An interrupted wet and windy Deep Learning Plus week may have provided some additional logistical challenges to what was already a complex organisational picture, but it also produced a new candidate for my favourite Deep Learning photograph of all time.

The image tells you everything you need to know about the importance of these occasions in the school calendar.

At ICHK we make use of a series of Thinking Routines, designed as technologies to promote insight and discussion by Harvard University’s Project Zero team. So, in exploring the significance of this image, let’s draw on one called See-Think-Wonder here.

I see about half a dozen wet, masking-wearing young people, of both sexes, dressed in waterproofs and training gear, who appear to be engaged in a group activity that centres on a bicycle, which is being ridden, apparently with some difficulty, by one of the children. Looking more closely, I notice that the environment really is saturated. Everything is wet, and the surface of the floor – a narrow outdoor walkway – where it is not covered by a blue mat, is slick and glassy. The children’s body language suggests that they are not just wet but also uncomfortably chilly. I also notice that, despite this discomfort, they are persevering with their task, whatever it is, and that they are modelling care and support towards the individual on the bike.

I think to myself: this is a strange situation. A group of uncomfortably wet and cold children, providing aid to someone engaging in an activity that, assuming the person knows how to ride a bike, doesn’t usually require help, and, what’s more, doing it in such an odd and unsuitable location. Weird. I think further: there must be more to this image than immediately meets the eye.

Wondering what that “more” could be, I choose to look again, more carefully still.

And then it hits me – the bike has no pedals. That’s why it’s impossible to ride. It’s a broken material technology, unfit for use, and the only way that its value as a vehicle can be recovered is by the substitution of its material deficit with some form of alternative technology. It needs to be fixed. But how?

This is the solution to the puzzle of the photograph: the children are banding together as a team, uniting in a common purpose, cooperating as a group, to function as a “fix” - to support their colleague in achieving a goal that would otherwise be impossible. They are honing their social skills, drawing on and strengthening their collaborative instincts, exploring their powers of communication, in order to orchestrate the social technology of applied teamwork to overcome a specific problem.

In encountering and overcoming the pedal-less bike challenge, these intrepid, resilient, committed, and patient Year 8s are discovering things about themselves and each other, and about the abstract possibilities of cooperation in general, which will leave them a little more confident, a little more resourceful, a little more socially adept, and a little more hopeful in the face of challenge, than would otherwise be the case. String together enough of these occasions, on a regular enough schedule, carefully designed each time to stretch and cajole incrementally in line with the children’s maturation and experience levels, and you have an education in being a stronger, better version of yourself. In the language we employ in our Human Technologies programme, you are charting a realizable course on the journey from Self1 to Self2; while knowing all the time that, with the resultant personal growth and self-development, new horizons will open up, new vistas offer themselves, new possibilities emerge, so that, in fact, the journey never ends. It's for life.

I wonder why education wasn’t like that in my own experience of school, and I reflect that I am relieved and encouraged that it is now.