Christian Moore-Anderson

@cmooreanderson.eurosky.social

2357 Followers 964 Following

● Educational author & biology teacher (11–18) ● Reader of enactive cognitive science & systems theory ● Author of Teaching Meaning, Difference Maker, and Biology Made Real Blog & ideas: https://christianmooreanderson.com/

The cover of Darwinizing Gaia: Natural Selection and Multispecies Community Evolution by Ford Doolittle.
Yet, if we return to the student and apply this idea directly to them, we find another loop; one that deserves special attention because it changes the entire dynamic. There’s another level of problem solving: The student’s self-regulation. Essentially, students become problem solvers for their own participation in learning. They develop their own certainty about how to act, rather than relying on the teacher’s regulation. I’ve represented it in the following formula. THE CAPACITY TO ENGAGE ≥ THE COMPLEXITY FACED ↓ student’s relevant knowledge + student’s certainty about how to act + student’s self-regulation + teacher’s support + teacher’s certainty about how to act
Vellend's model: As an initial brief illustration, consider one of the simplest questions one can ask about an ecological community: what can cause a change in the number of species (S) present in a particular place over time? Figure 4.2 shows one community, initially with nine individuals divided among three species. There are only four fundamental ways to change the number of species, which we can imagine in a hypothetical sequence of steps: 1. Speciation: One subpopulation of the white species diverges from the other, forming a new species; the community now has four species instead of three. 2. Dispersal (immigration): An individual of a species not already present locally arrives from somewhere else and joins the community. A species has been added to the community. 3. Drift: Even if all individual organisms have the same expected rates of survival and reproduction, there is a nonzero probability that, for example, the solid gray individual will die before reproducing. If this happens, the number of species will decrease. 4. Selection: The white species has a fitness advantage over the black and dotted species (i.e., it deterministically makes a greater per capita contribution to the community in the next time step), thereby excluding them from the community. The number of species has decreased again.
A stock and flow diagram I designed for teaching the mechanism of transpiration
2. Close the gap between your teaching and their learning. This goal brings us back to my second basic move: conversing. Pask’s vision of conversation didn’t just involve spoken words; it included conversing via other interactions. Be it through written work, gestures, physical demonstrations, images, hands-up voting, or via a machine, with others or oneself. The key was the mutual communication that coordinated and reorganised the participants’ understandings.
RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS Into the Black Box: Explicating Black Boxes and Its Effect on Mechanistic Reasoning Gur Arie Livni Alcasid | Michal Haskel-Ittah Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
Harmlessly enough, computing (from com-putare) literally means to reflect, to contemplate (putare) things in concert (com), without any explicit reference to numerical quantities. Indeed, I shall use this term in this most general sense to indicate any operation (not necessarily numerical) that transforms, modifies, rearranges, orders, and so on, observed physical entities (“objects”) or their representations (“symbols”). For instance, the simple permutation of the three letters A,B,C, in which the last letter now goes first—C,A,B—I shall call a computation; similarly the operation that obliterates the commas between the letters—CAB—and likewise the semantic transformation that changes CAB into taxi, and so on.
Making perceptible the content that makes a difference is a key move in teaching meaning. For this reason, these key distinctions are known as the critical aspects in variation theory (I’ll use them synonymously in this book). Critical aspects are, then, distinctions that communities of teachers and experts agree are important. Because they shape how we notice, make sense of, and work with the content.
Cover of Teaching Meaning
Conversations are built on communication, but the two are distinct. In the introduction, I presented communication (which includes telling, exemplifying and demonstrating) as the most basic and intuitive of teaching moves. The value of communication is in its clarity. Conversations arise when two participants become entangled in communication. Their value lies in sharing, generating and coordinating meanings.
We should specify a lesson only somewhat; its content, and the key distinctions we’ll vary. And then play through the unfolding conversation in the direction we want to go.
Models for teaching biology I dream of a community of biology teachers who draw and explore models with students. Unlike many slide decks, the models I share aren’t the lesson itself. They aren’t to be presented or delivered, but co-constructed in conversing, step by step; a teaching method I explain in my books, Difference Maker and Teaching Meaning. Through sharing our best models and teaching moves: We become better teachers: combining the best of professional coordination and teaching autonomy. We have a lighter workload by avoiding laborious resource creation; our planning time involves making sense of models and checking subject knowledge. Our students learn more by reaping the benefits of teaching without PowerPoint slides and developing understanding beyond knowledge.
