Collaborative learning spaces

I'm thinking a lot bout design of learning spaces, and the issue of facilitating collaboration.
This Edutopia blog post is  a nice summary of my thinking so far:

Collaborative learning spaces

"Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner?"

Some books are so profound they leave you gasping, both at their clarity and their message, and at the basic question of why you never saw things like this before?

"Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner?" by Katrine Marcal ( ISBN 978 1 84627 564 7) is almost one of those, although the last statement less so I am pleased to be able to say.

Marcal (lead editorial writer for the swedish newspaper Aftonbladet) presents what is billed as a feminist critique of the economic theory that lies at the basis of modern market economies. She questions the complete omission of women from economic modelling, particularly the billions of dollars of unpaid work that women complete every year around the globe.

Her analysis then proceeds beyond that to the underlying assumption of economics at the micro level: the existence of 'economic man' and his capacity for rational decision making.

It is this latter part on which I am pleased to say I often teach the shortcomings of economic theory and models. In my classes I describe what I call the 'weirdness quotient', our propensity to behave in ways that are most often very far from rational.

If you were to dismiss this book as a simple feminist attack on economics you would be selling Marcal and the book short. Her book questions at a deeper level what it is to be human, and how effectively we can ever hope to 'model' the erratic messy irrational ways in which we behave.

The proponents of 'Big data' may well take issue with her basic contention that we are far too illogical to be as predictable as economics would have us believe, but this work is to me one of those timely reminders that we need to keep asking questions about the 2008 GFC and its causes. We need to question the economic environment of which we are a part.

We need to stop accepting without question the theorising of economists as a valid representation of human behaviours at both the individuals level and en masse, and we need to ensure that we retain our critical thinking capacities, we need to 'keep our wits about us' in this far from logical world.

The translation from the swedish is at times clumsy and makes the book read less elegantly than I suspect it would have done in swedish, but at just short of 200 pages it is still eminently readable and engaging.

Thoroughly recommended.

A new take on 'literacy learning'

Today's Literacy PD with Dr Ian Hunter was fascinating.

Some opening statements:

"Good readers make good writers" ..  it's a myth!!

However, "Good readers read a lot good writers write a lot".

We discussed perceived shortfalls in boys’ writing and came up with this list:

• Ability to plan/structure an argument and link ideas together
• the logic of deeper thinking (or they can say it but they can’t write it)
• Range of technical/subject vocabulary (meta language)
• Ability to structure sentences with simple grammar
• Lack of general knowledge.. do we prepare our juniors sufficiently wrt general/world knowledge

First weapon to improve writing is the questions we ask, and how we phrase those questions.

The question you ask effectively ‘trains’ the students in analytical thinking skills. Boys will write the way we model. Hence our own writing skills are paramount to our boys' improved writing,. and their improved results.

There is no correlation between engagement and confidence. With boys confidence is the route to success.

The best pattern of paragraph length is short intro, shorter paras, one good e.g. per para,

40 130 130 130 etc this rains boys for thinking skills. Most over write.

Conclusion should be as long as a body paragraph.

Regardless of whether external exam or internal we should impose word limits on all tasks to develop better writing skills.

Year 11 650

Year 12 800

Year 13 1000

Maybe Art and PE require a few more words.

This is harder work but you reclaim the ground as a teacher. The boys will learn to be sharper writers. Train by active policy of refusal. Imposing word limits will push boys to use their subject language. Boys are being overworked and are expected to write far too many words.

This was a fascinating PD session, successfully engaging staff and boys in ways I've never seen before. The number of emails I've had from staff commenting on how good they thought the PD was has been huge. They were engaged by both the presentation style, leadership, and practical nature of the presentation material.

This won't end here. It's the beginning of the next phase in our own long term literacy development project.

For the greater good ... altruism lives?

I've noted the development of an interesting behaviour amongst boys in my class. Many of them take notes/develop meaning using Google Docs. In economics there are often complex diagrams that are quite a mission to draw electronically. Some will search the web for something appropriate, but increasingly one of them will take out his phone, check with me for permission, and then take a photo of the diagram that we have just constructed on the whiteboard.

The diagram is then tweeted using the class hashtag so that anyone can use it in their own notes. It looks like this:

Boys don't formally take turns, but they do seem to informally share the task around. I think they quite like being the one to do this first.

