This most recent issue of English Journal is chock full of Toulmin. Many of the articles use Toulmin, others reference his name, but it seems like he is somewhere on every page. With a theme like logic and critical thinking, Toulmin is a natural choice for discussing how we can get our students to approach logical thought. Last year, my colleague and I came up with a great lesson featuring Toulmin and their summer reading, A People's History of the United States by the late Howard Zinn.
There is a bit of deep background on how we came up with the lesson. The year before this past year, a parent in the community raised an objection to the use of Howard Zinn's text as assigned summer reading. This person cited Zinn's wearing-my-Marxism-on-my-sleeve approach to history as offensive. My colleague stated that this attitude is essential for students because it is so very contrary to what they have been taught in the past; or, as Vygotsky would say, the students were being placed in a zone of proximal development. They came back from the summer, primed and looking for an intellectual fight.
The trouble was...what would they fight about? Were they focused on the point-of-view Zinn was putting forward, or were they simply miffed about some of the things Zinn said? More often than not, especially considering our proximity to Washington, D.C. and Quantico, the students just saw Zinn as an "unpatriotic jerk." What about his service to his country? What about his years in the classroom, educating American students? The questions start flowing back at us. the inevitable question is: "Well, who's right?"
That was when we decided to do a lesson called, with apologies to Capital One, "What's in Your Wallet?" Students are broken out into groups of about 4-5. They are given a sheet of paper with details on it, such as:
Brown Leather
Pictures of a woman and two children
Pictures of a Porsche
Pictures of a beach house
Three $100 Bills
Two $50 Bills
Ten $20 Bills
Business Card for Accounting Firm
Three Credit Cards from different companies
They are then asked to interpret the contents of the "wallet" and tell the class about the person who owned it. This is where Toulmin comes in. Students usually want to say something like this guy is a stuck-up business man who cares more about his possessions than his family, or something very similar. We ask them to provide the data that support this claim. Then we ask them to provide the warrant that links the data to the claim. When they do this, they suddenly realize how pre-programmed they are to jump to conclusions rather than look for what they can actually see. Looking at the process of stating a claim, examining the data, and analyzing the warrant helps students to go back to the Zinn book with a critical eye.
We build on the concept after that, but this gets the students thinking in terms of what can be proven to be true with the data, but also what else can be proven true. They begin to view history as the interpretation of a set of data that can be interpreted in radically different ways. This realization increases both their willingness to read history and their ability to read critically.
How do you encourage critical thinking in your classrooms? What connections do you try to emphasize when you teach logic? I look forward to the conversation.
Showing posts with label critical thought. Show all posts
Showing posts with label critical thought. Show all posts
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Education vs. Training - To Think, Learn, or Both?
As teachers of English, we know words have power. The two that lead this post are two I have been thinking about a lot lately. Let me explain why.
I did not have TV for a number of years. My wife and I had trouble with our cable provider and, since no resolution could be reached, we turned in our equipment and said see ya later. That was two and a half years ago. (I find it interesting in a country run on a "free market system" that we could not get cable from any other provider unless we moved miles from where we were. Just a side thought.)
In any case, when we moved into our home in May, we had TV connected. (This was mainly for guests. You won't believe, when you have not TV, how many people will come visit and ask about the TV. "You don't watch any TV?" "Some DVDs." "No cable?" "Wow." [Insert shaking head].)
Since the box has been back on, I've been distracted, not by gratuitous sex, violence, and police procedurals, but by commercials for the University of Phoenix online. The crux of many of these commercials has been that the University of Phoenix has technology...and they know how to use it. Oh, and they have professors who still work in their field. (Feels a little bit like the old "can vs. do" argument.)
Believe it or not, I started asking myself questions about these commercials. I know what you are thinking: This stuff gets this guy thinking...whatever. The commercial goes on and emphasizes the University of Phoenix's ability to make people ready for careers in the 21st century. That is what got me. Is that why we get an education? We learn Shakespeare, the quadratic equation, the scientific method, and Pearl Harbor so that we can get that cubicle with the view?
If we look at an education as solely job training, we serve a false idol. The student who will become the CPA for Microsoft probably doesn't need Shakespeare. The student who works as a preschool teacher probably doesn't need the quadratic equation. The student who will stay-at-home probably doesn't need the scientific method. The student who will do research on non-Hodgkins lymphoma probably doesn't need to know about Pearl Harbor. I only have one question: Who are we to decide that students should not be exposed to certain cultural capital?
On the TV today, I saw an episode of Cash Cab featuring two of the most vapid people I have ever seen. When asked what "level-headed pamphlet" Thomas Paine wrote, the gentlemen in the cab were stumped. They used a "mobile shout-out" and called a friend of theirs who had Dr. in front of his name. What did these three gentlemen give as the answer to that question? You guessed it...The Declaration of Independence.
This all leads me to what I think I will use as a theme for the month of August. As we get ready to (duhn duhn duhn) go back to school, I am going to make each of my posts focus on the relationship of content knowledge to critical thinking.
