"Because Sir told me to."  

Those innocuous-sounding words could really land you in an uncomfortable conversation in particular circumstances. Imagine the scene: a visiting dignitary, or an inspector, is shown into your classroom and, as is expected of anyone in that situation, walks around the room chatting to the pupils. She notices that one young man has created a database, based on research conducted over the internet, and is busy generating some pie charts from his findings.  

"Why did you decide to use a database for that?" inquires the visitor.  

"Because Sir told me to," comes the reply.  

What we really want the pupil to say, of course, is something along the lines of:  

"Well, I considered several programs for this work, but decided on a database in the end because..."  

Far-fetched? Pie in the sky? I don't think so. I recall in one of my lessons two boys, aged 11 coming to me and saying,  

"We know you said we have to use a database for this but we'd rather use a spreadsheet."  

"Why's that?" I asked. "Because we want to be able to see a lot of the data all at once, and then use the data filter to look at what's going on under the surface."  

If you think about it, that was a pretty deep conversation. Let's break it down:  

1. The pupils felt comfortable about approaching me to ask if they could use a different program than the one I'd instructed them to.  

2. They had explored spreadsheets sufficiently to be able to see how they would treat the data differently from a database.  

3. They had a good idea about how they wanted to explore the data.  

4. They were able to express their wishes in a fairly articulate manner.  

Obviously, the school was in the better part of town, with parents paying a hefty fee to have their children educated there, right? Wrong! The school serves one of the poorest districts of one of the poorest areas in London.  

OK, those particular pupils were especially bright then? Think again: all of the standard measures indicated that they were neither super-bright or super-dim. They were pretty average. So how come we were able to have that conversation?  

First, I firmly believe that the best way to teach anything is on a need-to-know basis. There is no point in teaching a class how to use all of the functions in a word processor, when they are only going to need to know how to format a heading and change the font for their next project.  

Second, there are always alternative ways of achieving the same thing. Before undertaking that data-based project, for example, I'd shown the students how you could use a database, spreadsheet or table in a word processor to store data, and when you might use one in preference to another.  

Third, I think it is crucial to insist that pupils explain everything to you, or to each other. I always had my pupils write up, at the end of each project, a report in which they covered these questions:  

1. What did I do?  

2. Why did I do it?  

3. Who was the intended audience?  

4. What did hardware and software did I use?  

5. Why?  

6. How did it turn out?  

7. Was it successful or not?  

8. Why do I think that?  

9. What would I do differently if I did it again?  

10. Why?  

Notice any question that seems to crop up more than others? What I always aimed for is to make my students (a) reflect on everything, (b) ask "Why?" about everything and (c) be as articulate as possible. On that last one, if a pupil cannot explain herself, how can you tell if she has actually "got it"?  

I recently attended an event called "Be Very Afraid" in London. I've written about it here, and I think you'd enjoy reading that, but in the meantime have a look at this video of an eleven-year-old girl I spoke to (unfortunately, the video appears to have been made unavailable now). Her ability to express herself, and her enthusiasm, are quite awe-inspiring. Imagine having a whole class full of children as articulate and keen as that! There are more videos at that article I just mentioned; go check them out (No there aren’t: please see previous note.).  

As far as I am concerned, there is only one wrong answer to "Why" and that is "Because Sir told me to." Wouldn't you agree?