I rarely give notes these days, but rather have the boys construct meaning that we then test and share. This seems to be  a good tool for the purpose.

School leadership and 'moral purpose'.

I have been interested in the concept of 'moral purpose' in education. This has increasingly been a feature of the leadership literature.

Our New Zealand Ministry of Education has this to say:

Leading with moral purpose means having a commitment to making a difference in the lives and outcomes of students as a result of their experiences at school. Barber and Fullan (2005) explain that: “The central moral purpose consists of constantly improving student achievement and ensuring that achievement gaps, wherever they exist, are narrowed.” For a school to achieve this, there needs to be a shared commitment to explicit values.

Source http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Attitudes-values-and-ethics/Moral-purpose-and-shared-leadership

Professor David Hopkins, in an article titled 'Leadership for powerful learning' (ACEL Journal Term 2 2015, Vol 37 No 2) states:

Leaders are driven by a moral purpose about enhancing student learning. Moral purpose activates the passion to reach for the goal and prompts leaders to empower teachers and others to make schools a critical force for improving communities"

Now there's a powerful statement.

Eric Mazur on "Assessment: the silent killer of learning"

Last week I had the privilege of attending this year's Edutech 2015 conference in Brisbane. Much about the conference was a mere shadow of the previous few years, but the stand-out session was the opening keynote address by Eric Mazur of Harvard University titled "Assessment: the silent killer of learning"in which Mazur posits that current assessment is not fit for purpose.

My colleagues and I co-constructed some notes during the session, but it is doubtless easier to watch an earlier version of the same address given by Mazur in 2013. It is very similar to that which he gave last week.

Where's yer evidence Part 2

Here's a nice counterpoint to my previous post, written by Claire Amos.

Where's the research? Why we need to stop looking in the rear vision mirror at longitudinal research and data.

Thanks Claire.

Educational mythology... where's ya data?

The world of education is awash with myths and has been for decades. In my early years practice was so disconnected from data and evidence that to claim teaching as a profession might have seemed to be stretching the truth to those ‘in the know’ (although oddly I suspect that it was viewed as more of a profession by the general public at that time than it is now).  I recall pondering (only very briefly) how I would have felt being attended by a doctor or dentist who paid similar regard to research evidence (thankfully I never have been). Things have changed, and teachers generally not only incorporate the use of achievement data into their practice, but also the growing body of good robust research evidence that has accumulated worldwide on what helps cause learning.

One of the seminal moments in this regard must be the publication of John Hattie’s book ‘Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement’ (2008). In the book Hattie and his international research team brought together a vast amount of research data, all carefully sifted to ensure that only quality data was incorporated. The book makes heavy going as a piece of reading as the density of quality material is so high. However it has made for a much better informed profession. Sadly despite work of this sort, some serious myths persist.

One of the classic myths is the ‘learning styles’ debate. In his later book ‘Visible learning for teachers (2012) Hattie says “.. it is not intended to delve into learning styles (visual, kinaesthetic etc), for the effectiveness of which there is zero supporting evidence, “. Professor Steve Wheeler of Plymouth University takes up the cudgel in this debate as well in a blog post titled ‘A Convenient Untruth’ (http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.co.nz/2011/11/convenient-untruth.html) in which he says:

“In an excellent expose on learning styles, Riener and Willingham (2010) argue this:

"...learning-styles theory has succeeded in becoming “common knowledge.” Its widespread acceptance serves as an unfortunately compelling reason to believe it. This is accompanied by a well-known cognitive phenomenon called the confirmation bias. When evaluating our own beliefs, we tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs and ignore contrary information, even when we encounter it repeatedly. When we see someone who professes to be a visual learner excel at geography and an auditory learner excel at music, we do not seek out the information which would disprove our interpretation of these events (can the auditory learner learn geography through hearing it? Can the visual learner become better at music by seeing it?)" “

Another more recent controversy arises over the current concept of Modern Learning Environments or MLEs. This is the notion that we physically and intellectually deconstruct the classroom. We place two or three classes of learners into one space with several teachers, and allow student choice of what they learn and when. Apparently there is a massive intuitive appeal to the concept, one pushed by the Ministry of Education across the state school sector, I understand. While I have serious concerns over the concept, even more concerning is the fact that this major change to education is being pushed in what appears to me to be an absence of data. If there is robust replicable data out there, I can’t find it. I have looked. A lot. The debate resorts to a lot of rhetoric, with the suggestion that the value of MLEs is so common sense that you’d be a fool to challenge it. Apparently this is where the modern business world is going, and we’d ignore that trend at our peril.