The book cover and rating of Teaching Meaning on the website goodreads.com
The book cover for "Ecological Psychology"
This might be a helpful moment to introduce a distinction between following a course of argument and understanding it. I take understanding to be the experience of what is understood in a wider context. In this sense, we do not fully understand a theorem until we are able to contain it in a more general theorem. We can nevertheless follow its proof, in the sense of coming to see its evidence, without understanding it in the wider sense in which it may rest. Following and understanding, like demonstrating and proving, are sometimes wrongly taken as synonymous. Very often a person is regarded as not understanding an argument, a process, a doctrine, when all that is certain is that he has not followed it. But his failure to follow may be quite deliberate, and may arise from the fact that he has understood what was presented to him, and does not follow it because he sees a shorter, or otherwise more acceptable, path, although he might not, yet, know how to communicate it. Following may thus be associated particularly with doctrine, and doctrine demands an adherence to a particular way of saying or doing something. Understanding has to do with the fact that what ever is said or done can always be said or done a different way, and yet all ways remain the same.
The variegated ficus.
Poerksen: What you call the bringing forth of a world, related thinkers simply designate the construction of reality. The difference between these two concepts is, for me, that constructivists have traditionally foregrounded the subject part. You seem to plead for a more balanced view of the relationship between subject and object. You insist: there must be both; both are indispensable for the act of cognition. Varela: That is the central idea. Only the co-construction of subject and object can overcome the traditional logical geography of the strict separation of knower and known, internal and external world. There is no subject, as the constructivists suggest, on one side, constructing its reality in the desired way. And there exists no object, as the realists believe, on the other side, which determines what happens in the organism. My view is that subject and object determine and condition each other, that knower and known arise in mutual dependence, that we neither represent an external world inside nor blindly and arbitrarily construct such a world and project it outside. My plea is for a middle way that avoids both the extremes of subjectivism and idealism, and the presumptions of realism and objectivism.
A screenshot of my site, which says: I dream of a community of biology teachers who draw and explore models with students. A vision explained in my books, Difference Maker and Teaching Meaning. Through sharing our best models and teaching moves: We combine the best of professional coordination and teaching autonomy: We become better teachers with a lighter workload. Students reap the benefits of teaching without PowerPoint slides and develop understanding beyond knowledge: Students learn more.
This book arrived two months ago. It has taken me that long to read it… Because this is a book not to be rushed!!! Every page has something that leaves you imagining all the ways you could use it in your lessons. Whether you are an ECT or a well seasoned teacher, whether you are a teacher of science, art, English, maths, etc this book presents the ways in which meaning is really made and gives evidenced insights on how you can help your students make meaning. This book talks about how knowledge needs to acted upon by students to make meaning. They need to be able to take a new idea and explore it. Vary the ways it can be used, using the idea of “If X, then what?”, helping students see the limits in which their new knowledge can be used. We must not “confuse agreement with making meaning.” This is a book to be savoured and I know it is one that I will be referring back to many, many times.
An image of a person throwing stones at a piece of paper to measure its size, influenced by Gregory Bateson. We can only throw questions at students and see how many land.
There’s a second, but related, problem with overly emphasising agreement. It can be seen by distinguishing between two ways of engaging: skilful coping (relying on established knowledge) or exploring (enacting new knowledge).6 Skilful coping draws on existing ways of seeing and acting to get things done. In other words, students can skilfully cope with a task and still not learn what we’d like them to learn. They’re good at learning contextual cues that help them say the right words at the right time.7 Task completion can resemble understanding, especially when all students are expected to give the same answers.
There’s a second, but related, problem with overly emphasising agreement. It can be seen by distinguishing between two ways of engaging: skilful coping (relying on established knowledge) or exploring (enacting new knowledge).6 Skilful coping draws on existing ways of seeing and acting to get things done. In other words, students can skilfully cope with a task and still not learn what we’d like them to learn. They’re good at learning contextual cues that help them say the right words at the right time.7 Task completion can resemble understanding, especially when all students are expected to give the same answers.
