Brainvestigator is not a word. I made it up. Well, technically, me and AI made it up.
Its a bit like the word problatunity. Making up words feels good, in a powerful kind of way.
What’s in a name?
In this post, I pose a curious question: What if we as educators changed our name to brainvestigators? I wonder if, perhaps, one of the reasons our education system has not changed all that much over the past 1 million hundred years is that we need a makeover. Well, of course we need a makeover, and a cool new name to really shake things up.
Brainvestigator sounds so much cooler than educator or teacher. Those old names have been around so long. When something has been around for so long, we all just assume we know what it is, what it does, and what it will always be.
Let Me Explain…
See video above for reasons why we should no longer call ourselves educators.
In case you need further evidence let’s define some terms:
- “Wah, Wah, Wah”- Teacher talking, students trying hard to listen.
- Teacher: a person who teaches, especially in a school
- Educator: a person who provides instruction or education; see teacher
Try this quote out as your first brainvestigator assignment:
Learning is not the product of teaching, it is the product of the activity of learners.- John Holt
What, then, is the product of teaching? Hmmmmmm……
Please do not misunderstand me. Teachers are the best people I have the privilege to know and work with daily. I just want to start calling them by their true name, you know, like from The Never Ending Story.
Basically, Bastian, the hero of the story, has to call out the Empress’s one true name, moonchild, in order to save Fantasia from the Nothing.
Truly, what we do as teachers is valuable, but imagine what we can do as brainvestigators!
How to be a Brainvestigator
Because I just made this word up, I get to define it.
brainvestigator (noun)- a person who gathers information and evidence to solve mysteries about how the brain works in different people through methods of observation, interviews, learning experiences, and analysis.
An excellent example, and inspiration for this post, is Detective Cordelia Cupp. If you haven’t yet watched the Netflix series The Residence, please, please go immediately and come back here later.
Probably my favorite thing about Cordelia Cupp, is that she is a bird watcher. It seems to me, this hobby is what makes her exceptional, the best, actually at what she does. Birders not only know what to look for, they know where to find them, and then they wait. I might even go so far as to say they anticipate.
Waiting and anticipating are different things. Anticipation implies expectation. When she interviews all the people who may or may not have had anything to do with the crime, she is anticipating their response to being questioned, without actually being questioned. Its hard to explain, watch the show.
A brainvestigator can behave in much the same way as a detective or birder. We need to know what we are looking for, how we can find it, and anticipate the rest. In the same way that a birder needs to know what birds do, brainvestigators need to know what learners do.
What do learners do?
Before we decided to call ourselves brainvestigators, we used to be called teachers. Teachers used these things called standards to help us know what our students need to be able to know and do to be successful, at some later date, like the 21st century. When is that exactly?
Anyway, knowing what students need to be able to know and do are good things. However, its not the same thing as knowing what learners actually do.
How do you think bird watchers got good at knowing what birds do?
Bingo! They watch them, study them, read about them, etc. etc.
How will we ever know what learners do if we never watch them, study them, read about them, etc. etc.?
I’m not talking about being creepy, like in a creepy creepy sort of way. I’m saying how can you create a learning environment where students are behaving like learners, that will give you the opportunity to observe what learning looks like in real time?
More of our work as brainvestigators (teachers) should be centered around being able to identify learning strategies students already have and designing experiences that give them opportunities to develop more and better learning strategies.
Learning is the Product of Doing
Verb-(noun) a word used to describe an action.
Turns out, this handy little thing that came out decades ago, Bloom’s Taxonomy of Verbs, gives us a great place to check and see if our students are actually doing the learning.
Designing experiences where learners will act like learners and actually do something does not have to be as complicated as we might think. Perhaps just looking at the list of verbs will get the wheels turning.
Take the word categorize, for example. When we design a learning experience where students are going to have to do a higher level skill like categorizing, we will get the opportunity to see how their brain makes connections. Making connections is a learning strategy.
A great activity for this is to give a group of students a bunch of cards with either words or pictures on them and ask them to categorize them. Limit them to 3-5 groups of cards, and tell them they must create a label for each category.
As they engage in this activity, you get to practice your skills as a brainvestigator! Walk around, observing what the learners are doing. How are they grouping the cards, how are they agreeing with each other, or better yet, disagreeing? Make a mental list, or an actual list, of all the learning strategies you are witnessing so that you will be prepared when you lead your group in a debrief of the activity.
Remember, debriefing is where you get to name the learning that took place during the activity. This is where it all comes together! More on this later!
New Identities Take Some Getting Used To
Its ok if it takes a while for your new identity to fully materialize. Just think how many superheroes kept their true identities secret for as long as possible. You may look in the mirror some days and see a brainvestigator. Or maybe you decide Tuesdays are brainvestigator days, and the rest are just teacher days.
Maybe, like some, you need an accessory, like a cape, or ,may I suggest, a t-shirt a less distressing item, that makes you feel like a brainvestigator. Whatever you need to try things on a bit.
In the end, changing your title from teacher to brainvestigator is just one subtle way to be a little subversive in a system that is going to take a lot to change. Please do not hesitate to share a picture of you in your new t-shirt, or any accessory of your choosing, that lets us all know how we are working to create change.
Enjoy the shift!