I was intrigued to see a piece in the business publication ‘The Main Report’ titled ‘HR - Does a cool office really matter?’ (The Main Report, 11 May 2015) in which the opening statement is:

Recruiting experts Hays says the technology sector’s famously alternative work spaces are being replicated by many businesses, but it asks - do they have the desired impact on employee productivity, performance and retention? The answer is - it depends on the organisation's culture.”

As I see it, someone has decided that alternative open plan workspaces and collaboration are the way of the future. However in the school context it seems to me that this fails to recognise two factors:

1. Employees in the workplace are not adolescents who are right in the middle of that process of testing boundaries and learning about themselves and the world around them.
2. Even in these alternative work environments people need space to sit down at a desk in a quiet environment and think, create or problem solve. They need to be able to close the door to the rest of the world and get on with things.

Am I a fan of Modern Learning Environments? Possibly not as they are currently portrayed. However I AM a fan of what you might call Modern Learning Pedagogy. There are new ways to learn, and there is a growing body of research evidence that these new approaches work. We observe in our classes many of those things that the research evidence seems to support. However we monitor what the research says, and modify our practice in the light of research and experience. For example in the midst of the laptop programme we are considering the issue of reading. It is perhaps no surprise to many that reading electronically is different to reading on paper. It seems that there is often less comprehension, less depth to reading done online, or on electronic devices. The nice thing is that this thing called neuroplasticity of the brain seems to mean that we can retrain the brain to read carefully, closely, with an eye to detail. For four years now we have had a focus on critical literacy at College. This embraces a spectrum of issues from the basic skills of reading and writing to the more complex skills of critical thinking and analysis. As she scanned research literature and articles on the subject (part of a regular routine for most of us) a colleague found a fascinating article  in ‘The New Yorker’ titled ’Being a better online reader’.   It can be accessed here: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/being-a-better-online-reader

A: Yeah, me too.

At College we maintain what we call a blended learning environment. That is, one in which we use the right tool for the job, and there will be times when laptops are not the right tool for the job. So while a lot of reading takes place online, we also have boys reading from and working on paper. We have boys interacting  in person as well as online. We have boys putting their laptops away and taking up a hammer or a paintbrush, throwing a ball or sprinting down the length of Upper.

As a consequence of this sort of data, and our own daily data gathering  in classes, teachers modify their practice. Reading is important, and reading a traditional paper book is  valuable exercise. Staff acknowledge this and encourage reading at every opportunity. I have mentioned in previous columns that we need to continue to encourage reading. This will at times mean reading online, but it should also mean reading on paper. Perhaps it’s only true for those of us of a certain age but there is something about the feel, the smell, the look of  a paper book that makes it appealing. It would seem that that is what the research confirms. I find it a little ironic that in an educational era in which we emphasise critical thinking so much, so many people continue to buy into educational myths revealing perhaps a lack of critical thinking.

Incidentally, if valid robust data comes to light to show the MLEs do indeed cause more significant learning than the existing alternatives, I will of course recant. Put another way I will of course ’think critically’ about the evidence and my position.

And as a footnote, last year I was transporting some junior boys to sport and their conversation went something like this:

A: You got a kindle?

B: Yeah

A: Got many books on it?

B: No, I prefer paper books.

Education for innovation

I have been doing  a lot of thinking about what the future shape of education might be. This began because we have some opportunities arising at work for curriculum change, fed by an appetite for some change. Recent events have offered additional insights that are tantalising to say the least.

Recently a number of us visited some of the folk at the EPIC centre in Christchurch. The insights gained form the visit and ensuing conversations were exciting to say the least, and perhaps the most exciting aspect of those conversations is the changing nature of society, and the need to promote innovation and wealth creation.

This started some ears back with Jane Gilbert's work 'Catching the knowledge wave' in which she effectively redefined knowledge for know stuff to doing stuff. For Jane knowledge had ceased to be a noun and become a verb. The EPIC guys want people who can work independently, people who are literate and numerate, but people who can think outside the square. These people are risk takers, not necessarily with wealth, but certainly with ideas.

