Today my grade 7's practised thinking. As we went through the process, it struck me that although I ask students to make inferences, connections and consider alternate points of view, I haven't really spent much time teaching them techniques for effective thinking.
Teaching students to become better thinkers when approaching tasks will, I believe, enable them to develop better ideas.
We began by reviewing the chart from last week.
Students then worked in partners to decode ads such as the ones below.
I asked them to engage in a series of thinking steps.
1. What is the obvious message? Justify/Explain
2. What assumptions did you make when concluding this was the message?
3. What would a less obvious message be? Justify/Explain.
4. What would the opposite interpretation to yours be? Justify it.
Students worked with partners to interpret, identify assumptions and deliberately form alternate interpretations. The goal was to get them to play with their thinking.
It was interesting watching them work through this task. They really are trained to immediately seek a correct answer. Playing with ideas and interpretations is not a habit for most of them at least within the context of school. It took time for some to become comfortable but once they did, interesting ideas began to emerge. Just getting them to think and discuss their own assumptions is a huge leap forward.
Once finished, they continued working on their constructed teens, and I interviewed them one at a time to find out what they had learned about thinking. I asked them to explain divergent thinking, to talk about the process of thinking and to think of how this process might be used in other subjects or outside of school. For some students, they really hadn't thought about how they think before; others actively use the process, but until now, weren't fully aware of their thinking steps. Some were able to give very clear examples of situations where this process would be useful, particularly in math and science. Regrettably, I didn't record these interviews.
All of this is taking us towards learning how to ask ourselves questions and determining which are the better questions. Teaching children to ask good questions is very much an expectation of our curriculum, but upon reflection, I think much of what I have done has been at a superficial level of thinking. Moving students fully into Inquiry requires them to be able to ask many questions and to determine which questions are worth seeking answers to. I need my students to look at tasks and be able to formulate rich questions independently. That, I think is what will truly move them into effective self-directed learning.
Teaching students to become better thinkers when approaching tasks will, I believe, enable them to develop better ideas.
We began by reviewing the chart from last week.
I asked them to engage in a series of thinking steps.
1. What is the obvious message? Justify/Explain
2. What assumptions did you make when concluding this was the message?
3. What would a less obvious message be? Justify/Explain.
4. What would the opposite interpretation to yours be? Justify it.
Students worked with partners to interpret, identify assumptions and deliberately form alternate interpretations. The goal was to get them to play with their thinking.
It was interesting watching them work through this task. They really are trained to immediately seek a correct answer. Playing with ideas and interpretations is not a habit for most of them at least within the context of school. It took time for some to become comfortable but once they did, interesting ideas began to emerge. Just getting them to think and discuss their own assumptions is a huge leap forward.
Once finished, they continued working on their constructed teens, and I interviewed them one at a time to find out what they had learned about thinking. I asked them to explain divergent thinking, to talk about the process of thinking and to think of how this process might be used in other subjects or outside of school. For some students, they really hadn't thought about how they think before; others actively use the process, but until now, weren't fully aware of their thinking steps. Some were able to give very clear examples of situations where this process would be useful, particularly in math and science. Regrettably, I didn't record these interviews.
All of this is taking us towards learning how to ask ourselves questions and determining which are the better questions. Teaching children to ask good questions is very much an expectation of our curriculum, but upon reflection, I think much of what I have done has been at a superficial level of thinking. Moving students fully into Inquiry requires them to be able to ask many questions and to determine which questions are worth seeking answers to. I need my students to look at tasks and be able to formulate rich questions independently. That, I think is what will truly move them into effective self-directed learning.
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