Critical Thinking

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Critical Thinking

What an exciting time to be a teacher and a parent. I am fascinated by the future our children and students are entering and I enjoy the challenge of preparing them for it. Like many others I believe that as an educator the challenge lies not in the transmission of subject knowledge and skills, but in the development of those dispositions our young people will need both within and beyond the classroom.

A major theme in the current thinking about our future is the rise of automation and how we will need to be more human to outsmart robots. It is developing the skills we often refer to as dispositions, (soft skills, 21st century skills or the C’s), that will see our students well equipped for this challenge. This blog is a description of my pathway to incorporating one of these dispositions, Critical Thinking, in my classroom. This journey is in no way complete but my intention here is to build on the professional development we have started at school and think about how we can unpack Critical Thinking (CT). The next step will be in our Professional Learning Teams (PLTs), sharing our experiences as we work on developing CT in our practice and make it explicit for our students.

As a starting point please consider the following definitions of Critical Thinking. How are they similar and how does this resonate with your own understanding of CT? The AIS as part of their deep learning project defines critical thinking as:

Evaluating information and arguments, seeing patterns and connections, constructing meaningful knowledge, and applying it in the real world.

Similarly ACARA also pick up on this notion of arguments and the solution of problems.

Critical thinking is at the core of most intellectual activity that involves students learning to recognise or develop an argument, use evidence in support of that argument, draw reasoned conclusions, and use information to solve problems.

Whilst the definitions were a useful starting point I still needed to see how this looked in my classroom. The next step for me was to dive deeper and exploring the ACARA learning continuum for Critical and Creative Thinking was a great way to do this. It gave me an insight into what CT actually looks like and how I might communicate this with students. I would encourage to look at this continuum with 3 key questions in mind.

What are the key aspects of CT?
What do you see in the continuum that you already incorporate into your practice?
What is something you might like to develop further ?

In my next blog I will look at what I found the keys aspects of CT to be and how these shaped my practice in the classroom.

PRIME – How I found out what students did not understand!

I recently collaborated with a colleague who is a Geography teacher for an idea for my Year 8 class studying percentages. I started with the notion of plastic straws and their impact on ocean pollution. After talking to my colleague however, I ended up at shark attacks.

He showed me an app from his phone that records the number of shark sightings in various locations and suggested it would be cool to have students investigate if shark attacks occurred where shark sightings happened. I thought about it and wondered if I presented students with the data would they:

a) come up with the same question to investigate?

b) see how they could use their knowledge of Maths and percentages to investigate this?

Here is what happened.

I started by presenting the worksheet below and asked them to individually write down at least one thing they noticed and one thing they wondered about these images.

I notice I wonder. I gave the class time to notice and wonder and as is my practice I took every student response including the fact that the phone was down to 8% battery and the wondering about why did I waste my battery on this. However there was more to it than just these superficial responses.

Posing Questions. It was time to answer my first question above, could the students come up with the same question to investigate as my colleague and I had? The short answer, yes. This was the question posed by the students. We tried a few versions to help develop an understanding of the question for all students.

Ideas. I don’t see PRIME as being a linear process. It is necessary to jump in and out of different sections as needed. This was Problem Based Learning, it was an attempt to get the students hooked by provoking them about what they didn’t know. So it was the ideas stage that came next. What ideas would the students have to solve this problem. It might not surprise you to know that the vast majority of the class came up with an answer quickly, yes or no. Not based on facts or information but simply based on their beliefs. This is a challenge, how do you move students to dig deeper when they think the task is simply a tick a box, give an answer and move on to the next question. To dig deeper I tell students, ‘convince me’, 2 words that make a difference to their level of thinking.

Research. I think this section needs more depth than what I offer here. In this case research was about making a connection to prior learning, a crucial skill in critical thinking. This took a while for students to make the connection and only a handful of students made the link to percentages independently. Those that did so were generally tentative and unsure if the path they were pursuing was correct. There were huge issues around risk taking and the fear of being wrong. It was very obvious they were used to being told what maths to use either directly or from clues within the question. This is fascinating and something I will continue to explore in my practice as I endeavour to develop deeper learners. This is the work tentatively put forward by one of the students and subsequently built on by others to develop a mathematical method.

Make. Now it was into the maths, they knew the technique to use and jumped in and did the skill, but there was a surprise waiting for me the next day as I checked their homework.