I posed the question in a recent parent newsletter:

"I want to know how we produce even more innovative and creative people who become leaders in their fields. And when I mention fields of endeavour I have to confess to being agnostic. We might well be talking about the gaming industry or industrial chemistry, but equally we might be talking about the music industry or the law, the visual arts or languages and diplomacy."

As  a consequence I have been pondering how schools need to restructure to do this. The purpose of this post isn't to answer that question but to consider the circumstances in which that question must be answered. My own early thinking went something like this:

We want teenagers to be innovators, we want them to be risk takers (in terms of their thinking, they are already risk takers in many other ways). We want them to move beyond knowing to thinking. Of course this doesn't mean that we abandon knowing stuff. You can't think in a vacuum, you have to know stuff in order to be able to think about it. The question then is how do we encourage teens to get to know stuff in a way that is engaging, in a way that harnesses their natural risk taking behaviour in a safe way?

At this point in time I created this obstacle in my mind: education is currently judged by society by a series of outcomes best defined in terms of the assessment/qualifications system, in our case NCEA. We have to teach to the assessment in order to get the results that communities judge as a measure of a quality school and a quality education, so we are hide bound to stay with the current industrial model of education organised into time periods, subject specialists and classrooms.

The alternative is to have students organise and manage projects focussed on innovation and creativity. But hang on, most teens can't do that particularly well, so maybe we just have a 'select few' able to do this while the remainder conform to the traditional models?

Well actually maybe more teens can do this than we think. And maybe NCEA isn't the constraint we think it is at all, maybe it is the liberating mechanism with its modular approach. Maybe we have taken up the cudgel with NCEA (of which I am a fan by the way) by simply slotting it into the old industrial system. Maybe in fact NCEA is the system for the new era of innovation. I am increasingly of the opinion that we have allowed ourselves to become fixated with the process of assessment rather than the process of education and learning. It is from the latter two that innovation comes, not from the former.

I have much more thinking to do on this, but this is enough writing for one post. I have a friend who writes tediously long posts that I rarely read because they are just too long.

I found this blog post by Claire Amos "Navigating the space between educational paradigms"
challenging and interesting. You may too.

Why I think schools have a future

When I wanted to learn how to make bread, I looked on the internet, checked out Youtube, and talked to other more knowledgeable friends. I applied what I read, saw and heard. It seemed that you can indeed learn almost anything you want from the internet.

At today's GAFE Summit 2015, one speaker made the same assertion during a part of his address in which he raised the question of the relevance of schools in the future. He said (and I paraphrase here, which translates to 'I may have completely misinterpreted his actual meaning'): 'Motivated learners can learn anything from the web'. The implication seemed to me to be that schools may well have no place in our future, at least not in their current form or format.

This is a question I've been pondering for some time. I've come to the conclusion that there are two critical assumptions behind the assertion that they may not have a future, and they are as follows.

1. Schools only teach knowledge and skills.
2. All learners are motivated.

The first begs the question of what schools actually teach, actually an enormously complex question. I recall having an argument with an 'old school' colleague that went something like this: 

Him: 'I teach <his subject>'

Me: 'You teach boys'

Him: 'No I teach <his subject>'

Me: 'No you teach boys'

You get the picture. This discussion went straight to the heart of the matter. In the secondary environment our subjects are in part merely a 'vehicle' through which we teach what we would now describe as the 21st century skills of critical and creative thinking. Of course content matters. I often find myself saying to others that a 21st century education is about thinking, but you can't think in a vacuum. You have to have something to think about. I find myself more than a little irritated by the NCEA 'haters' society which claims that under New Zealand's NCEA assessment framework content no longer matters. 

However in fact we teach even more than that. The New Zealand curriculum includes a component on values, and of course the key competencies. These are all things that we teach, many of them not just in the classroom but on the sports field on the concert or drama stage etc We teach them by virtue of ur interpersonal interactions with our students every day. This is one of many thingsthat make teaching such a demanding profession: we are being ';judged' every minute of every day as students take meaning from our non verbal communication as ell as the words we say.

In this regard schools as physical spaces in which people meet ought not to become redundant in my opinion. 

