Googleable or Not Googleable?

When we're working with schools on our Design Thinking School programme, one of the easiest ways to explain what we're looking for in the way a project is set, is whether the statement or questions being asked can be Googled easily: is this a Googleable or Not Googleable topic?

Every topic, every bit of learning has content that can be Googled, and we don't want teachers wasting precious enquiry time lecturing that content. We want students, instead, to be using class time to collaborate and debate around the questions that are Not Googleable, the rich higher order thinking to which neither the textbook nor the teacher know the answers.

One of our schools in Brisbane, Star of the Sea Cleveland, took my "Googleable" / "Not Googleable" to a very literal end, when they pinned up two headings and got students to post-it each and every question in the class, categorising those which could be searched quickly (the lower order questions) and those which they should dwell on in class time.

This is the kind of meaty discussion that we want in class, and making it explicit in this way means that we cut to the higher order thinking so much quicker.

Read more from our Brisbane school, and how the rest of this particular lesson worked out, on our shared blog.

Comments

[Matt Pocock]

This is great! This relates back to Paolo Freire's concept of "banking education" - that teachers who just teach fixed knowledge teach a fixed view of the world.

The knowledge that is googleable is fixed, unchangeable.
The knowledge that responds to a higher order of thinking are decisions: on policy and morality, from bedrooms to boardrooms.

Train them that the world is fixed, and they will respond in kind to that fixed world.
Train children in decision-making, and you make a generation of world-changers.

Far too much fixed education in the UK!