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Teaching in the Upside Down

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In the 1640s a song titled “The World Turned Upside Down” was popularized in England. Citizens sang it as a protest of the government’s ban on Christmas practices. Oliver Cromwell dictated that the historic celebrations of Christmas did not fit with his Puritan principles and values. By decree, the display of Christmas trees, ornamentations, and engagement in festivities were crimes. The tune fit the occasion.

In 1781 British troops reportedly marched out of Yorktown as their band played “The World Turned Upside Down”. The concept that a British army would surrender to colonials made those soldiers think the world order had been upended. The tune fit the occasion.

In our most recent past, federal, and state legislation that supports banning books in classrooms, narrowing the scope of our national history by banning minority stories and personalities, requiring the display of religious documents, and culling immigrant children, and condemning diversity of thought bring to mind “The World Turned Upside Down.” The tune fits the occasion.

I was prepared to be an English and social studies teacher decades ago. My baccalaureate and university training for classroom teaching fit my early life fascination with the stories of humankind. Stories that illuminate who we are, what we do, and why we do it are golden to me. Literature and history intertwined in my brain as I tried to make sense of people, the world, and issues.

There is a line in the Wisconsin state statutes that has supported a teacher’s mission to cause children to be educated and informed thinkers. Stat. 118.01(2)(a)2 reads as follows:  “Educational Goals – 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. This goal, supported by others, gives teachers license to present children with diverse resources, information, and data for their consideration and to support their conclusions.”

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/119

Now, there are books and stories we are not to teach to children and Cromwellian stories and dictates we are to teach. There are things teachers are not to talk about. A revised version of the old song is in order: Teaching in an America Turned Upside Down.

Lessons That Cause Learning Are Like Cookie Recipes That Must Be Perfected Over Time

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“I really nailed that lesson!” A teacher can have that feeling at the end of a lesson or school day and the smile of success feels wonderful. A “nailed” lesson is like eating a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie in which all the ingredients come together for a completely satisfying bite of life. And like a favorite cookie eaten and enjoyed, a teacher knows that all lessons are not created equally, so she savors the moment.

We cause children to learn with the lessons we teach. Our curriculum provides a continuum of learning targets that achieve larger educational goals for children’s education. Teachers make those targets into lessons that teach content knowledge, skills, and/or contexts for how students use knowledge and skills. Lessons are episodic because they fit into a singular place and time in a curriculum. We teach lesson in a unit once each school year and do not teach that lesson again until the next group of children are ready for that episodic lesson. Therein lies a rub.

Lessons, as clinical tools designed to cause specific learning, must be analyzed for their effectiveness after each time they are taught. It is like eating a hot just from the oven cookie – we bite into it, chew it, and taste it to verify that it satisfies. If we do not analyze lesson effectiveness, we do not know if lessons really cause the learning desired. Analyzing a lesson is biting into it and chewing with student learning as the taste that matters. Without analysis for effectiveness any old lesson will do, and instead of causing learning teachers are daycare providers.

What do we know?

Teaching and learning are cause and effect. We do not know the effect of the teaching until we assess for learning. After teaching a lesson, the teacher formatively assesses student learning with a test or performance or demonstration of learning. That assessment creates data about how well each child learned the educational objective of the lesson. The data is what decides if the lesson is a success, a failure, or if the lesson needs improvement. Every lesson a teacher teaches needs assessment and evaluation. If not, education stumbles around in the dark.

We also know that schools do not provide teacher time for lesson analysis. Nada! Schools treat lessons as “contracted line work” – one lesson follows another until a week of lessons and a semester of lessons and a year of lessons have been taught. There is no institutional time set aside for lesson analysis when lessons are line work.

After teaching a lesson, a teacher helps students with their independent practice, homework or other assignments stemming from this lesson, collect assignments and prepares to teach the next lesson. There is no school time nor expectation that a teacher will or should pause other work to evaluate the assessments of lessons taught.

We know that schools do give nominal time for teacher preparation of lessons. Daily prep time however is when principals, counselors, and parents talk with a teacher, or a teacher responds to their communications. Prep time is a teacher’s “bio” break time. And prep time is when a teacher actually takes a break in an otherwise fully packed school day of line work.