Evaluate Here was my surprise and where I found out the lack of depth of knowledge about what they were doing. This was fascinating. Out of the make stage some students had identified that they could calculate the percentages but did not understand how it related to the original question that had been posed. In fact they could not answer the original question. The class engaged in a discussion about how to interpret the percentages . They got caught up in the different number of sightings in each state and despite having calculated the percentages could not see how these percentages dealt with this problem. This was my learning moment. Whilst they could parrot back to me what a percentage was and how to calculate with them they did not recognise the true power of a percentage as a tool to compare things which were out of different amounts. It is this level of understanding that I am working hard to develop. Establishing this early in their learning will provide the tools later for them to analyse, argue and use their mathematical knowledge fluently in a variety of contexts.

The image below is messy but shows some of our discussion and what the students were thinking.

So my first foray this year into PRIME with a new class raised some interesting issues for me to consider. The big one for me was depth of thinking and depth of knowledge. I quickly uncovered the students who just treated their learning as a tick the box exercise and were reluctant to engage. Convincing me and convincing others of their own arguments was a beneficial way to dig deeper but how do I catch all students in this?

How about in another subject area? What does the use of aspects of PRIME uncover for you? How does this translate into deeper thinking in your students?

Why I value Professional Learning Teams.

In my journey to develop my classroom practices to explore Critical Thinking, I am supported at school by a Professional Learning team. We meet once a fortnight for an hour. Our school has scheduled it to happen within the timetable and our teams consist of teachers from a variety of subject areas. We are only 8 weeks into term and have met 3 times and already I have learnt so much from the conversations that occur in these teams. Here are two things my colleagues have shared that I think everyone should consider.

The first one came from a Design teacher who wanted to explore communication. They mentioned they were considering having a senior class to review the work of junior classes and provide feedback. A simple idea that for some reason had never crossed my mind. It provides an instant ‘real world audience’ for student work which automatically lifts the expectation of the quality of their work. So I tried it, I gave Year 8 a task and then gave their work to Year 11. The added bonus was uncovering the gaps in Year 11’s understanding. You can only give feedback if you have the knowledge to do so. Year 11 where instructed to give feedback on one thing they liked and one thing that could be improved. I returned it to Year 8 along with the feedback. The students readily interacted with the feedback applying themselves to improve their work. This may have been the most effective thing I can do in my classroom;

student time spent addressing feedback is some of the most valuable time they will spend (Lucas, B. and Spencer, E., Pedagogy for a Changing World Teaching Creative Thinking, p81, 2018)

Year 11 feedback to a Year 8 student. I really like how this challenges the student who could do the original task to think deeper about their work.

The second nugget was just this week and again came from a Design teacher. This time the context was how to develop true collaboration. I love this idea as I think it is important to break the notion that group work is necessarily collaboration. I have seen plenty of group work products prepared by just one individual group member with no collaboration evident. So what was the idea? Simple, reverse the think-pair-share protocol. Again a simple idea that is easy to implement. The idea is that once a problem is presented to or developed by the class, start by placing the students in groups of 3 to share and develop ideas. Then after a suitable amount of collaboration time where students discuss ideas, change it up and put them in groups of 2 (with a different person) to again share and reflect. The final step is for students to develop their solution individually. The thing that strikes me about this is that there is no where to hide in an individual solution. They have had the opportunity to collaborate and share ideas, get feedback and refine their thinking and now have to do the work themselves. Again I took this straight back to my classroom, we have done the 3 and the 2 and I am looking forward to see what the individual work looks like.

What I like most about these ideas is their simplicity. They took almost no prep time. The added bonus is that both of them are pedagogical practices that address key content and skills in my subject area as well as developing key competencies of Critical Thinking and Collaboration in my classroom.

What have you learnt from in school Professional learning this year? I would love to hear about the ideas of your colleagues that are transforming your teaching.

P – Posing Questions

Posing questions sounds so simple but for me it was a major challenge. I am a Mathematics teacher so for over 25 years I had been the main, if not sole, source of posing questions in my classrooms. The thing with that is often I was not posing the questions the students wanted to investigate. Their buy in was low, so although the tasks looked amazing to me it was a struggle to get them to dive deep and engage in ways that would foster their critical and creative thinking.

I think this is where the power of having students pose their own questions lies. It encourages them to be curious, to look around them and wonder and to find what engages them about a situation. These are not robotic skills and as such are the essential dispositions we would like to equip our young people with for their future. It also means they have had a voice in their education, it is their question they are investigating, they will want answers.

