The future belongs to the elastic mind
Give up the thought that you have control. You don't. The best you can do is adapt, anticipate, be flexible, sense the environment and respond.
~Frances Arnold, Nobel Laureate
As a teacher, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about how my brain works. Why do I respond to certain stimuli in the way I do? When am I most productive? What can I do to spark my own creativity, as well as my own happiness and satisfaction? How do I optimize my thinking so that I can continue to learn and grow? And, after all these years, continue to do this work with energy and enthusiasm?
Furthermore, how can I help my students to develop these kinds of metacognitive skills? Not only do I feel like it’s my job to teach my students to read and write more effectively, but I also think it’s essential to help my students to understand how they think and learn and to foster an awareness of their own power and agency in this process. Many questions guide my practice, but if I had to boil it down to one, it might be something like: How do I help my high school students to cultivate the cognitive habits they need to be happy and successful in school? And in their lives?
With that goal in mind, For almost two decades, I have leaned into mindfulness, using daily meditation and my own pedagogy to create a learning space where attention, engagement and community are paramount. I have found that as students become more engaged in the community of my classroom, they also become more comfortable and confident. And, it is this comfort and confidence that makes students more likely to embrace the ideas that underpin a growth mindset and where important work building stamina and resilience can take place. As students are given more opportunities to work through challenges and deal productively with setbacks, they begin to internalize the important idea that failure is rarely permanent and that they can, in fact, do hard things.
While I have no intention of abandoning these approaches to my work, I am always looking to improve them and one idea, in particular, seems to be uniquely relevant to the times we live in. Flexible thinking is often touted as the most essential skill in an increasingly complex and fast-changing world and everyone from psychologists to educators to business leaders seem to agree that it is the singular cognitive style that will best serve us going forward.
Flexible thinking—also known as elastic or agile thinking—can be defined as the ability to let go of comfortable ideas and old ways of doing things to explore or consider new ideas. It is capacity and willingness to sit with ambiguity and contradiction and to let our minds wander before fixing on a solution. It is the propensity to embrace what is new and unknown and to rely on our imaginations as much as our intellect to solve problems. Elastic thinking requires us to abandon existing assumptions and open ourselves to experimentation and possible failure. In a world that is constantly changing, it is the ability to embrace what we don’t fully understand and to be in a consistent state of openness, so that we can integrate new ideas and information into existing value systems and intellectual paradigms.
Leonard Mlodinow, a theoretical physicist and best-selling author, coined the phrase “elastic thinking” in his 2018 book, Elastic. There he argues that not only is this type of thinking useful in many contexts, it is absolutely essential in a world that is changing at breakneck speed and in which our ability to adapt really defines our ability to survive and thrive, both in our work and in our personal lives. “We have to be willing to rise above conventional mindsets, to reframe the questions we ask, to be open to new paradigms. We have to rely as much on our imagination as on logic, and have the ability to generate and integrate a wide variety of ideas, to welcome experiment, and be tolerant of failure,” Leonard Mlodinow (Elastic, 2018)
The next question for me, then, is how do we cultivate elastic thinking? And, how do I help my students to cultivate elastic thinking habits? It turns out that quite a few educators have been thinking about this very question and a couple of simple and actionable ideas stand out to me:
Model flexible thinking. Reveal to your students your own thought processes, especially when they involve letting go of comfortable ideas or familiar ways of doing things.
Help students become more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. Eliminate false dichotomies and the oversimplification of complex issues and help students to embrace the idea that they can consider a question from multiple perspectives, without necessarily finding the answer.
Make space for brainstorming and mind-wandering. Sometimes in the middle of a busy semester, I’ll set aside a day for coloring mandalas with colored pencils, while listening to classical music. I believe this helps my students to ‘get loose’ intellectually, so that instead of actively seeking ideas or solutions, they open space for them to come. This is often referred to as bottom-up thinking, where ideas kind of percolate up into the brain, even when you’re not looking for them.
Encourage and reward experimentation, especially when it takes a student out of their comfort zone.
Help students overcome their fear of failure by consistently emphasizing the potential for real growth and learning inherent in every challenge and setback.
Reframe the questions you ask students. Re-imagine your place in the conversation. Ask your students to do the same—to see the question from another perspective. Make room for a well-planned class discussion to move beyond—or beside—the plan and go someplace entirely new and unexpected. Save space for the magic.