Schools also expect a teacher to “prep” on her own time. This may be before or after the school, but “own time” most often is at home wedged into a teacher’s family and personal time. Schools do not keep track of how much “own time” a teacher spends on schoolwork; it is assumed to be part of the job. Own time at home is not truly focused time for lesson evaluation. This assumption fails tests of best educational practice and contributes to teacher burn out and dissatisfaction with teaching as a career.

A better idea!

At first blush, providing teacher time for lesson evaluation really is a “no brainer.” Every artist stands back from their work to study what they have done, consider its form, function, and beauty, and returns with ideas of how to make it better. Why wouldn’t school leaders provide time for teachers to step back and conduct lesson analysis? Time is a logistical problem. How do we provide time for lesson study with children in school? Simple – dismiss the children. Teachers cannot give their mind and effort to lesson analysis during a school day with children in the schoolhouse. Also, few teachers can walk out of a classroom straight into lesson analysis knowing that they still have lessons to prepare for the next day.

Provide protected and dedicated time for lesson analysis to assure the teachers can give their best attention and efforts at lesson improvement. Add paid days to each teacher’s annual contract for this professional work. A month of days should suffice.

Second, collaboration and collegiality are needed for objective lesson analysis. Getting the cook’s thumbs up on freshly baked cookies is one person’s subjective opinion: most cook’s like their own baked goods. Getting opinions from other bakers provides objectivity and validation.

Within the protected and dedicated time, create small teams for lesson studies. Team members must have commonality in their grade level (child development) or subject area content or their comments are without evidentiary substance. At the same time, there can be no competition within a lesson study. In our era of “choice” – parents choosing teachers – teachers in the same grade level cannot be using lesson study to gain advantage over their peers. Best practice is “what is said in lesson analysis stays in lesson analysis,” the benefit of study shows in the next iteration of lessons.

Third, lesson analysis is data and evidence driven. When a teacher presents her lesson she also presents the formative and summative data related to the lesson. She talks of the cause and effect of teaching and learning so that she can improve the “cause” to get better “effect” next time. A lesson analysis without data is just anecdotal – there is no evidence of learning.

Fourth, all the rules of collaborative group work apply. This is professional work at its highest level and requires respect, integrity, and good will. After presenting a lesson and its data, the group pauses for each member to consider the presentation and make notes for their comments. Then the presenter becomes a listener, recording comments that make sense for the perfection of the lesson. There is no tacit agreement that a presenter will take all comments to heart. As a professional, she considers group comments as objective insights. In truth, if she uses only one comment to improve the lesson, the lesson analysis was beneficial.

Fifth, principals and curriculum directors have a place in lesson analysis. While some may feel that administrative presence discourages peer comments, it sanctions all comments. There is no teacher evaluation in a lesson analysis – neither of the presenter or of the commenters. An administrator is not a referee in the process but a contributor to and reporter of the process. Principals and directors can add larger data perspectives to the analysis of a lesson’s specific learner objectives. As importantly, they can report to district and board leadership on the tangible benefits of district commitment to lesson studies. Without their reporting up the chain of command, lesson studies happen in the dark and things that live there do not last long when district resources are limited.

The Big Duh!

Very few school leaders reading this or any other writing about the value of lesson analysis will support this work unless they believe that every lesson taught to children matters. If leadership is into the business of “line work” and daycare, lesson analysis is not their thing. But, if they believe that lessons cause children to learn and teaching is all about causing learning, then new conversations can begin.

Paying Attention Is Learned Not Innate

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Mark Twain wrote, “In America, we hurry… what a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!” (Following the Equator, 1897) Thinking and considering a topic takes time. However, we are quick people.” Twain was writing about the quickening of the American attention span 130 years ago. If being in a hurry was true for Twain in the 1890s, we are in a mega-hurry today. In the last two decades, the average human’s attention span decreased from 12 seconds to 8.25 seconds. Gen Z’s attention span is a little less than eight seconds!

Average attention span

What does this mean for educators? We either must learn to talk and teach faster or learn how to increase the attention span of the children we teach.

What do we know?

First, we know that educating children does not live in a vacuum; teaching and learning are influenced by our greater culture. A child’s attention span at home and at play is the attention span they bring to school. As we watch children at school when they are not engaged in teaching and learning, they clearly live in micro-moments of conversation and activity. Like honeybees, children flit from one activity to the next, often in no discernible order. If busy is a child’s nature, children are nurtured by a parenting culture that purposefully keeps them busy.