Skilful coping draws on existing ways of seeing and acting to get things done. In other words, students can skilfully cope with a task and still not learn what we’d like them to learn. They’re good at learning contextual cues that help them say the right words at the right time.7 Task completion can resemble understanding, especially when all students are expected to give the same answers.
Skilful coping draws on existing ways of seeing and acting to get things done. In other words, students can skilfully cope with a task and still not learn what we’d like them to learn. They’re good at learning contextual cues that help them say the right words at the right time.7 Task completion can resemble understanding, especially when all students are expected to give the same answers.
As efficient as this sounds, it leads to a paradox.4 If teaching involves agreement on an idea, part of a teacher’s role is to reduce their students’ errors and deviations. But if students just provide the correct (expected) answers, we know little about what they have actually understood. So, the more we reduce our students’ errors and deviations, the less we know how to respond as teachers.
From the post: Engelmann’s model just considers the “logic” of the stimulus as determining the response. He said that, “an inference is based solely on the features of the examples that are presented”. And, he thought, the mind wasn’t the agent; “stimuli are the agents that make a difference, and the differences that are made are the responses.” (emphasis added). Notice how in von Foerster’s diagram, the person’s intent depends on more than just their perception; it also depends on the meaning they’ve already made. At the same time, the way they actively make sense of the situation draws on that very same meaning. Meaning, then, is central to the model and point to a key distinction. Engelmann argued that students were logic machines; thinking perfectly logically with the logical environment. In this model (and that of enactive cognitive science and variation theory), students think perfectly rationally with the meaning they’ve made. The most interesting bit comes next: notice how the sense-making actively updates the meaning people hold. According to the model, then, when our students perceive something and act in response, we may then think, “hey, they learnt it, they should now respond in the same way if I give them the same stimulus”. This was Engelmann’s idea. But every time the student perceives something, their meaning is updated in some way. The next time we ask them the same question, we may get something different, something we didn’t expect. On the outside, there’s another loop to consider. As students act, they perceive new things. For example, as they answer a question, they perceive our response to them: our body language, our words and tone. They also perceive their classmate’s responses. They make sense of this and continually update their meaning.
Interesting and thoughtful read. I really appreciated the author's perspective as a biologist, as even though the examples were in some cases rather specific to his subject, they had a much wider resonance that I could apply to my work as a language teacher. The text felt personal and showed the author's clear passion for his subject, but also for how subjects aren't just a fixed entity, but a conversation between the subject, the teacher, and the students. Highly recommended for all Secondary/High School teachers, and worthy of a staff book club read.
A lesson diagram I draw for students. It includes a cladogram showing when placentas evolved, a graph showing the relationship between body mass (of adults) and gestation period. And, a drawing of the fetus in the uterus, including the amniotic sack, umbilical cord, and placenta.
A graph with two axes: X = Collectively gain capacity (discretionary capacity made available by coordinating a way of teaching). Y = Teacher's retained autonomy (discretionary capacity still available for coordinating a way of doing a curriculum). There are two positions with higher teacher autonomy than collectively gained capacity: Siloed teaching, and systems in which there are shared general ideas. The other positions gain more from coordinating. Shared scripts gives the worst outcome in terms of collectively gained capacity and teacher autonomy (giving the system a low capacity). Shared curricular EdTech platforms reduce the teacher's autonomy to low levels also, but can offer greater capacity through, for example, compiling lots of data on learning. Shared lesson structures and activities across teachers retains some teacher autonomy (the teacher can still decide what to say and do in lessons), and there are some gains from collective capacity through the networked sharing of ideas and resources. Finally, the best position for preserving teacher autonomy and gaining from coordination is a system of shared teacher principles and emergent resources. All is explained in the post.
