A teacher once described his old teaching style: "I would stand in front of the class and do the thinking for the students. This is like someone in front of a physical education class doing push-ups and sit-ups while students sit there and watch." Luckily for his students, this teacher learned to use instructional strategies designed to help students exercise their own thinking.
Teachers around the world have abandoned "pour and store" teaching philosophies and are working to help their students acquire thinking skills and take charge of their own thinking, say experts. "We're not trying to teach people to think. Everyone thinks," says Barry Beyer, professor of education emeritus at George Mason University (Fairfax, Va.). "But very few of us think as well as we should when we deal with the complex issues we face as voters and consumers." For example, people tend to believe what they see in print, says Beyer. "Kids say, ‘If it's in a book, it must be true.' But look at Hitler's Mein Kampf."
"Left to itself, thinking is naturally egocentric and sociocentric," says Richard Paul, director of research at the Center for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University (Rohnert Park, Calif.). To support his claim, Paul cites research, including Jean Piaget's, that shows that people don't naturally consider different points of view. "If thinking was fine left to itself, we wouldn't need schools," Paul adds.
"A lot of people believe that good thinking happens by happy accident–if you put kids in a rich environment, their thinking will improve," says Beyer. "It doesn't work that way for most kids."
Providing Skills Through Content
Most K-12 students in the United States should be developing better thinking skills because standards now require such skills. But those who study the issue are concerned that thinking skills are not being taught effectively.
"Higher order thinking is in all state and national curriculums, so teaching for thinking is in place, formally, in these documents," notes Robin Fogarty, senior vice president of product development for Skylight Training and Publishing (Arlington Heights, Ill.). "But I don't know if it's followed up in the classroom in the same ways. I don't think that explicit teaching of thinking occurs as much as we'd like."
"In the 1980s there were a lot of freestanding programs to teach thinking skills," explains Robert Swartz, who directs the National Center for Teaching Thinking (Newtonville, Mass.). These programs proved largely unsuccessful, he says, because many students were not transferring the skills to real-life situations.
For example, Lynn English, now principal of Hunter Elementary School in Raleigh, N.C., describes an experience she once had while teaching a course on decision making: A girl was in tears because she couldn't figure out what to do about a personal problem. That the student couldn't apply the decision-making skills she was learning in the class to her life situation was "a huge awakening" for English.
Student inability to transfer thinking skills to real-world situations has led most teaching for thinking programs to combine the explicit teaching of skills with content, say experts. To do this, says Jay McTighe, who directs the Maryland Assessment Consortium, teachers "need to be clear about what good thinking in a discipline is, and then decide how to teach it."
For example, if we want students to compare literature, "we must teach them the tools" that writers and literature scholars use to do this, says McTighe. Second graders can compare and contrast two versions of a fairy tale by using a matrix to look at word choices, illustrations, and character. "This shows them what's important in thinking about literature."
Surveying the Field
Despite general agreement among experts about combining thinking skills with content, the teaching for thinking field remains complex because of the variety of programs and approaches available. For example, some educators believe that critical thinking should be the basis of teaching for thinking. Others say that critical thinking should be complemented by other types of thinking, such as creative or practical.
Those who study teaching for thinking are also divided about the importance of recent ideas in education. "There are many fads sweeping through K-12 education today," says Paul. "Teachers think that a brain-based approach will help students think well. But the research on this is always changing. Ten years ago, right brain, left brain theory was popular. How has that served students who were taught using that approach?" Paul also identifies multiple intelligences and emotional intelligence as fads, saying that they "give some insight, but don't offer a comprehensive approach to teaching kids to think."
Others disagree. "People want multiple intelligences, cooperative learning, authentic assessment," says Fogarty . "All these things are about teaching for thinking." She believes that "pedagogy and brain research go hand in hand." She says that brain research, which has shown us that the brain continually seeks connections, has garnered support for thematic teaching and problem-based learning.
No Quick Fixes
Because of the many different approaches to teaching for thinking and debates in the field, experts encourage teachers and administrators to read literature on the subject and to visit schools that are using different approaches. Swartz recommends that teachers and schools "make sure they know what they want for their students, try out different programs, have an open mind, and evaluate whether they are getting what they want. Be discriminating and set your own standards."
In the end, most experts agree that no one approach is necessarily best for all students. "We do not need to write about the procedure for doing a thinking skill. There are probably different ways of doing it," says Beyer. "Kids need to see several [procedures] to incorporate a skill into what they are doing. We want kids to take ownership of effective learning procedures."
Whichever approach teachers or schools take, experts advise that implementing a successful thinking program takes time. "When I first started in the thinking field in the early 1980s, I saw an ad in a magazine that described a new thinking skills program and promised that kids would be geniuses in two weeks," says Swartz. "I asked myself, how can they make that claim? There are no quick fixes."
Developing Thinking in All Students
In the 1970s and '80s, higher-order thinking was emphasized in programs for students identified as gifted and talented. Today, experts say, all students can benefit from studying thinking. "It's important for all kids to have deep and meaningful learning experiences," says McTighe.
