Reflection 4

Reflection 4

This reflection will continue discussing the principles of teaching thinking.

Writing is thinking

One of the best and most natural ways to teach thinking is to teach writing. Firstly, writing incarnates thought, whether we are considering economics essays, philosophical discourses, literary criticism, argumentative essays or fictional writings. Quality writing requires the pre-existence of quality thought. Secondly, for any type of writing, the writer must always consider his purpose, and then consider the best way to achieve his purpose given his audience and context. Strategic thinking is therefore crucial.

We will begin by considering the first point with reference to several types of writing.

There are a number of text patterns ('top-level' structures) which can be found in non-fiction writing. Two main types are argumentative structures where reasons are used to support claims and explanatory structures with cause and effect chains. For the first, students can only write good arguments if they first able to construct them. And they are only able to do this if they are able to use sound premises to support intermediate conclusions (if any) well, which in turn serve as premises for the final claim. Justification of claims is clearly a thinking skill. To a great extent, this skill is innate—most human beings have some a priori knowledge of the rules of inference. Philosophers argue much about how this is possible, but not many would deny we do know the rules of logic to some extent without being taught; and when we are taught these rules, the teaching seemingly reminds us and makes us more aware of something we already know.

We should be midwives who help students to give birth. We should help them to practice and refine the innate reasoning power they already possess. One of the most effective ways to do this would be to teach students how to turn a cloudy and wordy argument in their heads into a clear diagram on paper—a key skill used in informal logic ('put into standard form'), and one that can be integrated into the planning stage of process writing. The clear distinction made between premises, intermediate claims and final claims, and the greater light shed on the materials and architecture of thought, mean students are able to employ their reasoning abilities more effectively. To complement this, students also need to be taught (or perhaps reminded of) the standards of sound intellectual standards and habits (like those from Richard Paul) to evaluate and be meta-cognitive about the quality of their arguments.

For explanatory writing, equivalent strategies are necessary. For instance, pupils need to be clear about the cause and effect chains through the use of graphic organisers like the fishbone diagram. They also should know and apply the criteria for good explanations.

For fictional writing, creative thinking comes to the fore. Students need to be taught strategies to fluently generate a variety of ideas for characters, settings, plot and so on. They need to use visualisation skills to evoke scene, experience them with all five senses, and enter into their mood and atmosphere; students need to experience their characters, and even become the characters they craft, experiencing their thoughts, passions and characteristics as one’s own. They need to generate different plots and complications, preferably driven by the desires and natures of the characters.

Moving on to the second point, students have to think strategically to cater to their audience after generating sound and creative thought. In their planning, they have to be taught how to take into account the prior knowledge and perspectives of their audience, when framing their arguments and explanations and stories. They have to address gaps in knowledge, misconceptions, and entrenched points of views. Besides appealing to logos, they also need to appeal to pathos and ethos by carefully targeting the emotions of their audience and maintaining credibility through the use of appropriate tone, language and appealing authorities.

In essence, when we teach students to write effectively, we are teaching them to think effectively. For Fuhua students, I would probably have to differentiate for readiness and ask them analyse and construct simpler arguments, explanations and stories. I will have to use less complex resources and provide more scaffolding. But I do think the fundamental strategies or aims should not change, and I have the faith that they would enjoy thinking as much as my former students. They may use simpler words or less immaculate grammar, but I firmly believe they can produce quality thought.

Quality questions are needed for quality thought

This principle is central to Socrates’s pedagogy. To be a midwife of thought, one needs to ask good questions that promote higher order thinking. For this, we can depend on some taxonomy like Revised Bloom’s or Marzano’s, or use Paul’s elements of thought to generate questions that cause pupils to consider different perspectives, justify their opinions, evaluate their evidence, generate new ideas, question their assumptions, infer multiple implications, categorise ideas and so on.

In addition, one can use these taxonomies to train students to generate higher order questions. Indeed, this is arguably even more important than asking higher order questions (though the teacher would of course have to model the practice). For we want to produce students who have the habit of critically questioning what they read and hear about, whether from peers, from books or from us. As such, a functioning thinking classroom would be one where the teacher steps aside quite frequently, and where students take up much of the burden of discussion and thinking.

Is this possible for my students in a mainstream school? With suitable differentiation and adjustment, and with enough time and patience, there is no reason why it is not.

Concepts unify; concepts engage

The final principle is to that even in a largely skills-based subject like English, we need to base our teaching on concepts and generalisations. I use Hilda Taba’s definition of a concept as a word describing a class of objects with common elements, like love, setting, animals, justice, energy, demand and so on. Generalisations are statements that express relationship(s) between two or more concepts (e.g. energy cannot be created or destroyed, equity is often secured at the expense of efficiency). By their very nature, concepts and generalisations unify discrete facts, and can be applied to understand different phenomena and to solve problems in many contexts. As such, they tend to organize our knowledge, and produce ‘aha’ moments where we feel that our understanding of ourselves and the world has grown. By contrast, teaching that is largely mainly on discrete facts and skills tend to be much less engaging and cognitively stimulating.
Unlike the teaching of facts, one cannot teach concepts and generalisations by simply telling them to students, unless the students have the training and readiness to spontaneously connect the concepts and principles to their prior knowledge and experiences. Generally, it is important even when using direct instruction to exemplify concepts and principles extensively, and/or to use different strategies to stimulate pupils to relate what they know to the concepts and principles. It is in fact often better to use inductive methods like concept attainment, concept development or inquiry where pupils infer generalisations from examining phenomena or facts. In that way, pupils would be more certain and convinced about the grounds for their knowledge. Similarly, to achieve deep understanding, it is important to put contradictory generalisations and theories (which are constructed from a set of coherent generalisations) together, so that pupils are forced to consider different perspectives and acquire a comprehensive appreciation of the grounds for the generalisations or theories—including why opposite opinions are not true.
It is probable that students who are weaker in their linguistic abilities would require a significant dose of skills training (though even this can easily go beyond drill and recitation), and thus less time is available for concept development and learning. Yet, to promote reading, listening, speaking and writing skills students need to understand concepts like audience, coherence, setting, plot, climax and so on. And many effective strategies that undoubtedly improve language skills have the potential for concept teaching. Examples include integrating themed literature to hook students to read, using debate and discussion to consider social issues, teaching vocabulary acquisition strategies based on word categorisation, and teaching students reading comprehension strategies that help them connect their reading to personal experiences, other texts and self.
All in all, I look forward to new experiments, new adventures and new discoveries in my next posting.