Last week, I talked about the need to teach students/children higher-order thinking skills. If you missed that article, you can find it HERE. Today, I wanted to continue that discussion.
The Greek philosopher, Socrates, who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy, taught his students to question their assumptions. If fact, he taught them so well that they started to question their political leaders, threatening their authority! As a result, Socrates was arrested, imprisoned, and subsequentially forced to drink poison for the good of the city-state of Athens.
While much of this style of learning continued in the Eastern universities of Byzantium and the Muslim world, it was lost to Europe after the fall of Rome. Medieval professors were largely lawyers and theologians and taught through lecture and demanded rote memorization.
The Protestant Reformation brought a threat to the established educational system, as followers of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, John Knox, and others taught their followers the importance of reading the Bible for themselves. This led followers to start their own community schools or engage in an early form of homeschooling, though much of the learning continued to focus on memorization.
I will say memorization does have its place. Children need to learn to recognize their letters and numbers. They need to learn to read, spell, and write. Memorizing poetry or scripture is valuable. Students also need to learn basic math, and memorizing their times tables does make it easier and faster to do everyday calculations in one’s head.
Higher thinking was taught in the vast number of universities started in the young American nation by these religious thinkers. Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth were founded by Congregationalists (Calvinists). Princeton was financed by New Light Presbyterians, though founded by Congregationalists. Brown was founded by Baptists. Columbia was Anglican. Penn and Cornell were officially nonsectarian, though Presbyterians were well-represented among its founders.
The Industrial Revolution having learned the value of the assembly line and interchangeable parts, continued the trend of education through repetition and memorization. Though innovators continued to make practical improvements in manufacturing, transportation and delivery of goods, retail marketing and sales.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela
In 1956, Benjamin Bloom created a taxonomy detailing levels of questioning tiers, beginning with low-level questions and moving upward to increasing levels of difficulty. It was revisited again and revised in 2001, the same year that the No Child Left Behind Act was passed. In principle, the objective was to ensure that all children, regardless of physical, mental, or emotional ability, would receive the same opportunities to learn and succeed. In practice, it has led, in my opinion, to the degradation of academic standards across the county, as classrooms have become more inclusive of students with diverse abilities.
When I started teaching a couple of decades ago, I taught world history to three classes of 6th graders in a local charter school. Students were placed in classes based on their reading, writing, and math abilities. This resulted in a class of highly capable students, who could easily find ways to disrupt a class if they were not challenged – and so I challenged them! I had a class of average/above average students, who were often more creative than the first class. Finally, I had a class full of struggling below-grade learners with an overwhelming pile of accommodations and modifications – many a teacher’s nightmare class.
I admit that I loved this class structure. I was able to engage and challenge each class where they were and build from there. I could easily reduce content to address widespread deficiencies in the third class. Ironically, I discovered that it was easier to get the third class excited about learning, than the other two! (Maybe because no one had attempted it before.)
I covered the same basic content in all three classes, adding or subtracting depth, as needed. I also gave the same basic tests, though with sneaking modifications. The first class had to write page-long essays and answer more challenging multiple-choice questions. The second class had essentially the same test, but I was happy if they could give me a solid, well-supported paragraph. The third class had easier worded questions, fewer choices, and I was happy with a well-formed and supported sentence or two answer. The beauty of it was that none of my students knew I was doing it, despite constantly “comparing notes” across the classes! Everyone won. The students all learned at their pace, though not without struggle (my classes were never considered “easy” by anyone), and all of them were challenged to improve. And all (or nearly so) of them rose to that challenge.
Later, our school changed the class structure to ensure a more mixed ability level in each class. It did have the advantage of not piling all students with special needs (504 and IEP accommodations) into one class, though it became infinitely more difficult to challenge each student at his or her own level. The overall proficiency dropped as a result.
As I moved up to teaching high school, I taught grade-level and Advanced Placement (AP) classes. I saw the same trends as I had when I first taught 6th grade. I did have a few combined grade-level/AP courses and experienced a similar resulting drop in proficiency despite employing every method or trick I had learned over the years. It was simply not possible to differentiate for every student at every level in one class. I will point out here that even within more ability-homogeneous classes, they were never completely homogenous, and I did differentiate within those classes too, but since the disparity was not as great it was easier to accomplish.
Maybe I was just a poor teacher. Maybe, but my results were still far better than most other teachers’ results across our district and in other local public schools. I am not trying to brag. I certainly made many mistakes during my teaching career. I am simply trying to point out that our current educational philosophy needs to be reevaluated.
The greatest reason for mixing the classes was eliminating the so called “dumb class” or “dumb student” identity. The reality is that every student continued to know his or her abilities in comparison to others. The first thing they do, when I handed back an assignment is to compare their results. We need to find a different way to address this issue. The problem runs deeper than labeling the class in which they are enrolled. But this is a topic for another time.
Common Core Standards tried to incorporate critical thinking or higher-order thinking skills into education with mixed results. Some problems arose because teachers had not been properly trained on the new methods and standards of teaching. Others were that students had not sufficiently learned the basics to suddenly be thrown into a new way of thinking and learning. Also, difficulty lies in trying to teach higher skills to students too early, when their brains are focused on learning by repetition.
Next time, I will discuss what the higher-order thinking skills are and what teaching them looks like.
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