Twelve students at a time, every other day, for 55 minutes, Cinde Rinn teaches students who may be poor readers and have failed the end-of-grade and state writing tests. In her classroom at Mineral Springs Middle School in Winston-Salem, N.C., she combines the HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills, a program designed to teach thinking skills to at-risk learners) program with multiple intelligences, learning styles, and cooperative learning to help her students acquire better thinking skills. Many of the students "are comfortable filling in the blanks, but watching videos showing different perspectives is difficult for them," says Rinn.
Rinn's first task is to create a comfortable learning environment so that the students feel safe to think. One strategy she uses to achieve this is cooperative learning. "Cooperative learning is important to thinking skills," explains Rinn. "You need a climate to work together, then to use thinking skills, then to use those skills in other situations."
Such a climate is especially important for middle school girls, says Rinn. "At that age, boys are more aggressive. Cooperative learning gives girls a chance to know they can think and think well."
Like Rinn, Lynn English thinks that students of all abilities can be taught to improve their thinking. As a former teacher of a self-contained 4th grade gifted class, she noticed that many children were performing beyond what tests had predicted. "I began to ask, what makes people gifted? Naturally, I looked at testing and found that many kids who don't test high, show depth in real-world settings."
From the Classroom to Real Life
Based on her research and experiences, English chose to implement Robert Sternberg's triarchic approach to thinking, which "provides a balance of analytic, practical, and creative approaches and ways to apply them in the real world," says English.
English illustrates the approach by describing a typical unit on the Judith Viorst book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. She explains that with a traditional approach, a teacher might tell students to read the book and look at its cover, then ask the students questions about the setting and main characters, and then require students to write something about the book.
In contrast, a teacher using a triarchic approach begins the unit by asking students to think about a recent day in their own lives when everything went wrong. The teacher asks, Who were the main characters? What was the cause and effect? What was the setting?
Each child then shares her answers with a partner and talks about how she felt that day. Then the children read the book. They draw a Venn diagram to compare their day to Alexander's. The teacher asks the students to think how Alexander could have changed his day at one point in the story. Then students explore how they could make these same changes in their own lives.
English says her school's approach will help students become more self-reflective and encourage them to ask themselves how they can improve their thinking. She hopes that students will learn to be creative, practical, and analytical–and know which situations are appropriate for each approach. "Tax time is probably not a good time to be creative," she notes.
Students Evaluate Their Thinking
One way to help students learn which types of thinking are appropriate for specific situations is to teach them to evaluate their thinking. While teachers can assess student thinking by asking probing questions, creating performance tests, and collecting student portfolios, "assessment of thinking needs to be set in a context," McTighe says. "Whether thinking skills are taught in one subject or as interdisciplinary, assessment needs to have meaning" so that students can transfer skills.
Once students have practice using thinking skills in different contexts, they can further claim ownership of their thinking by deciding how to assess it. "When you get students involved [in assessing] their own thinking, you want them to establish criteria for evaluation," says Wayne Mosher, principal of Parkway South High School in St. Louis, Mo.
"If you want kids to think, they need open-ended opportunities," says Mosher. For example, in science class, students should design the experiment and decide how to evaluate and report it. Then they ask, "Should they write a paper? If so, what should be in the paper?" To truly become independent thinkers, students should receive guidance on how to assess their thinking as they move through K-12 education, says Mosher.
Thinking for the Future
Because improving students' thinking gives young people the power to decide what to think, "people in every corner of the country are a little frightened by thinking," says Mosher. "They want to line kids up and teach them what they need to know. There's a fear that kids' minds will be liberated. But most kids want to know things deeply and understand them."
For his part, Mosher says that by teaching kids to be good thinkers now, we will all reap the benefits in the future. "Kids know the world is a bit of a mess and their generation must do something to improve it." For this reason, although "thinking is hard work for adults and kids, we must do it."
Start with Staff Development
Start with Staff Development
To help students realize that they have control over their thinking and learning, teachers must first learn this lesson themselves, say experts. Three years ago, the San Francisco Day School formed the school's learning committee—which includes teachers from each grade level and some administrators. The committee investigates and evaluates education ideas and decides which ones would have the best impact on teaching and learning. After doing research, visiting other schools, and attending workshops, the committee decided to focus on critical thinking as its first topic.
"Critical thinking helps teachers work with students, creates teaching focused on doing the real work of life, and helps students improve their thinking. It's a set of skills that cuts across all the disciplines," explains John Trapasso, who teaches 7th grade history and English and chairs the learning committee. "There is a basic vocabulary in critical thinking. This appealed to us because all teachers in the building could study and learn a common language to work with all students at all grade levels."
The learning committee also chose critical thinking because "these skills help you be more reflective about your inner world and your relationships with others. They help you to take charge of your thinking, desires, emotions."
Even though these lessons benefit teachers personally, they also have implications for student behavior. "If a child is mad at someone, he wouldn't necessarily throw a ball at some kid's head. He might think about why he's angry and his options," says Trapasso.
Teachers at San Francisco Day School have received training from Richard Paul in critical thinking and have supplemented their knowledge by studying the work of David Perkins and Art Costa. Team members work in small study groups throughout the year to learn how to improve their own thinking and how to infuse thinking skills into lesson plans. Teachers on the team will later train their colleagues.