At school, part of their hurry before, during, and after school is caused by a school day that does not give them down time. There is barely enough time for toilet stops and nutrition as we shuffle them on and off buses, from classroom to classroom, and to a lunch break with more time standing in line than eating. Organizationally, we literally chase children through a school day.

Why, then, are we surprised when these same children lose interest in school assignments? Why do we frown when they look up and fidget two minutes into reading three, four, or five pages of material? Why do we feel agitated when constantly repeating to students “now, pay attention, please!”  We know the answers. Too often, schoolwork does not match children’s attention spans, and we do not teach children to extend their abilities to pay attention.

Second, we know that an attention span is a real phenomenon. By definition, attention span is the length of time an individual can concentrate on one specific task or other other item of interest.”

APA definition

Is an attention span important for life and learning? You bet it is. “Attention span is a crucial cognitive function that influences our ability to focus, learn, and accomplish tasks. As we progress through various stages of life, our attention span undergoes significant changes, influenced by diverse factors such as brain development, environmental influences, and individual differences. Understanding these changes can help us optimize our learning and productivity at different ages.”

Attention Span by Age

Third, we know that attention spans change. A person’s attention span naturally develops over time. Infants to age three have rapid-fire attention spans, ranging from a few seconds to several minutes. Their entire environment engages them simultaneously and they do not focus on isolated things for long. Children from birth to age three hear, see, and do many things for the first time and all their world is exciting and stimulating.

Early childhood children grow their attention spans to between five and fifteen minutes in duration. However, they also can be easily distracted. Play-based instruction helps young children to piggyback learning onto their play and use play to learn.

Children in the primary and intermediate ages continue to lengthen their attentions spans. As a generalization, they add five minutes of attention span each year in this age group. By the age of ten, children can focus for up to thirty minutes.

Adolescence is troublesome for children to focus attention. “Raging” hormones, social interactions, and technology can interrupt their focus. On their good days, teenagers typically focus for extended periods of one to several hours. But there are days and times when they cannot.

The demands of schooling contradict what we know about paying attention.

If the speed of a school day is a problem, so are the curricular demands we place on teaching and learning. From the get-go, every grade level and subject area course has more curriculum than can be taught in a school year. After 55 years working with teachers, I am not aware of a single teacher who ran out of assigned curriculum to teach before the last day of school. School curriculum is the proverbial ten pounds of learning in a five-pound bag.

Additionally, we never diminish curriculum; we only add more to it. Everyday and every year adds new history, new science, new literature, and new topics deemed as important for children to learn. Have you ever been to a school board meeting where an agenda item was decreasing what would be taught and learned? Never happens.

It is no wonder that paying attention is so difficult when we do not present an attentional education.

Can we grow a child’s attention span?

Knowing the above, can educators help children to increase the quantity and quality of their attention span so they can learn better in school and in life? Yes, we can.

There are numerous tangentials we can manipulate to increase our students’ span of attention

  1. Physical activity. Before requiring children to concentrate, provide them with a stretching or in-place exercise to relieve their need for physical action and make ready for mental activity. Five to 15 minutes of body movement is good preparation for larger amounts of concentration. And insert physical action breaks purposefully between mental activities. Break up learning into chunks and insert physical activity between chunks.
  2. Attention exercises. Teach children what “paying attention” looks and acts like. Have children sit or stand appropriately so they physically are prepared to concentrate. Create mental exercises, like jumping jacks for the brain. Give them material to read or problems to solve. Start a timer and instruct them to focus their attention on reading or finding solutions. Stop the timer after a predetermined time and ask children to describe their concentration and what it felt like to concentrate. Repeat by increasing the time.
  3. Work within time framed expectations for children of different ages. As a rule of thumb, expect children to concentrate on one task for two to five minutes per their years of age. For example, 10 to 25 minutes for a five-year-old and 12 to 30 minutes for a six-year-old. For practical purposes, start all children at the beginning of their age time frame. Within these frames, identify which five-year-olds can focus for 10 minutes and which can focus for up to 25 minutes. Over time, focus activities to increase all children of the same age towards the upper end of their time frame.
  4. Remove visual distractions. For children struggling with their concentration, remove visual clutter. The only thing on a child’ desk or table should be what the item for their focus. As children need other materials and resources, provide them in their order of need. Keep brains focused on the task at hand not looking at stuff not yet needed.
  5. Keep classroom walls and spaces quiet. Bright and colorful and detailed posters and signs draw their peripheral vision and then their attention. Older children with stronger attention spans can handle busier environments.
  6. Use memory exercises. Integrate card, board, and on-screen games that require children to remember facts, chronology, and variations in details. Children today are gamers so game their brains with knowledge and skill building games. All games, however, should involve competition against the learning outcomes, how much a child can do and how well, not against other children.
  7. Have each child rate the challenge of their assignments and keep  track of the rating and where the child begins to lose focus. Children quit engaging in activities they label as hard and too hard. Use their self-ratings to provide each child with an appropriate challenge. As they succeed incrementally, their attention span for sticking with a challenging activity will grow.

