable to
problems beyond explaining human growth.
Some potential tools that received a
glimmer of attention in the dialogue were:
• Proportional versus absolute increase.
• Correlation. (Do short parents tend to
have short children?)
• Polysemy (“Growth” might mean
something different depending on
whether it refers to growth in height,
growth in knowledge, or growth of new
hair or skin cells.)
Development of higher-level ideas depends
on investing effort over and above that
required for solving the immediate problem.
No indication of this.
Critique of Student
Dialogue
As the school year came to an end,
the teacher asked students to enter
reflections on the dialogue.
– Several indicated they hoped it
would resume in the fall.
– One suggested collecting
information over the summer
through interviewing various
professionals.
– One proposed that a new dialogue
should be started dealing with the
brain and growth in knowledge.
How Successful Was This as Knowledge-Building
Discourse?
• It had a goal, to explain physical growth.
• Students for the most part stuck to this goal and gathered
information directly relevant to it.
• The state of community knowledge underwent a
considerable advance, as recognized by the students
themselves.
• Nevertheless, a coherent explanation of growth was not
achieved.
• Instead, the class achieved a multi-factorial explanation-essentially a list of factors that affect growth.
• This is probably the state of most adult knowledge about
growth, but knowledge building could go to a higher level.
Summary of How Discourse Might Have Been
Strengthened
• Above all, shift from belief mode to design mode.
• More analysis of problem: Why understanding growth is
important, complex.
• More idea revision.
• More consideration of what are promising/unpromising
subproblems, explanatory ideas.
• More meta-dialogue: Are we making progress? Not
simply are we learning?
• More “rising above” to higher-level of explanation.
Summary of How Discourse Might Have Been
Strengthened
• Above all, shift from belief mode to design mode.
• More analysis of problem: Why understanding growth is
important, complex.
• More idea revision.
• More consideration of what are promising/unpromising
subproblems, explanatory ideas.
• More meta-dialogue: Are we making progress? Not
simply are we learning?
• More “rising above” to higher-level of explanation.
Belief Mode versus Design Mode
• In belief mode new information is used to support or
disconfirm ideas but not to further their development.
• This is typical school practice, strongly supported by many
science educators.
• But this is a distortion of science that ignores its creative
aspect.
• Knowledge Building makes the creative aspect central—
not only in science but in every subject where
understanding is a goal.
• Shifting education from belief mode to design mode
overturns millennia of tradition.
• Important to get the students themselves on the side of
design mode.
Judgments of Promisingness
• Promisingness plays the same role in design mode that
convincingness plays in belief mode.
• Because the outcomes of knowledge building efforts (like
all creative acts) are always uncertain, successful
knowledge building requires good judgment about
promisingness of choices to be made.
• Good judgments of promisingness depend on knowledge-mainly knowledge acquired from previous efforts to do
creative work in the relevant area.
• An important part of becoming a creative knowledge
builder is making choices and learning from the resulting
successes and failures.
• Teachers or team leaders need to encourage judgments of
promisingness and help members learn from them.
Typical Idea-Generating Discussion:
Step 1: Freely generate abundance of ideas.
Step 2: Combine ideas into categories, summarize.
• Step 2 is almost always a mistake.
• It removes the distinctiveness and originality of
ideas.
• Instead, discuss which are the most promising
ideas, ideas most worthy of further work.
• Instead of seeking a common denominator, seek
ideas with uncommon potential.
Examples of Possible Scaffolds for Good Dialogue
Moves
• Looking more deeply into this problem…
• This idea can be improved by…
• This concept (or distinction, analogy, hypothesis) helps
to...
• This idea is worth working on because…
• Something else this idea might explain is…
• Another way to look at this is...
• Are we getting closer to a solution?
• Where is this discussion heading?
• Putting these ideas together…
Better Knowledge-Building Discourse for Deeper
Understanding
• The result of knowledge-building discourse should be that
some portion of the world makes more sense than before.
• Students in the growth discussion produced pieces of the
story of how people grow; deeper understanding would put
the pieces together into a process narrative:
– Here’s what happens when you grow….
– Here’s what happens when a tree grows…
– Are these processes as different as they seem? This is a
question for even deeper inquiry.
• There is always a deeper level.