Teaching like a Lockpicker

In a video from June 2016, a YouTuber known as LockPickingLawyer, takes us on a seven-minute exploration of his technique for practising his skills as a lock picker. If you’ve never seen one at work, a lock picker is someone who can open locks and padlocks without the key and with little more than a few simple tools and a lot of skill.

A few minutes on LockPickingLawyer’s YouTube channel will show you that he is a lock picker of tremendous skill, conquering a range of padlocks, bicycle locks, and assorted other security systems in what seems like an almost comically short amount of time. To practice, LockPickingLawyer puts in a great deal of time picking locks, much as you would expect, but his technique fascinates me. Rather than select a lock and pick it repeatedly, over and over, slowly improving his technique, he will pick a lock and immediately put it to one side before picking another, and another. He continues this way until he has worked his way through a whole tray of locks.

His explanation for this is striking. If he picks the same lock repeatedly he will learn to pick that one lock really well, but only that one lock. However, by selecting a pile of locks to pick, and never picking the same one twice in a row, he can never become accustomed to a particular lock and so, he says, he is picking each lock “as if for the first time.”

“When we set work for students, plan our lessons, and give them assessments, are we teaching them to really pick locks or just to be great at picking one very particular lock?”

We might then ask ourselves, as educators, how can our students approach a challenge, a task, or a puzzle “as if for the first time”? When we set work for students, plan our lessons, and give them assessments, are we teaching them to really pick locks or just to be great at picking one very particular lock? To do this would emphasise skills and tools over memorisation and repetition. We would be looking at a much more holistic approach rather than the targeted learning so many education systems rely on.

For many taught courses, the exam at the end of the programme sits like a padlock to be picked and much of our work as teachers is teaching students how to pick this particular lock. Where to apply the pressure, how to use the tools we have equipped them with, and how to read the challenge they are given. Many students become quite adept at this specific puzzle and can crack any variation we throw at them. But the moment we give them something that lies outside these bounds we find the limits of their skills and the end of their knowledge. Nothing yields. Nothing opens. They struggle and work at things, but no matter what they do they can’t solve it. We’ve taught them to pick a very particular lock, and now we’ve seen the shortcomings of this method.

There is always this tension, between teaching to any success criteria and teaching for teaching’s sake and it is a tension teachers feel every single day. Some of us resign ourselves to the inevitability, some of us rail against it, but all of us feel it in one way or another.

One of my roles, from time to time, is to prepare students for university interviews of different kinds. On many occasions, I have interviewed students for subjects I know only a little about; international relations, economics, medicine, and even the sciences. A colleague asked me how I handle interviewing someone for something I have never taught and I said it was easy, I simply ask the student something they’ve never been asked before. A student may sit in front of me with a tremendous knowledge of political affairs, physiology, or quantum physics, but I know I can test their knowledge and understanding just by asking something they’ve never been asked before. In other words, by giving them a lock they’ve never picked. 

“Humankind is encountering challenge after challenge where there are no existing answers to fall back upon and without creativity and innovation of thought we’ll be forever trapped in repeating the same old failed solutions.”

So much in life, of course, is trying to solve problems the likes of which we’ve never come across and the value of being able to learn such generalised thinking skills, and critical aptitudes is enormous. Humankind is encountering challenge after challenge where there are no existing answers to fall back upon and without creativity and innovation of thought we’ll be forever trapped in repeating the same old failed solutions. How, then, can we escape the trap of teaching to the test when teachers, and society alike, want to value and develop wider thinking skills? 

ASSESSMENT

A first step will be to rethink the nature of assessment in education, the outcome expected of any system will control how that system operates so this must be our first consideration. Alternative assessment models abound, and the development of education technologies makes this an increasingly studied question - yet an answer has still to emerge.

IT’S OK TO FAIL

We need to enable teachers to be able to fail. We need to understand that the learning process cannot be ruled by commodification and quantitative data and for things to go well, in important, interesting, and socially meaningful ways, things also have to be able to go wrong. We need space for experimentation, creativity, and adventure. Freed from assessment models built on regurgitation we may be able to reclaim territory for this kind of learning.

LEARN HOW TO LEARN

Finally, we need to acknowledge that learning to learn is far more important than learning any particular thing. The rote retention and repetition of facts and information is no longer of educational value and crowds out opportunities for real learning. Instead, we must focus on aptitudes - design thinking, critical thinking, creativity, and innovation, and let the teaching of these skills vary as the needs, interests, and demands of students vary. Such a focus will produce students who won’t falter when asked a question they’ve never been asked before. If we equip our students with the right mental tools and powerful learning skills, they’ll crack any lock.