A graph with two axes: X = Collectively gain capacity (discretionary capacity made available by coordinating a way of teaching). Y = Teacher's retained autonomy (discretionary capacity still available for coordinating a way of doing a curriculum). There are two positions with higher teacher autonomy than collectively gained capacity: Siloed teaching, and systems in which there are shared general ideas. The other positions gain more from coordinating. Shared scripts gives the worst outcome in terms of collectively gained capacity and teacher autonomy (giving the system a low capacity). Shared curricular EdTech platforms reduce the teacher's autonomy to low levels also, but can offer greater capacity through, for example, compiling lots of data on learning. Shared lesson structures and activities across teachers retains some teacher autonomy (the teacher can still decide what to say and do in lessons), and there are some gains from collective capacity through the networked sharing of ideas and resources. Finally, the best position for preserving teacher autonomy and gaining from coordination is a system of shared teacher principles and emergent resources. All is explained in the post.
A stock and flow model of digestion in the mouth and stomach.
30 visits from Bluesky, with 163 page views, and average sessions of 18 minutes. 20 visits from LinkedIn, with 21 page views (average session duration not logged)
The Goodreads page for Teaching Meaning showing 14 ratings with an average of 4.93.
The Amazon page of Teaching Meaning showing eleven 5-star ratings.
Daughter: Daddy, what is an instinct? Father: An instinct, my dear, is a explanatory principle. D: But what does it explain? F: Anything—almost anything at all. Anything you want it to explain. D: Don’t be silly. It doesn’t explain gravity. F: No. But that is because nobody wants “instinct” to explain gravity. f they did, it would explain it. We could simply say that the moon has an instinct whose strength varies inversely as the square of the distance… D: But that’s nonsense, Daddy. F: Yes, surely. But it was you who mentioned “instinct,” not I. D: All right—but then what does explain gravity? F: Nothing, my dear, because gravity is an explanatory principle. D: Oh.
A graphic based on von Foerster's nontrivial system. I've translated von Foersters terms into everyday teaching language. From the post: Notice how in von Foerster’s diagram, the person’s intent depends on more than just their perception; it also depends on the meaning they’ve already made. At the same time, the way they actively make sense of the situation draws on that very same meaning. Meaning, then, is central to the model and point to a key distinction. Engelmann argued that students were logic machines; thinking perfectly logically with the logical environment. In this model (and that of enactive cognitive science and variation theory), students think perfectly rationally with the meaning they’ve made. The most interesting bit comes next: notice how the sense-making actively updates the meaning people hold. According to the model, then, when our students perceive something and act in response, we may then think, “hey, they learnt it, they should now respond in the same way if I give them the same stimulus”. This was Engelmann’s idea. But every time the student perceives something, their meaning is updated in some way. The next time we ask them the same question, we may get something different, something we didn’t expect. On the outside, there’s another loop to consider. As students act, they perceive new things. For example, as they answer a question, they perceive our response to them: our body language, our words and tone. They also perceive their classmate’s responses. They make sense of this and continually update their meaning.
The mind as seen by a behavourist. A stimulus is an input, the response is the behaviour. What happens in between isn't important.
Positions on cognition placed between two continua: cognitivism-embodied cognition, and informationalism-organicism. Classical cognitivism can be found in the cognitivism-informationalism quadrant. Embodied cognition movements can be found in the emboded cognition-informationalim quadrant. Enactivism is found in the embodied cognition-organicism quadrant.
Following may thus be associated particularly with doctrine, and doctrine demands an adherence to a particular way of saying or doing something. Understanding has to do with the fact that what ever is said or done can always be said or done a different way, and yet all ways remain the same.
In Teaching Meaning, Christian Moore-Anderson gets to the heart of how well-designed teaching can transform student learning. Writing with his distinctive perspective, he shows how many rules of thumb in teaching are half-truths. Greater clarity in our own thinking as teachers, along with a better understanding of what is needed in the minds of students if they are to learn, can make teaching much more effective. Dr. Michael Reiss Professor of Science Education, University of London
Are your teaching "rules of thumb" actually half-truths?
A venn diagram typical of information theory. It shows the resolution of uncertainty with a communication. That uncertainty that isn't resolved is due to ambiguity in the communication, and noise.
