Mr Maher's List: Critical Thinking

• • This exposes some of the problem with questions that we have to address.  Students may feel theya re being attacked if you always question, they will fear saying anything becuase you are questioning - but we have to teach them "why" we are questioning and help them know that we are teaching them to do it themselves before they speak.

• Rather than lectures, worksheets, and didactic instruction, it is through reasoning and thinking their way through the curriculum, that students really learn.
• • Standards of Critical Thinking
• the rich and deep disciplines of the social studies are about more than recall, more than simply memorizing chronology, events, and names; they are ways of understanding, learning, and thinking about the world.

  • This is important and lies at the heart of our curriculum.  We are not only teaching students about the world, but we are teaching them how to learn about the world.  We can't dp that by telling them stuff
• • Using the reasoning established here - I want to suggest that we have these posters made for our classrooms.  Here is our CEF GRANT!
• Whatever the activity we are doing in class, whether my seventh grade students are  moving between learning stations, engaged in an experiential exercise, or hypothezing about clues during in the mystery strategy, they will be involved in some degree of writing to improve understanding.

  • Include writing at places in the curriculum you don't normally use it - this will generate (we hope) writing that is more reflective of "thinking" and not simplyclass completion or fact communication

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• Key Features and Practices

  • This is a model to be contrasted with that from the CFT - we shouldn't take a a model and over-emphasisze it, but by the same token, we can't go about this without doing it in a conrete manner
• Thinking Routines loosely guide learners' thought   processes and encourage active processing. They are short, easy-to-learn   mini-strategies that extend and deepen students' thinking and become part   of the fabric of everyday classroom life
• Thinking Ideals are   easily accessible concepts capturing naturally occurring goals, strivings   or interests that often propel our thinking. Four Ideals -- Understanding,   Truth, Fairness and Creativity -- are presented as modules on this site.   There are associated routines for each ideal and within each module there   are activities that help deepen students' concepts around the ideal.

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• One important finding was that skills and abilities are not enough. They are important of course, but alertness to situations that call for thinking and positive attitudes toward thinking and learning are tremendously important as well. Often, we found, children (and adults) think in shallow ways not for lack of ability to think more deeply but because they simply do not notice the opportunity or do not care. To put it all together, we say that really good thinking involves abilities, attitudes, and alertness, all three at once. Technically this is called a dispositional view of thinking. Visible Thinking is designed to foster all three.

  • An important concept to be included in the presentation.  it is not just that we need to teach the components of critical thinking, or the routines through which it is accomplished, but we have to foster the desire to do it.  I do think it is possible, esspecially with counter-factual or "who did it?" type history, we can.  We can also foster motivation by teaching it as a martial art.  
• Visible Thinking approach -- the thinking   routines, the thinking ideals, and other elements. All these were developed   in classroom contexts and have been revised and revised again to ensure   workability, accessibility, rich thinking results from the activities,   and teacher and student engagement.

  • These folks and this program seem to have more applicability to the classroom than CFT, even if the CFT seems more intellectually robust

• An opinion is something you decide on your own, while judgment is a belief you develop after you share your opinion with others and hear theirs, too.

  • This is one approach to highlight
• To make thinking more central in one's teaching, begin by identifying the types of thinking one wants to promote.
• kinds of thinking needed to build understanding: making connections, looking at things from different perspectives, constructing explanations and interpretations, reasoning with evidence, wondering and asking questions, describing the parts and features of a thing, and forming conclusions

  • This is a list like the Foundation's - it could be used instead
• Many teachers like to post these moves in the classroom as a "map of understanding" that they and their students can refer to throughout the learning process

  • I can pose this as an option for a cef grant. Although the 7th grade teacher's list in CTF is good also. Ask the teachers what they want
• For example, after watching a video or reading a text, ask students how the information connects to what the class has already studied about the topic, how does this new information extend their knowledge, and what challenges or questions emerge about the topic as a result. This routine, Connect-Extend-Challenge, scaffolds the active processing of new information by making the thinking involved visible and explicit to all.

  • This is a routine that can be incorporated into teaching
• If a teacher asks lower level questions, that is what he will receive. But if he asks questions that require more deeper thinking at the level of analysis, synthesis, or evaluation, then he will get answers that use critical thinking.

  • How many questions do we ask at the level of analysis, synthesis and evaluation?
• For example, when I am teaching history to students, I tell them we will not be spending most of our time looking at the what, where, when, and who. Those facts might be important but they are only the basic building blocks used to reach critical thinking. Instead I focus on questions that look at the why and how.

  • Another good quote - another method
• If students can back up their answer using the who, what, when, or where, then they have taken that learning to a higher level.

  • How many questions do we ask that actually do this?
• These students are suggesting that after critical investigation the best answer is "We don't know!" How many teachers would honor "I don't know" as a right answer?

  • This is an intriguing point - but the difficulty lies in creating the grading structure around this to measure performance outside of the right/wrong model.  It also shows - that right/wrong questions are almost always inaccurate

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• Compound Interest

  • The calculation of Compound and SImple interest is included in the Financial Literacy Curriculum - how to the remodeling strategies described here stack up against our lessons?