The Thrill of Insight
And why it’s not enough
At a recent meeting with my fellow GMWP bloggers, we discussed how students seem to struggle with explaining their reasoning in writing. Across grades, across subjects, students who work to gain insight have difficulty providing justifications: they can come up with an inspired answer, but they can’t explain what inspired the answer.
I have a theory that the issue has to do with the human brain.
People like solving puzzles and gaining insights: “I know the answer to 11 across!” “I know who the murderer is!” My understanding is that at such moments of insight, the brain sparks with electricity and the body gets a shot of dopamine. Having an insight literally feels good.
I suspect that some of our best classes happen when we are able to pose questions that have just the right amount of challenge. The students have the means to answer the question, they focus, and they gain insight.The answer to the perfect question is at first just out of reach, and then it isn’t.
And then the dopamine rush. Which feels really good.
From my own experience of such moments, I don’t really know how I arrived at the answer . But more importantly, I don’t get any sort of pleasure from explaining the details of how I knew that word or how I solved the crime in the first 50 pages.
Therefore, I am not surprised that students fail to offer a good enough explanation of even their greatest insights. We ask them to take their moment of insight and think about it joylessly for the next day, week, or month, pressing them to provide the details in an analytic writing paper process that offers them no biochemical reward.
And that’s a problem.
The Importance of Justification
I suspect that students see no value in justifying their arguments. They gained insight, so why do they have to show their work to the teacher?
This is math educator and professor Jo Boaler’s answer to this question :
“An important requirement in the Common Core is the need for students to discuss ideas and justify their thinking. There is a good reason for this: Justification and reasoning are two of the acts that lie at the heart of mathematics. They are, in many ways, the essence of what mathematics is. Scientists work to prove or disprove new theories by finding many cases that work or counter-examples that do not. Mathematicians, by contrast prove the validity of their propositions through justification and reasoning.”
But in addition to valuable intellectual training, I think there’s another benefit. As fellow GMWPer Ashley Collegnon put it: “By having students justify using multiple representations, they were able to make connections within the content that they had not considered before.”
I strongly suspect that this sort of mathematical reasoning takes place in any writing classroom, where students are constructing their own thoughts and reasoning through their ideas. Insight is a necessary part of developing an idea, but crafting the argument is where genuine understanding is formed.
At my school, Juniors write a 4000 word research essay over the course of 10 months. I suspect they experience this project as an interspersed series of dopamine rushes. They read, they think, they formulate a research question: hit! They struggle finding sources to develop their reasoning, but then find the concept, technique, or idea that enables them to understand the answer to their question: hit! They struggle to write out a summary of ideas, then finish each mini-essay: hit! Like an addict, however, they have to work harder and harder, longer and longer to earn the next hit.
As a teacher, I’m now caught in a bind: students enjoy the dopamine rush provided by insight, but deep understanding only comes through long periods of justification.
Learning to Love
In conversation, fellow GMWPer Jeannine Ramsey offered an instructive analogy. When we fall in love, strange biochemical reactions create an intoxicating series of romantic moments. But those fade away, to be replaced by the deeper, calmer satisfaction of being in love for decades.
So, perhaps the solution to student resistance to analyzing is to persuade them to fall in love with justification. Yes, the moment of insight feels good, but consider the prospect of genuine understanding you’ll have when you form a deep, meaningful relationship with this idea?
When students at my school submit their final research essay early in senior year, they sit down with their advisor for a closing interview. In my experience, students reflect on the highs and lows, and usually take great satisfaction in writing an essay that they start out believing is impossible. I’m not sure that they always love their work, but I do hope that giving them the experience of reasoning over such a long period of time will give them a reason to persevere in future writing projects.