https://www.edutopia.org/discussion/7-ways-increase-students-attention-span

Emphasize study to increase attention to study.

The root definition of “student” in verb form means “to study.” A student is a person engaged in study for the purpose of learning. To keep students, busy in school, we assign them an abundance of “doing” tasks and connote the doing of the task with learning. Children do a lot of reading and a lot of math without really knowing how to read for learning or how to learn from the math they do. Decrease the “doing” by increasing the “learning.”

  • Read with academic purpose. The trend in school is to have students read sections or abbreviated editions of texts not whole texts or content-rich editions. We think we do this to keep their attention, but the outcome is minimized learning AND minimized attention. At the end of the assignment, they do not know and understand deeply. They achieve less learning because we settle for less in our assignments.
  • Teach close reading. Or focused and strategized reading. We know reading is not an innate act for humans. We speak and hear innates, but we read and write only through learning how to read and write. So, teach children to read more intensely. With the right reading tools, their attention to reading and learning from their reading will increase.
  • Successive readings. Teach children to read a text assignment three times. Seems like redundancy, but each reading is different. Read first for main ideas and structure. Read second for specific details, vocabulary, and structure of the text. English lit is not biology and biology is not history. Each uses different words and structures for using those words. Read a third time for conclusions – this is what I know now.
  • Active reading. Teach children how to underline, highlight, take notes, select the most important sentences in a paragraph and paragraphs in a chapter. Teach them to “mark up” a text on paper or digitally.
  • Main points and evidence. Teach them to identify, mark up, and look at the main points of a text assignment. They do this by breaking using reverse essay writing techniques. In the structure of the texts and paragraphs, what are the leading statements and closing statements and what supporting evidence lies between.
  • Read whole texts.
  • Do not cheat students by assigning only sections for their reading and study. Give them the satisfaction of reading an entire poem or essay or text or novel. This means deeper and more purposeful teaching to support their reading of whole documents. Deeper study and learning does require deeper teaching.

The above only addresses how to read as a part of studying. Teaching for more complete and deeper knowledge, understanding, application, and evaluation of what is being learned applies to all school courses and subjects.

The Big Duh about attention span!

We really do get what we settle for. And children get what we settled for them. Attention span is a product of age and brain development. It also is a product of educational training. Educators have a child’s captive attendance through compulsory education, if not parental needs for childcare. As we have their physical presence, we can maximize their intellectual focus by explicitly teaching each child to be more intellectually attentive, to know and use deeper studying and learning techniques, and to own their personal learning.

Educating Children Is the Essence of Paying Forward

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We educate children of the next generations in the belief and hope that the knowledge and skills they learn will support their future success in times when our generation cannot. We pay now for rewards anticipated in their tomorrows.

The right to be educated is as essential to an American as any guarantees in the Bill of Rights. In fact, an illiterate and uneducated person lacks the reading and contextual comprehension to understand the background, meaning, or applications of the Bill of Rights let alone the ability explain them as the backbone for our way of life. Advocating for public education and higher education has been with us since our founding. Thomas Jefferson said that education is necessary for all people to protect their freedoms, prevent tyranny, and make better decisions for their common good. Jefferson believed that education is a “paying forward” strategy that prepares children through education to become capable citizens as adults.

https://www.monticello.org/the-art-of-citizenship/the-role-of-education

Jefferson got it right. Our system of public education is the essence of paying forward. Taxpayers fund the education of their children and grandchildren today and for years to come knowing they, the payer, will not see the outcomes achieved by the education they bought. In the rear-view mirror of history, this is how each generation in our country has received education paid for by its parents and grandparents. We educate children now in the belief that when these children are adults they will pay for the education of the next generation(s).

