Newsletter #25: The Explanation Game
Charlotte Hawkins
Beverley Taylor Sorenson visual arts educator
I watched with hilarity as two teenagers accepted a challenge: call grandma on an old rotary phone. It was amusing to me because I know how to use a rotary phone. And a typewriter. And a compass. My dad taught me that one. After the buzzer went off, they hung their heads in frustration. “How do you use this thing?”
Technology makes tools and objects obsolete with alarming speed. It’s breathtaking to realize my great-grandfather harnessed horses to get to school each morning. I certainly can’t use a harness, although I might be able to eventually figure it out. “Understanding often involves recognizing the parts of a thing, what they do, how they function, their roles and purposes” (Ritchhart, Church & Morrison, Making Thinking Visible).
Project Zero (PZ), a Harvard Graduate School of Education initiative, has thinking routines to get students to notice the features and details of an object to generate explanations for why something is the way it is. The Explanation Game is an exercise in looking at the parts of an (sometimes unknown) object to build understanding of what it is or what it could be. The purpose is to generate hypotheses, not guess correctly.
Like See-Think-Wonder, students slow down to notice and find evidence. In the Explanation Game, however, students may already have prior knowledge of the object, but not understand how it works or functions. By noticing parts, like the rotary telephone dial, or earpiece, students can generate theories and explanations that it is a phone, but was used differently than current telephones.
To play the Explanation Game with students, find a subject and introduce it to students. The subject could be a science phenomenon, a historical event, a geographical image, or any physical object. Ask them to:
• Name it: give it a name, or name a part or a feature of the object.
• Explain it: What could it be? What might it do?
• Give reasons: What makes you say that?
• Generate alternatives: What else could it be?
As you listen to conversations about what the subject is, listen for sound reasoning rather than correct theories. Encourage students to look beyond the superficial, make connections, and find relationships. Remember, the game isn’t to guess what the subject is, rather to create an environment for hypothesizing and conjecturing with evidence.
