Puzzles vs. Mysteries

If you haven't discovered the genius of Malcolm Gladwell, author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point", and contributor to The New Yorker, you really need to read his work. Everything I've read by him has made me think about how I think about things. His latest article discusses the Enron scandal, and examines it through national security expert Gregory Treverton's interesting concept of puzzles vs. mysteries. To summarize, Gladwell argues that the US Federal Prosecutors treated Enron as if it was a puzzle. There were many pieces to gather and once they gathered each piece, they would know what Enron was up to. His argument is that Enron was actually a mystery. All of the pieces were there for everyone to see, it just took the right person to look at the information, know what he or she was looking at and interpret it.

That got me to thinking. Sometimes in school psychology, we tend to look at assessment as a puzzle. We look at a child and try to gather pieces of the puzzle, and when the puzzle doesn't make sense, we keep trying to find more pieces, i.e. we conduct more tests. But what if we looked at the assessment process as a mystery instead? What if it's a matter of interpretation? I think we tend to steer away from looking at the process as a mystery because we want everything to be concrete, make clear sense. But we all know that, sometimes, things are bit murky. We, as school psychologists, are given the task of looking at the murky information, make sense of it and interpret it for others to see. I think that one byproduct of this change in philosophy will be a reduction in the number of tests given to a child. A kid can be tested to death if the results don't support a clear answer to why he or she isn't functioning well in the classroom. Somehow this needs to be addressed. Maybe a change in philosophy could be the change we need.

BBC