So how do you go about encouraging students to ask questions? How do you facilitate this in a way that is meaningful and aligns their questions to your curriculum? About three years ago I started this full of enthusiasm. I had started to engage with problem based learning and had uncovered some exciting resources and found some other teachers who were already doing this and were sharing their ideas and experiences. I started with my Year 8 class at the time and excitedly showed them a video as a prompt to the lesson. I awaited eagerly to hear their questions. Why is the guy wearing a suit? Why did they make this video? These were not the questions I had in mind about speed, distance, when two runners will meet and how can we find out. I realised I had work to do. I persevered, I tried a few things. I adopted the thinking routine of I Notice, I wonder. I still had lots of silence in my classes when I asked them to share what they noticed. I then started to have them talk to their friend first, asking them what they noticed. This turned out to be a great ice breaker. It meant they could test their responses in a low threat environment before putting their ideas on public display in front of the whole class. I suddenly had more students contributing what they noticed and what they wondered. I also took every response. None was too trivial, I did not judge how good or bad the notice or wonder was, I just wrote them all down. Some students tried some silly responses, I just wrote them down. At the end we had a long list, much longer than ever before and then we unpacked the list. The next step was to deal with the trivial, the wonders that could be answered quickly until all we were left with was the deeper questions, the ones we could investigate with my subject area and invariably, the area I wanted to focus on was there amongst them.

How do you prompt students to pose questions in your class? Questions that are worth exploring further, that encourage depth in student learning? I would love to hear your techniques, what works in the classroom?

Maybe this is an area you would like to develop in you exploration of Critical Thinking. If you are just starting off down this path and try something new share with a colleague how it worked. Invite them in to observe. What worked well? What can you do to improve it for next time? If like me it fails the first time, being met with silence or superficial responses, don’t be discouraged. Reflect and refine and continue to share the journey.

PRIME

In 2017 the driving question for our schools Integrated Unit was, Working as an advocate for refugees what is one innovation you can come up with in response to the refugee crisis? I worked alongside the TAS faculty as we planned this unit and was first introduced to the acronym PRIME, Problem statement, Research, Ideation, Make, Evaluation. PRIME was a useful tool for guiding the students through the design process. It encouraged them to think more deeply about the refugee crisis and to be free to imagine multiple solutions. It also encouraged reflection and evaluation of their solution, something that I often found lacking as the desire for task completion often outweighed the drive to continually improve and refine their ideas. Implementing PRIME across 300 Year 6 – 8 students was a challenge that may not have hit the high notes for all but it certainly gave me an insight into a useful thinking tool. Later as I explored the ACARA learning continuum it occurred to me that PRIME succinctly covered the big ideas within this continuum.

Have another look at the continuum and see if you can also see PRIME in the big ideas.

Here is where I found evidence of PRIME in the continuum.

P – Posing questions. This in an interesting one for me, as for the majority of my 30 years of teaching it has been me posing the questions to the students. In a later blog I will explore how I am going about changing this in my classrooms so the students are now involved in the process of asking questions.

R – Identify and clarify information and ideas. I often find students like to skip this step. I find them posing a question and deciding on their own answer, then proceeding to the making of a solution. The seem to have the P and M under control but it is the R, I and E that deepens their engagement in the thinking process.

I – Imagine possibilities and connect ideas. If students can be encouraged to slow down and not move straight from the posing questions to the make step, the potential for creativity and innovative solutions increases as their engagement in the process deepens.

M – Seek solutions and put ideas into action. At this point in my journey I see this as the subject content and skills coming to the fore. But this step, like the others does not sit in isolation and the ACARA continuum uses language such as best solution, and testing consequences. How many times do we give students the opportunity to explore this is depth? It is one of my challenges.

E – Evaluate procedures and outcomes. At Level 2 in the continuum the description is to evaluate whether they have accomplished what they set out to achieve . So many times I see my students tick the task completed box and appear ready to move on. Engaging them in effective evaluation of their work is one of my goals for my own practice. How do I make time in my classroom for students to make corrections and reevaluate their work if they have not accomplished what they set out to achieve?

PRIME itself is not a linear model that students have to move through. It is a simplification of the concept of Critical Thinking so that it can be made more visible and provide a platform to explicitly teach and discuss Critical Thinking. I have found that encouraging students to present their work using PRIME as a scaffold helps me to see their strengths and weaknesses. In this manner I now have the necessary evidence to provide feedback to students about where they are now and where they need to be, as well as a tool to discuss how to get there.

The other wonderful thing about PRIME is it took a complex activity and broke it into 5 key parts for me to focus on in my own practice. I am in the middle of the journey exploring these aspects. This year I am keen to focus on Evaluation and how I can make this meaningful in improving my students thinking. In our learning this year you might like to target one of these 5 areas of Critical Thinking in your practice. Some of our staff, including Liz, Nat and Marten are already using PRIME in their teaching practice and you might like to talk to them about their experiences to date. I am sure there are others and I look forward to hearing about your work and how you are building the disposition of Critical Thinking in our students.