Lost and not knowing which way to go is a concept that has greater meaning and worry in our world today. There are an abundance of noises and loud voices with few guiding lights and fewer guardrails for what is real and valid. Thinking critically is a skill set educators can and must teach children to use for finding their way.
What should a person who is lost do to find their way forward? If physically lost, there are a series of well-advised steps to take, like staying calm, stop wandering, retracing your steps, using landmarks, and using devices like GPS and maps to find your way. Finally, stay put and wait for help. As helpless as being physically lost seems, there are real and tangible things to do.
Being figuratively or mentally lost is a similar conundrum, but also significantly different. Staying calm, using devices, and waiting for help can apply. But the mind does what the mind wants to do, and it wanders and often becomes more lost and mired without a way forward. The absence of physical and tangible remedies causes being mentally lost to seem increasingly overwhelming.
What do we know?
Moore’s Law spoke about the rate of transistor development and the increasing speed of change. The world sped through that law, yet Moore and the speed of change can be applied to change in the world as a whole. The political, economic, social and cultural landscapes of our world are changing at Moore-like speed. Given the amount of vastness of changing things and all the crappola flung about, it is easy to feel lost and adrift in the world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
Facets of this changing landscape are the ever-increasing sources of information that are available to every “connected” student today. On any question, a student can find similar, different, conflicting, fact-based and alternative fact-based information at a moment’s notice and tomorrow there will be more. For a growing mind, noise and voices are bedlam. And to make it even more difficult, listeners in the beldam are told who to believe and who not to believe as often as they are told what to believe.
In the 60s and 70s some young people were so abused by disinformation systems that “dropping out” of mainstreamed culture was an attractive option. In this century, disenchantment with adult voices of all persuasions leads to Millennials and Zers becoming semi-isolates, to prioritize self-reliance and collaboration instead of following and looking for ethical leadership.
Teachers are empowered to teach critical thinking.
Wisconsin Statute 118.01(2)(a)(2) instructs public educators to teach “… analytical skills, including the ability to think rationally, solve problems, use various learning methods, gather and analyze information, make critical and independent judgments and argue persuasively.” It may appear to be cherry picking to isolate this singular statute, but in a culture that is unable to attach whimsical decisions to bedrock, identifying a state statute is a true anchor.
Critical thinking also is an identifiable thread running through each of the disciplines of the Common Core curricula, adopted and incorporated into Wisconsin’s Academic Standards.
What does teaching critical thinking look like?
In its simplest terms, critical thinking is an intellectual, brain-based process of careful evaluation, analysis, and synthesis of various pieces of information to create a rational, and thought-out judgment or decision about a targeted question. Everyone has the capacity for critical thinking. However, many choose to be told rather than to think.
All teachers, regardless of grade level or subject, can teach children to understand and use critical thinking skills. These skills can apply to every question or substantive decision in a child’s school and personal life, though many daily decisions are semi-baked into a child’s education and training. For example, looking both ways before crossing a street does not require critical thinking. But trusting adults a child does not know does. And understanding daily news does. And understanding personal relationships does.
While we do not want to paralyze child decision making, we do want to teach them how and when to exercise deeper thinking skills to navigate through their growing up.
These elements are foundational to critical thinking. As practitioners of critical thinking, we teach children to –
- evaluate by assessing the credibility and relevance of information. Who says it, why do they say it, who do they represent in saying it, what do they want to achieve by saying it? Children need to understand and recognize bias in information and voices. They need to discern facts from opinions, and in most recent terms, false facts and disinformation. Critical thinkers verify the accuracy of the information they consider by asking questions and reading/listening to diverse points of view.
- analyze information by finding similarities and differences in what the information says, breaking these into smaller bits from which patterns and relationships in the information can be identified, and creating a concept or theory that explains, in the student’s own words, what she has learned and knows. She understands perspective while knowing that some information does not make sense in a coherent argument.
- synthesize the bits, connections and disconnection, and relationships needed to make an informed and personal statement. While evaluation and analysis deconstruct information into smaller bits, synthesis is constructing a meaningful statement based upon sorting and valuing the bits.
- reason with others. This the hardest step in critical thinking. When a student reasons with others, she puts her understandings and informed conclusions against those of others. It is a testing of a student’s evaluation, analysis, and synthesis. Good reasoning sometimes requires accommodating well-reasoned arguments from other students.
If not teachers, then who?
It is difficult to be young today. Maybe it always was, but in this decade even more so. It is hard for adults to sort the chaos and find their own truths when every statement in the news conveys the speaker’s or writer’s self-interests and biases. It is equally difficult to find incontrovertible sources of information. It is hard for adults; it is really hard for children.
We need to make classrooms into laboratories for critical thinking at all ages and levels of cognitive development. As teachers and public education leaders declare classrooms to be apolitical and agnostic regarding social, political, economic, and cultural controversy, teachers and students are free to investigate issues, ask insightful questions, and use critical thinking to derive informed answers. This is why teachers are critical to critical thinking.
Secondly, teachers are prepared to develop critical thinking skills, not rush them. Critical thinking fits well into an educator’s understanding of “developmental appropriateness.” Our youngest primary students can observe, listen, touch and feel, and constructively identify what they learn about things, ideas, people, and their world. They identify information and begin to evaluate it. Primary aged children are not ready for deeper analysis, synthesis, or reasoning.
Intermediate grade level students can begin analyzing information. Hilda Taba, a curricular theorist and student of John Dewey’s, gave us a method for analyzing information and using critical thinking inductively for students to create their own informed concepts and generalizations. Students in the intermediate grades begin using Taba techniques to analyze information on the way toward generalizations.
http://mrbeasleysaigsite.weebly.com/tabas-concept-development-model.html
Secondary school is ripe for critical thinking in every area of our curriculum. Every teacher can meaningfully ask, “what do you know about…”, “what do you observe about …”, “what do you think about …” questions and move students through evaluation and analysis into synthesis and reasoning. Given the range of cognitive development in secondary students, all students, even those still immature in their reasoning skills, benefit from being engaged in formulating their thoughts and explaining and supporting their reasoning.
Taba died in 1962, but her words ring true more than 60 years later.
“One scarcely needs to emphasize the importance of critical thinking as a desirable ingredient in human beings in a democratic society. No matter what views people hold of the chief function of education, they at least agree that people need to learn to think. In a society in which changes come fast, individuals cannot depend on routinized behavior or tradition to make decisions, whether on practical every day or professional matters, moral values, or political issues. In such a society, there is a natural concern that individuals be capable of intelligent and independent thought.”
So, if not teachers, who do we want to teach children to be critical thinkers. Our elected leaders? Our social influencers? AI?
Teachers cause learning.