The brain is a beautifully complex organ, and humans are inherently social beings. While education has recently embraced the science of memory, Christian’s book supports educators in taking the next crucial step: helping young people make meaning. As an experienced, practising teacher, Christian guides the reader through the carefully curated moves of the ‘Meaning Making Game.’ This application of enactive cognitive science gives teachers a way of acting that generates deep understanding. Every page is rich with insight. As I was reading, I felt compelled to talk to Christian about what I was learning – a perfect reflection of the coordinated meaning-making the book itself is about. As a vital addition to our educational dialogue, I wholeheartedly recommend this to readers in all areas and phases of education.
The brain is a beautifully complex organ, and humans are inherently social beings. While education has recently embraced the science of memory, Christian’s book supports educators in taking the next crucial step: helping young people make meaning. As an experienced, practising teacher, Christian guides the reader through the carefully curated moves of the ‘Meaning Making Game.’ This application of enactive cognitive science gives teachers a way of acting that generates deep understanding. Every page is rich with insight. As I was reading, I felt compelled to talk to Christian about what I was learning – a perfect reflection of the coordinated meaning-making the book itself is about. As a vital addition to our educational dialogue, I wholeheartedly recommend this to readers in all areas and phases of education.
What is the purpose of rehearsal during lessons?
The second point is the way folk systems relate to cultural innovations. Geary states, “I am suggesting that the components of fluid intelligence enable the creation of secondary abilities by modifying folk systems” (2008/this issue, pp. 188–189). But this is wrong if folk modules do not exist a priori with genetically inherited knowledge inbuilt, so that they then have to be modified to fit a newenvironment. I claim the effective folk modules do not have this nature: rather, the effective folk systems develop in response to the ambient environment in an adaptive way and hence this conflict does not arise. Thus I propose that the identified folk systems do not exist as genetically determined modules; rather, given a set of basic intellectual capacities, these effective modules develop as a result of interactions with the social and physical environment. The key difference is that in the article the supposed folk modules are taken to be inherited (genetically determined), whereas I propose they are of developmental origin, and hence environmentally shaped. Then they will automatically adapt to cultural innovations, as they will indeed be shaped by the culture in which the individual is situated.
Commentary on “An Evolutionarily Informed Education Science” by David C. Geary George F. R. Ellis Mathematics Department University of Cape Town, South Africa Dr. David C. Geary’s article centers on the concept of inherited folk psychology modules, together with the idea of a transition from primary to secondary learning. This article suggests that there exist only effective folk psychology modules, which are the result of interaction of inherited primary emotional systems with the physical, biological, and social environment. Consequently there is no transition from primary to secondary learning; all cognitive modules result from the process characterized by Geary as secondary learning. Furthermore, an evolutionary psychology analysis does not support the idea of a phoneme-based approach to learning how to read, as suggested by Geary; rather all evolutionary processes are top-down as well as bottom-up, and hence rather support holistic, meaning-based approaches. Finally the issue of proof and evidence in these contexts is raised; it is suggested that no adequate criteria have been given for proving existence of the suggested folk psychology modules, whereas such criteria do exist for the primary emotional systems that are in fact the lynchpin of evolutionary psychology effects.
The cover of Geary's book, The Evolved Mind and Modern Education
Number 1 seller in the category of "high school": Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn't Enough.
Information Theory and why explaining clearly isn’t enough
The cover of the book Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn't Enough
A photo of the hardback of Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn't Enough.
A diagram for explaining Mendel's monhybrid crosses of pea plants.
Top 5 referrers to my personal site in the last month. Visitors from Bluesky spend an average of almost 7 minutes. From LinkedIn, they spend just two and a half minutes.
If the learner does not respond in the predicted manner to a faultless communication, the assumed “fault” lies not with the communication, but with the learner. Therefore, we must switch our focus. This switch involves a complete change in orientation, from a concern with the analyses of communicating quality and sameness in a precise manner, to the laws of behavior. These laws provide us with specific guides about the amount of practice, the massing and distribution of trials, the schedules of reinforcement, and other variables that cause the growth or strengthening of the learner’s response to take place. For example, if the learner apparently forgets the word red and cannot respond to various examples in a faultless presentation that asks the learner, “What color is this?”, we modify the learner’s capacity to “remember” how to produce the name. When the learner reliably remembers the words, we return to the original communication. The learner is now assumed to be an adequate receiver, capable of responding according to the predictions of the stimulus-locus analysis.
The book cover for Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn't Enough.