Cognitive Flexibility Theory

"If it was fun, it wouldn't be called work."
This common aphorism has been around for at least two generations. I've used it half in jest on occasion, particularly when faced with a distasteful or difficult task. I thought of the tendency of our society in general and education in particular to be accommodating as I read this article. I witness the results of this accommodation in my classroom every day and quite frequently while taking graduate level courses in education.

I've recently come to the conclusion that educators are the biggest tinkerers in the world. This is a healthy thing for all teachers to do: reflect and revise lesson plans, projects and units to achieve higher levels of understanding for all students. It is imperitive to experiment and analyze so one may draw on previous experiences to improve teaching strategies.

Education theorists pursue a new paradigm for instruction with the fervor of a Crusader seeking the Holy Grail. There must be a better way to make them learn, they posit. Analogous to Einstein's elusive single unified theory, CFT was developed to be a meta-theory for the learning process with four main goals:

1. Help people learn important but difficult material.
2. Teach learners to adapt and flexibly apply knowledge in real-world settings.
3. Change the underlying way people think
4. Create new hypermedia environments to promote items 1-3

Many progressive corporations use teamwork and employee empowerment to allow decisions to rise up from those who work closest to the business challenges. This is in stark contrast to the old manager-employee structure. This 'inverted pyramid' approach will end up rewarding those who can think critically and solve problems.

CFT creates a learning environment where subsets of content may be randomly sampled to allow the student to appreciate the superset through inference and extrapolation. It is suggested that using technology to create hypermedia learning environments will help the digital natives learn better. Experiential learning encourages higher order thinking skills and leads to the ability to transfer knowledge and problem solving strategies. Technology can certainly add to learning experience.

What concerns me as a social studies teacher is one must be careful in the selection of content to be applied when using this construct. Rote memorization of a timeline has no intrinsic educational value, but understanding cause and effect does. Making analogies and drawing parallels is an important life skill that can be practiced with Social Studies content.