Education has, at its heart, the goal of encouraging critical thinking skills. Training is about knowledge alone. If I am training for a certificate, I am not being educated; rather, I am being inducted into a set of terms, ideas, and concepts related to a specific field. When I am receiving an education, I am learning to seek knowledge and do something with it. When I say "do something" I mean in a way that will affect that body of knowledge. I worked at a school once where a colleague's nephew, a lawyer, was published in a prominent legal journal. The article talked about a particularly difficult legal matter; he used a literary allusion to Scylla and Charybdis in the title. Not only did he communicate his point, but he did it with style.
On the other side of the issue, there are people who say that we don't need to teach knowledge, but how to think. If we follow this logic, the thinking becomes very difficult. What are we to think of if we have not learned what things are. But seriously, the argument on this side is that students graduate with a lot of facts, but no context. The context and the abilities to synthesize and evaluate information are the hallmarks of higher-order thought. Teach those skills, they say. Who can argue with that.
So, as we get ready to (duhn duhn duhn) go back to school, I will ask this question: How much of our content do we give up to focus on critical thinking skills? What should our focus really be? If we teach thinking skills instead of knowledge, can we blame anyone but ourselves for the shallow thoughts that result? I don't know, but I look forward to the discussion.
I did not have TV for a number of years. My wife and I had trouble with our cable provider and, since no resolution could be reached, we turned in our equipment and said see ya later. That was two and a half years ago. (I find it interesting in a country run on a "free market system" that we could not get cable from any other provider unless we moved miles from where we were. Just a side thought.)
In any case, when we moved into our home in May, we had TV connected. (This was mainly for guests. You won't believe, when you have not TV, how many people will come visit and ask about the TV. "You don't watch any TV?" "Some DVDs." "No cable?" "Wow." [Insert shaking head].)
Since the box has been back on, I've been distracted, not by gratuitous sex, violence, and police procedurals, but by commercials for the University of Phoenix online. The crux of many of these commercials has been that the University of Phoenix has technology...and they know how to use it. Oh, and they have professors who still work in their field. (Feels a little bit like the old "can vs. do" argument.)
Believe it or not, I started asking myself questions about these commercials. I know what you are thinking: This stuff gets this guy thinking...whatever. The commercial goes on and emphasizes the University of Phoenix's ability to make people ready for careers in the 21st century. That is what got me. Is that why we get an education? We learn Shakespeare, the quadratic equation, the scientific method, and Pearl Harbor so that we can get that cubicle with the view?
If we look at an education as solely job training, we serve a false idol. The student who will become the CPA for Microsoft probably doesn't need Shakespeare. The student who works as a preschool teacher probably doesn't need the quadratic equation. The student who will stay-at-home probably doesn't need the scientific method. The student who will do research on non-Hodgkins lymphoma probably doesn't need to know about Pearl Harbor. I only have one question: Who are we to decide that students should not be exposed to certain cultural capital?
On the TV today, I saw an episode of Cash Cab featuring two of the most vapid people I have ever seen. When asked what "level-headed pamphlet" Thomas Paine wrote, the gentlemen in the cab were stumped. They used a "mobile shout-out" and called a friend of theirs who had Dr. in front of his name. What did these three gentlemen give as the answer to that question? You guessed it...The Declaration of Independence.
This all leads me to what I think I will use as a theme for the month of August. As we get ready to (duhn duhn duhn) go back to school, I am going to make each of my posts focus on the relationship of content knowledge to critical thinking.
Education has, at its heart, the goal of encouraging critical thinking skills. Training is about knowledge alone. If I am training for a certificate, I am not being educated; rather, I am being inducted into a set of terms, ideas, and concepts related to a specific field. When I am receiving an education, I am learning to seek knowledge and do something with it. When I say "do something" I mean in a way that will affect that body of knowledge. I worked at a school once where a colleague's nephew, a lawyer, was published in a prominent legal journal. The article talked about a particularly difficult legal matter; he used a literary allusion to Scylla and Charybdis in the title. Not only did he communicate his point, but he did it with style.
On the other side of the issue, there are people who say that we don't need to teach knowledge, but how to think. If we follow this logic, the thinking becomes very difficult. What are we to think of if we have not learned what things are. But seriously, the argument on this side is that students graduate with a lot of facts, but no context. The context and the abilities to synthesize and evaluate information are the hallmarks of higher-order thought. Teach those skills, they say. Who can argue with that.
So, as we get ready to (duhn duhn duhn) go back to school, I will ask this question: How much of our content do we give up to focus on critical thinking skills? What should our focus really be? If we teach thinking skills instead of knowledge, can we blame anyone but ourselves for the shallow thoughts that result? I don't know, but I look forward to the discussion.
Monday, March 1, 2010
The Myth of Learning Styles
Note: Make sure you click on the title of this post to see the video.
