critical thinking

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?

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.

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.