Good teaching is the ability to effectively develop in students the skills they need to succeed, and then inspire them to do the bulk of the learning or thinking about the subject matter.
What thinking skills do students need?
Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy lists these skills (from lowest to highest) as:
• Remembering - recalling known facts
• Understanding - explaining ideas or concepts
• Applying - using information in new situations
• Analyzing – using connections among ideas
• Evaluating - justifying a point of view or decision
• Creating - producing something new or original
The Center for Instructional Technology and Training at the University of Florida shows it like this:
While many teachers claim to use the Socratic method of teaching, in my experience of observing, training, and mentoring teachers over the years, the reality is that many teachers only question at the remembering and understanding levels. Many test questions only assess at the lower two levels. There are very few questions from the higher levels on most assessments. It may that that creators of these assessments are simply reflecting the above pyramid, or it may be that the pyramid reflects the standard methods of assessing.
Plaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development tells us that children begin to develop higher-order thinking skills during the concrete and operational developmental stages – typically occurring in upper elementary (ages 7-11). This is why many of the new Common Core Standards were difficult for lower elementary students to grasp. And if the upper elementary students had not mastered the basic skills, it would be difficult for them too.
Children aged 7 to 11 can typically think logically and understand cause and effect relationships. By fourth grade students should be able to:
· Pose questions to clarify and interpret information and probe for causes and consequences
· Identify main ideas and select and clarify information from a range of sources
· Collect, compare and categorize facts and opinions found in widening range of sources
In early adolescence, children begin to develop formal operational thinking, characterized by the ability to think abstractly and make logical deductions - middle grade/high school (ages 11 - 15). By the end of sixth grade students should be able to:
· pose questions to clarify and interpret information and probe for causes and consequences
· identify and clarify relevant information and prioritize ideas
· analyze, condense, and combine relevant information from multiple sources
Psychologist Richard Bernstein (The Bell Curve) found that students who were given critical thinking lessons made substantial and statistically significant improvements in language comprehension, inventive thinking, and IQ as compared to a control group.
Other studies have found that students who receive instruction in higher-order thinking skills have better problem-solving abilities and are more likely to transfer their learning to unique situations.
By combining the concepts of Bloom’s Taxonomy with the above higher-order thinking skills, I have developed my own graphic to better illustrate them. I have not used a traditional pyramid, but rather choosing an apartment building, because I believe it is more important to focus on the higher-order thinking questions. These questions by their nature ensure that students have mastered the basic comprehension and knowledge required.
Additionally, I like the metaphor of the Medieval European cities, like Edinburgh, where the poor lived in the bottom apartments, the middle-classed merchants and professionals above them, and the wealthy at the top. To me it sends the message of striving to reach those upper levels of success. I strongly believe that critical thinking, or higher-order thinking skills, are not only important to those students planning to attend college, but also for those who are planning to enter the trades or other career paths. It is not that struggling students or students with special needs cannot learn to think at the higher levels. It is more that they may need to demonstrate those skills in different ways.
I mentored a teacher, who taught three mixed eighth-grade history classes. We were working together to add more higher-order questions to her exams and then in creating rubrics to grade them. She brought me several responses and wanted me to grade them using the rubrics. She did not provide student names or backgrounds. I graded them and as we discussed the results, she was surprised that I had awarded one student, we’ll call him Bob an A, while the next student, we’ll call her Sally, received a C. Apparently, Sally normally received A’s on her tests, while Bob, a special needs student on an IEP, usually received Cs.
I explained to her that while Sally wrote a long paragraph, with proper grammar and spelling, she was mostly regurgitating information, without really addressing the prompt which required her to draw a conclusion and support her assertion. Bob on the other hand, had written a beautiful thesis statement (albeit with misspellings and grammar errors) that fully addressed the prompt and provided two pieces of supporting evidence – all within two or three concise sentences! I saw the epiphany cross the teacher’s face, and to her credit, she saw her students’ abilities differently. She was already a good teacher, but she quickly became a great one because she now knew where she had to work with each of her students to help them improve their skills.
To misquote the venerable Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr, “I have a dream that one day students will live in a nation where they will not be judged by meaningless classifications but by the content of their responses.”
Here are some additional examples to make my point. My eldest son is an engineer, and he must find ways to solve programing problems in drone guidance every day in his job. This is probably not a surprise. My daughter, in her job as an editor, had to find creative ways to put words together to solve grammar, comprehensive, rhyming, or flow problems in different types of texts. Again, college graduate – not surprising. My youngest son is a plumber. Every day he shows up at multiple houses to install water heaters, softeners, or to repair leaks and problems with a myriad of other issues. Every house he visits (even those in cookie-cutter housing developments) has a slightly different problem, waterpipe layout, or other complication that he must first identify, understand, and then find a way to resolve. Older houses are especially challenging after years of modification, use of faulty or incompatible materials. Every house requires unique solutions.
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” – W.B. Yeats
As teachers, parents, grandparents, we all want the children in our lives to be successful and develop the higher-order thinking skills they need to compete and succeed in whatever path they choose in life. How can we do this? Next time I will lay out ways to inspire and engage students in learning these higher-order skills.
Next time, I will wrap up this series with some specific ideas for how to inspire and engage students.
Until then, Keep reading!
Comments