As superintendent of public schools, I believe that the best way to prepare students for college and careers is to focus on providing instructional programs and opportunities that help them become good thinkers. To do this, teachers, and virtually everyone else in a community, must take on the mantle of becoming a cognitive trainer to students Whether you are a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, older sibling, or member of the community at large, we all have an important role to play in developing good thinkers among our youth.
The best way to become a cognitive coach is to seek out and engage school-age children and adolescents in meaningful conversations. The goal here is to get kids talking about what they think, what they feel, and what they believe whenever and wherever you find them. It can be in a classroom. It can be in the supermarket. It could be at a basketball game. It doesn’t matter where, as long as you engage students in a topical conversation and hopefully even a debate. Mainly, you want to encourage students to express their opinion about things. Ask them to take a position on “either/or” and ask them to support their position with evidence. Interestingly, the simple process of engaging students in real life conversations and debates will serve to reinforce what they have learned in the classroom and help them create their own knowledge on a topic or topic. Learning indicates that a student has been exposed to the material, understands the material, and can recall the information. Knowledge, on the other hand, goes beyond memory and includes information processing, application to other situations, considering meaning, and contrasting with other concepts.
Naturally, the topic of conversation you engage in with one of your students will vary from student to student and in level of complexity depending on the child’s age and level of development. But even a kindergartner has an opinion about the things that happen in her life. Engaging in a conversation with any member of your learning community in a way that gets to what they have learned and what they know will help them develop higher order reasoning skills. The goal here is to help students integrate their knowledge and experience through daily discussions with adults. A student’s mental synthesis process occurs when a respected adult asks a question, particularly a question that requires reflection. In education, we call this process “scaffolding.” I believe that all adults in a community have a responsibility to help children build the mental scaffolding I am talking about here, where the formation of one concept builds on another, with the ultimate goal of producing independent thinkers.
TIPS FOR ENGAGING IN MEANINGFUL CONVERSATIONS WITH STUDENTS:
• Help students make connections what they have learned in the classroom to real life situations. Effective understanding of subject matter content is more likely to occur when students are required to explain, elaborate, and defend what they know in relation to things that are going on around them. Almost any math, science, or social lesson can be used as the basis for “what do you know?” So, what do you think?” question forms. At the grocery store, have students practice estimating as they go and find the best value for size, quantity, and choice of products. Use history lessons and civics for the student to express an opinion about whether some new law or school policy is “fair” or “unfair.” Point out a battered car in a parking lot (hopefully not yours) and ask a student to speculate about it. the laws of physics that must have been involved in the accident You can even ask them to provide an opinion on how long ago the accident occurred by examining the amount of oxidation (rust) that has formed on exposed metal surfaces. Helping students make connections between what they know and situations outside of the classroom where opinion, speculation, estimation, probability, and plausibility are required can be a fun activity for both parties. It also offers students the opportunity to use intuition, creativity and imagination which encourages the development of an inquiring mind.
• Promote diverse thinking on an issue or problem at the local, state, or national level. This is the old type of “on one side and on the other” conversation with a student. Point out to the student that debate is a form of human discourse that is not only tolerated in our society, but encouraged. Ask the student to consider both sides of an ongoing debate that can be found in any local newspaper. Ask them to argue from both sides of the political arena, and then ask them to choose a side. Get them to defend the position they have taken. Don’t be afraid to question any faulty or inaccurate assumptions they made along the way. Again, the goal here is to encourage the student to not only report what she knows and what values she holds in the process, but also to formulate new ideas on a topic through a process of mental synthesis.
• Encourage students to use primary sources of information about a subject, topic or problem. Ask them to report what the textbook and the teacher have taught them, but then instruct them how to conduct their own research using sources that are independent of both. This means teaching them to be skilled users of the local library and the Internet. Students can become highly skilled Google Jockeys if they are guided by adults to find quality research articles, peer-reviewed journals, archived newspaper accounts, etc. that reinforces what they have learned in class or changes their perspective entirely. Either way, they are using higher order reasoning skills that lead to better discrimination of valuable versus non-valuable information. The development of these discriminatory skills leads to a better comprehension of the reading material and forms the basis of structured thinking. Structured thinking results in better writing. Asking students to routinely seek out their own primary source of information in addition to textbooks leads to more disciplined and diverse thinking, which in turn leads to good test-taking behavior and better test scores. This is because the student can call on multiple associations with the same content knowledge when she needs it.
• Help students recognize the relationship between cause and effect. Through the practice of disciplined and discriminating thinking, the next step is to encourage students to use the scientific method to solve problems. As a natural consequence of the type of intentional conversation you have employed thus far, students will begin to routinely use an inventory of cognitive skills that not only activate prior knowledge, but help them construct new meaning in the process. Things like comparing and contrasting, classifying, observing, planning and predicting, testing assumptions, and forming hypotheses are skills that the student now practices well. These are the subset of skills necessary for the student to begin to see the cause and effect relationships around them, and that is when the light bulb really comes on in the process of developing critical thinking. Most schools do an excellent job teaching students the scientific method, but they need help with the precursor skills mentioned above. When students can demonstrate the ability to set aside their personal values, beliefs, and biases and engage in the rigors of purely evidence-based thinking, using the scientific method becomes second nature. As a cognitive coach, when you see these thinking skills beginning to emerge, take the opportunity to use a “teachable moment” to ask the student to explain how they have considered facts, ideas, situations, alternatives, criteria, and consequences when reporting any conclusions. (opinion) that they share.
• Call attention to the use of “spin” and “advertising” in all sources of information.. This involves teaching students to develop an inventory of common sense strategies that help them develop their discrimination skills in the real world. We all know it’s wise to teach children the “rule of thumb” and the old adage that “if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” What I am talking about here is more subtle and insidious. Something that is not obvious to children and adolescents until an adult points it out, but it is a critical analysis skill that is crucial for independent thinking. Spin It is the manipulative use of a source of information. It puts an innocent common sense perspective on an embarrassing fact to make it sound normal or good. Propaganda it is an attempt to get the public to adopt a commonsense view that is not true, and is known not to be true, in order to gain or maintain political control.
Hopefully, after reading this article, you’ll be willing to join me in engaging students who live in your community in conversations that will help them become good thinkers. If we teach children everything we know, their knowledge is limited to ours. If we teach children to think, their knowledge is limitless. I am a firm believer that any student’s ability to succeed in life after high school graduation and in their competition for jobs that do not yet exist, rests on their demonstrated ability to be good thinkers. Your help is needed in the development of students’ cognitive skills, even at an early age. You can do this by helping students collect and analyze information, helping them develop their own set of assumptions, ideas, hypotheses, and most importantly, teaching them to solve real-world problems through disciplined, creative, and independent thinking. . Having good thinkers among you enriches the life of every member of your community, and you can really help by increasing their number by following some of the strategies outlined in this article.