Dispositions are Embodied

Globally, the search is on for a kind of education that is not an intellectual obstacle-race, creating winners (who go on to good colleges and professional jobs) and losers (who don’t have that option), but one at which everyone can be a winner.

An education that is not (just) a competition but one that equips every young person with the core knowledge, skills and dispositions they need to lead a rich, fulfilling life whatever form their life is going to take.

An education that is self-evidently useful and empowering to families and young people themselves.

At present, the value of studying Shakespeare, Algebra or the Periodic Table to someone who might become a hairdresser or a car mechanic is not obvious. They are told these things matter, but not how or why. Cultural treasures, they say — but they don’t light everybody’s fire.

What knowledge and skills count as ‘core’ is a matter of dispute which I’m not going to pursue here. Instead, I’m going to zoom in on the third type of real-life assets: dispositions.

There is widespread agreement that schools should be developing something deeper and broader than specific skills and information. There is reasonable agreement about what some of these dispositions are. But there is very little agreement about what kind of thing these essential assets actually are, what to call them, and how best to inculcate them.

This lack of clarity has led to much confusion and uncertainty. A lot of fine words have been written and very little progress made. No country or state has, to my knowledge, yet achieved embedded, sustained system-wide change.

It’s these questions I want to tackle here.

Terminological Inexactitude

Different countries and agencies use a wide variety of different terms to chart the territory of dispositions.

Soft, non-cognitive or 21st century skills; attitudes or aptitudes; key competences or competencies; mindsets, virtues or values; general capabilities, thinking skills, habits of mind, learning dispositions, epistemic strengths or character traits; and so on.

This confusion leads to time wasted trying to map them on to each other or to articulate how exactly a ‘skill’ is different from a ‘disposition’.

They are all fishing in the same pond.

Broadly, there are two kinds of fish:

·        Prosocial traits that underpin being a ‘good person’, such as honest, kind, friendly, tolerant, trustworthy and socially responsible.

·        Epistemic ones that underpin being a ‘good learner’ — someone who deals well with complexity, novelty, uncertainty and challenge — such as curious, resilient, imaginative, resourceful, collaborative and reflective.

What Are Dispositions?

Dispositions are broad inclinations to behave in a certain kind of way when faced with a certain kind of situation.

Honesty is the tendency to let social decency override personal or short-term gain, for example when finding a lost purse.

Resilience or determination is the tendency to stay intelligently engaged with a tricky problem or situation rather than give up quickly.

Being imaginative is having the inclination (and the capability) to come up with possible things to try when you are stuck.

And so on.

Dispositions have five main characteristics.

1. They are behavioural

They are tendencies to act, not just to think or know. In that sense they are features of a living, breathing body that wants to survive and prosper; they are not just ideas or ‘good intentions’.

They are functional rather than theoretical. They have some power to direct us.

2. They are value-laden

They tend to have an emotional or moral tinge to them.They prioritise long-term goals, lasting benefits and deeper values.

They represent the self we like ourselves for being.

3. They are broader than specific skills

They are more abstract templates that capture and respond to the significance of the situation rather than being tied to particular details.

The ‘trigger’ is, for example, ‘being stuck’ rather than ‘it’s time to weld those two pieces of metal together’.

4. They are flexible rather than fixed

Whether they hold sway — and how they are expressed — depends on what else is going on in the body and out in the environment at the time.

They are default preferences rather than hard-and-fast rules.

5. They are biological

They are embedded in the way our brains and bodies work, the way they have been sculpted by our genes and our experiences. They are circuits in the brain that loop out into the sensors and the muscles of the body.

As Aristotle said, character is composed of dispositions — tendencies to act in more or less judicious ways — that are built up by experience.

They are the mnemonic residues of countless interactions with the world, annotated according to their success or failure to promote our wellbeing.

How Are Dispositions Developed?

It will be clear from this quick rundown of their characteristics that dispositions can’t be directly taught. You can’t explain honesty or empathy to someone and expect them suddenly to become honest or empathic.

To have a talk about ‘growth mindset’, stick up a poster and expect magic to happen is naïve in the extreme.

But dispositions can be cultivated in the same way that plants are nurtured. You create the right conditions for the kinds of growth you want and then sit back and — if you got it right — watch the growth happen.

If you want your beans to grow tall you may have to put in some sticks for them to twine themselves around. That is what explicit discussion can do; it can provide beanpoles. It can’t force growth but it can support it.

So the main job of the teacher as dispositional gardener is to create the right conditions — the right culture — in their schools and classrooms. Luckily, the conditions necessary for the growth of the epistemic dispositions are quite straightforward.

First, you make sure that your classroom is a safe place to be a learner. That means having a go and making mistakes involve no risk at all of anyone putting you down. It means building a shared understanding that we are all beginners, ungainly and inept, sometimes (especially the ‘high achievers’).

It means sometimes modelling being a learner yourself, revealing some of your own struggles and fallibilities, pour encourager les autres.

It means making time for people to practise and experiment. It means encouraging drafting and redrafting, coaching giving and accepting feedback and support without getting upset, on the way to a product or a performance of which your learners are justly proud.

And then it means populating that safe space with juicy and irresistible challenges and provocations, the pursuit of which requires effort and commitment.

In the course of grappling with these well-chosen challenges, learners’ curiosity, persistence, resourcefulness, imagination and collaboration have to be engaged, stretched and strengthened.

It means gently appreciating the growth of your learners’ self-reliance and independence, and helping them appreciate their own (and each others’) progress and development.

And then it means gradually, at a tolerable rate, escalating the complexity and autonomy of the challenges so that the dispositions progressively become stronger and more robust, broader and more generic, and more sophisticated and flexible.

And that’s it. Job done. The only problem left is how to get there from here.

But that’s another story.