The second question is also interesting. I would agree that motivated learners are now able to find most things they want on the internet somewhere. However in the secondary system we teach adolescents. By their very nature these are young people who are finding their identities, finding their way in life, and they do so frequently by making mistakes. That's the nature of adolescence. Many of them are not as well motivated as we'd like in terms of their learning.

The usual response to that is that they must be allowed to follow their passions. However the problem is that they don't know what they don't know. How many times in our careers have we seen young people undertake a significant change of direction because of something new that they have learned in a class that they initially didn't want to be a part of, or as a result of an 'inspirational teacher'? I fear for a world in which people never read Frost or Shakespeare, never see the beauty of a geographic landscape or a simple mathematical proof. I am not a brilliant mathematician (I struggled), but I recall being spellbound when I saw the proof that for any two numbers on a number line, you can always find another number in between, regardless of how close the initial two numbers are. To my mind it was beautiful.

These are things that make us who we are, they are often life changing, and they are things that demand some form of human interaction. I guess that doesn't necessarily mean that schools may have their current physical or organisational format, but as social and learning organisations in my opinion they most definitely do have a future. 

Integrated curriculum

A friend spotted this article on curriculum reform in Finland and sent me the link.

The very idea of the total abandonment of traditional teaching subjects and their replacement with topics is certainly provocative. I recall writing a paper for my previous Head in the 90's in which I supported the notion of an integrated curriculum, one in which a lot of content was taught via topic based research and development.

However I don't think I am brave enough to suggest that we go as far as the Finns are suggesting with a nation wide reform.

I'm a little more conservative than that. For me the answer lies somewhere in between. The traditional subject/class teaching of key subjects such as English and mathematics to support the development of deeper learning of a broad range of subjects using an integrated topic approach.

I would currently classify myself as an anti 'Modern Learning Environments' crusader. I would however accept the label I heard from colleague Pauline Henderson yesterday as a pro Modern Learning Pedagogy proponent.

This needs a little more thought.

Course to discourse?

I've begun my year with my traditional online forum discussion using the forum tool embedded in our Intranet software package Moodle. The course I teach is NCEA Level 2 Economics, a course that requires deep thinking, and a lot of analytical writing. The literacy expectations of the course are well expressed by the fact that the three external standards all provide UE literacy (Writing) credits, while the internal standard we offer provides UE  literacy (Reading) credits.

The topic I choose is a discussion of the issue of the free market. It almost invariable ends up as a discussion of the libertarian paradox as we embrace issues such as power imbalances and inequality associated with markets.

My approach is always the same, The boys post in response to my fundamental question about the benefits or otherwise of the free market. As they post, I respond individually to every post written by every boy. However my response is NEVER to give answers, ALWAYS to pose further questions. My response to every boy is unique, asking questions that are specific to that boy's post, steering and guiding in a way appropriate to that boy's current knowledge (as revealed by his post) and the specific angle that the boy appears to be taking in the discussion. I think that this is a fantastic way to differentiate learning.

This year's result is strikingly more sophisticated than in previous years. I have been more careful about my responses, trying to make sure that I even more appropriately tailor each response to each boy. Regardless of the medium (online, on paper, face to face) this has always been true.

The result has been a significant amount of learning, created by constant (socratic?) questioning. At no stage have I given any of the bis specific knowledge/content, yet the learning has been apparent and significant. I asked the boys if they had learned much, and they universally agreed that they had.

Course to discourse? I'm not sure that I necessarily understand what that means, but I hope so.

Secondary schools and the work force

... a class-based theory of how and why we have a fundamental labour force imbalance.

Introduction

In this post I want to describe some thinking that has been 'brewing' in my mind for some time about the work of secondary schools in New Zealand for the past four or five decades.

My parents were 'great depression' children. They were born in the '20's (the 1920's) and grew up in the 30's. These were times when unemployment was high, when families struggled to feed their children, when children went to school without food or shoes (some of that seems a little too familiar at the moment).  My mother would tell me stories of what it was like to grow up in a working class family at the time, and these were common themes in her stories. This continued into my own childhood, we were a working class family.

