‘Learning Outside the Fish Bowl’
Have you heard this term before? The fish bowl analogy is related to the term many people say these days as “seeing the big picture”. What does it mean? What requires you to see the big picture and take that leap beyond your current fish bowl?
The fish bowl analogy means that we are all immersed in a paradigm and reality, much like a fish in the water it swims in. A fish can’t distinguish itself from his water, just as most of us don’t distinguish ourselves from our thoughts about the way we learn. We don’t know that there is a new learning reality outside the fish bowl within which we are immersed.
The challenge is to pop out of your current fish bowl or context in order to see the “big picture” to strive ahead far more effectively at school and beyond . Like a man on the flying trapese, we all have to let go of a known way of viewing our learning for the unknown. Everyone of us who aspires to something greater than our current fish bowl or our current grades at school, has to risk this moment of vulnerability. What makes a clever person is their willingness to confidently jump out of the fish bowl in order to see the bigger picture from which to strive ahead far more effectively.
It takes commitment and a capacity to expand one’s reality. In order to let go of the trapeze bar of one level of functioning, in order to swing to and grasp another, you have to be committed enough to let go of what no longer serves your learning. One distinction of a clever person is their willingness to risk failures and their own vulnerability to expand their knowledge to see their potential.
As an English Teacher I can help to hold the bigger picture for my students to leap into. I will endeavour to empower my students to make the leap into learning outside the fish bowl in order to see and act from the Big Picture. I will allow my students to get the big AH-HA moment to shift their paradigm to include this next level of the Big Picture of learning by giving them the tools to write well and achieve academic success.