How does this work?

Jefferson and our nation’s forefathers purposefully did not make public education a function of the federal government. They delegated public education to the state governments and there it remains today. Each state is responsible for establishing its public school system, and each state further delegated this responsibility by creating local school districts and school boards of education. In Wisconsin, state statutes 115 – 121 describe the state’s guidelines for local control of public education. As Jefferson proposed, local communities are the most knowledgeable for decisions on the education of children in their local schools.

From the get-go, public education was the agency for ensuring three essential outcomes

  • A literate adult population. The capacity to read and be informed is essential for an electorate to make self-determining decisions. Public education’s first goal was to teach reading and civics. Voters need to read the ballot and sign their name, and they need a working vocabulary to understand their elected representatives.
  • Inculcation of knowledge and skills for prosperity. Schools prepares children to become informed and productive adults. An informed citizenry is bonded by its heritage and its history so, schools teach US History as a common background of national information. And schools prepare children through regular attendance, following group directions, and learning literacy and problem-solving skills to enter the local workforce after graduation. A child who is regular in daily attendance, follows school rules, and annually adds to their knowledge and skills will be a productive and reliable citizen.
  • A common education without privilege or discrimination. Prior to the early 1800s, education was reserved for male children of prosperous, white families. It took decades before girls were enrolled and even longer before non-white children were allowed to attend public school. It took time for the theory of public education as a prevention for a class-based society to become reality. Public education still suffers the ill designs of segregated and self-interested people in our society.

What we need to know.

We do not have a national system of public education. There is no constitutional authority for the federal government to direct local school governance. In other countries, compulsive education is a mechanism for the indoctrination of children in “state thinking.” It is a tool of totalitarianism. And, that tool is not constitutional in the United States. Any attempt to do so is illegitimate and illegal.

Congress uses the 14th Amendment – the due process clause – to create protective legislation ensuring equal and equitable access to education. Our laws prohibit segregation into so-called separate by equal schools for any children. Our laws support and protect the education of children with special education and handicapping conditions. Congress passed specific and continuing legislation, such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to promote public education and teacher preparation. Although the “due process clause” opens the door for Congressional action, the clause has limited interpretation.

In specific instances, politicians and Congress try to shape public education through semi-draconian actions. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 established national student achievement goals in reading and math and punitive repercussion for states, schools, and teachers who could not or did not achieve those goals. The Common Core was proposed as a national curriculum for state and local school systems to implement. In the next decade, NCLB’s efforts dissolved due diminished federal financial support for its agenda and state and local school districts’ adoption of NCLB’s positive intent without punitive accountabilities.

Public education continues to be a tool used by and for special interests in our society to gain personal advantage. Most recently, state legislatures changed school district boundaries to create re-segregated schools – re-segregation on socio-economic-cultural classifications. The COVID pandemic accentuated the creation of chartered “pocket” schools for select enrollment. In several states, school systems look like schools prior to the civil rights corrections of the 50s and 60s. This is not happening by accident.

The historic separation of church and state is eroded by legislation providing public tax dollars to parochial schools. Politicians understand the unspoken consequences of sum-loss school financing. When the sum of financing is politically capped, any redistribution of the limited funds means existing recipients will receive less. And when funding is aligned with enrollment, urban schools suffering “white flight” are left with high costs and diminished funds. This is not happening by accident.

Lastly, local school governance thrives on neighborliness. Moms and Dads who sit on school boards usually do so to support a quality experience for their children and their neighbor’s children. The vast majority of school boards are non-partisan and paid only for their meeting time. Sitting as a school board member is an act of civic responsibility. However, populist activists’ invasion of school board meetings and haranguing of board members to enact specific agendas, such as book banning and curricular cleansing, is changing the membership of local school boards. This is not happening by accident.

The Big Duh!

Polarization within our society is anathema to the purpose of public education and, if continued, will gradually and forever make public education what Jefferson feared – no longer a protection against tyranny. We will be paying forward into an unAmerican future.

Teaching Critical Thinking Is Essential Education

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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.

https://dpi.wi.gov/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.