The one thing my parents held to be true (if I remember correctly) was the value of education. They did not want us to lead the lives that they had lead. They believed that better eduction was the key to avoiding the poverty that they experienced as children, and so they pushed us to attain the highest possible levels of education that we could. Their own experience had been to be forced to leave school at the end of their Standard 6 (Year 8 in our terms) in order to get a job to help support their families (or maybe to be less of a burden on those families). They suggested that this was common at the time.

To them, a university education was the ultimate, and they pushed us in that direction. Now for our generation they were probably right. I gained a university degree and went on to teach, beginning my career in 1979. We were a generation of new teachers who possibly came from those working class origins, the product of a generation who held this aspirational belief in a university education.

I 'm not suggesting that these attitudes were unique to working class parents (whatever that may mean), but I think that they had a significant impact on attitudes towards education.

This is relevant background to what I believe to be the root cause of a significant labour market condition in  New Zealand.

Theory

The over-riding value was (and still is) that the higher the education the better. A university degree is the best education that anyone can aspire to, the best that money can buy. And here is the root cause of the problem. As a child of depression generation parents, I too grew up to believe that the higher the level of education the better. When I began my teaching career I took this belief into the profession with me, and for a while continued to perpetuate this view with my own students. I would counsel students to aspire to a university education. There was an unintended consequence of our beliefs. It created a 'hierarchy' of jobs and activities.

This situation has been exacerbated by the EFTS based funding formula for universities. More students means more funding. This incentivises the recruitment of more and more students.

In my opinion we now have too many people equipped with inappropriate degrees, and too few people trained in what 30 years ago might have been called the trades. The result is that I pay anything between $100 and $200 an hour for a plumber, or an electrician or .... you get the picture. These charge-out rates to some degree represent a skills shortage, one which we have seen exacerbated with the massive increase in housing demand driven by Auckland's growth and Christchurch's rebuild.

What am I theorising as the root cause? The desire of a generation of working class parents to ensure that their children would not be subject to the deprivations that they had experienced, and the belief of that generation that education (well, a university education actually) was the key.

Since the 1970s ( and maybe earlier) we have had ready access to university, with the belief that a university education is the right of every child. I support the belief that everyone should be able to access a university education. With regard to universal access we still have much to do of course. Cultural and socio0economic barriers mean that some groups do not actually have the same opportunities as others. The 'tail of under achievement' is something that we need to address.

I am challenging the belief that it is in society's best interests that everyone should have a university education. The introduction of tuition fees has not slowed the growth in university rolls. Nor until now perhaps has the increase in the level of the bar required to access university.

The 2015 drop in the numbers of New Zealand students gaining a UE qualification is probably the result of the latest lifting of that bar. The lifting of the bar took the form of requiring students to achieve Level 3 NCEA in addition to a literacy and numeracy component, and reasonable achievement (14 credits) in each of three level 3 subjects. Universities have found that students who entered their halls without Level 3 NCEA tended to have a much higher failure rate in their first year.

This is in my opinion a far better rationing mechanism than the imposition of ever growing fees. The growth in fees disenfranchises those from the very working class from which people like me have sprung. If instead the bar is created in terms of ability, with subsequent lowering of costs to students gaining entry,  then perhaps we are more likely to get the most useful populations of university students from the perspective of New Zealand society, and the economy.

So, summarising, I am suggesting that we have had a generation of secondary school teachers who had come from  a 'working class' background who have pushed students into a university education. The result is that we have had too many students attend universities and too few take up alternative forms of tertiary training/education. The result is that we have a serious labour market imbalance. We also have a university system that has grown beyond what we can support. Instead of funding high level research, and the education of our academic best, we fund a much larger population of university students who take on large debt for possibly little gain. We also have a shortage of people wiling and able to work in trades, and other non academic work. Arguably we may also have a less entrepreneurial society than we need.

Evaluating the argument.

1. Where's the data? Is it true that a majority of secondary school teachers recruited in the 60's and 70's came from 'working class' backgrounds?
2. What were school leaving ages like ion the '30's and 40's? Was it in fact a typical experience, or something only forced on a relative few?
3. Were real wage differentials large enough in the 60's and 70's to justify the belief that a university education would make someone better off than say a trades apprenticeship?
4. How significant is the current wage differential? If it is real, does it really represent a longer term shortage in labour markets, or is it merely a short term phenomenon?

This post is the result of some thinking. Research may already have been done that might prove or disprove the 'thesis'.

But .. I was just thinking.