Daniel Willingham of the University of Virginia is unpopular with many school systems. His research in cognitive psychology shows that the learning styles theory is not quite what it seems. What does that mean for education? In particular, what does it mean for the English classroom.
As students of language, Dr. Willingham's findings about meaning-based learning should not be a surprise to English and Language Arts teachers. The indeterminacy of language is firmly entrenched in the discourse of literature, composition, and criticism; deconstructionism is literary theory based on the shakiness of the meanings behind words. In our classrooms, we teach vocabulary and reading based on discussions of meaning, but how do we bring this meaning out in conversations with our students.
Over on the English Companion Ning, Jim Burke has been leading a study of his new book, What's the Big Idea?: Question-driven units to motivate reading, writing, and thinking. I have been reading the book along with the group and had a bit of an epiphany in conjunction with this video. The best way to get at meaning is to ask the questions that delve into those bigger ideas, those essential understandings. This book has already been a great help in organizing the essential questions I already used to guide my unit and lesson design. Particularly, a quotation Burke (2010) cites from Neil Postman spurred my epiphany: "Students enter school as question marks and graduate as periods." I think this connection between learning styles theory and meaning-based instruction may be the reason students graduate without any questions or imagination.
Think about Willingham's assertion in the video. Asking students to learn something aurally or visually asks the student only to learn a characteristic of something (like the shape of a country or the tonal quality of a voice); meanwhile, asking students to learn words asks them to learn the meaning behind something, its big idea. The trick is while visual and aural learning focuses on characteristics of something, meaning is more abstract. So, just like knowing the shape of Sudan won't help students understand the suffering of people in Darfur, asking students to learn the meaning of something visually or aurally won't either.
A recent NCTE inbox issue contained a study with similar findings. The January 12th edition of the newsletter featured an article on a recently released study of learning styles. In the summary section of the article, the authors state that they "conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporate learning-styles assessments into general educational practice" (Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork, 2009, p. 105). Taking these findings into consideration, why do we place so much emphasis on learning styles.
The students we serve thrive not on superficial characteristics, but deep probing questions. They are not unlike ourselves or the young children they used to be. My son is turning two this March 12th, and as I write this he is sitting next to me asking me all kinds of questions (as long as you speak 2-year-old-ese). His "whastht?"s ("what's that) and "whahappnd?"s ("what happened") are the mind's first forays into learning the most essential lessons we learn. He questions me constantly which, as a teacher, I love. He loves learning new words and repeating them...endlessly...until "truck" or "car" or "broken" fall away to newer and newer concepts. His curiosity is insatiable and joyful. Then I think about the lack of curiosity some of my students exhibit, usually on the standard level, and I get angry. Maybe that is the answer for parents who don't like, understand, or trust our schools: they've grown angry with watching learning-styles-driven teaching make students focus on the concrete and forget the importance of abstraction, of searching for meaning.
I for one have taken Jim Burke's new book to heart because it speaks to something I always knew was true. Standard, AP, IB, Honors, etc. are just labels. Question-driven teaching belongs in all classrooms. If a student doesn't understand a concept, make analogies, make connections, but most of all help your students ask the right questions that will guide them to the meanings they seek.
As always, please share your thoughts on the video, learning styles, question-driven instruction, or any ways this topic has come up in your professional lives.
Oh, and have a pleasant March. I'll see you all in April.
Daniel Willingham of the University of Virginia is unpopular with many school systems. His research in cognitive psychology shows that the learning styles theory is not quite what it seems. What does that mean for education? In particular, what does it mean for the English classroom.
As students of language, Dr. Willingham's findings about meaning-based learning should not be a surprise to English and Language Arts teachers. The indeterminacy of language is firmly entrenched in the discourse of literature, composition, and criticism; deconstructionism is literary theory based on the shakiness of the meanings behind words. In our classrooms, we teach vocabulary and reading based on discussions of meaning, but how do we bring this meaning out in conversations with our students.
Over on the English Companion Ning, Jim Burke has been leading a study of his new book, What's the Big Idea?: Question-driven units to motivate reading, writing, and thinking. I have been reading the book along with the group and had a bit of an epiphany in conjunction with this video. The best way to get at meaning is to ask the questions that delve into those bigger ideas, those essential understandings. This book has already been a great help in organizing the essential questions I already used to guide my unit and lesson design. Particularly, a quotation Burke (2010) cites from Neil Postman spurred my epiphany: "Students enter school as question marks and graduate as periods." I think this connection between learning styles theory and meaning-based instruction may be the reason students graduate without any questions or imagination.
Think about Willingham's assertion in the video. Asking students to learn something aurally or visually asks the student only to learn a characteristic of something (like the shape of a country or the tonal quality of a voice); meanwhile, asking students to learn words asks them to learn the meaning behind something, its big idea. The trick is while visual and aural learning focuses on characteristics of something, meaning is more abstract. So, just like knowing the shape of Sudan won't help students understand the suffering of people in Darfur, asking students to learn the meaning of something visually or aurally won't either.
A recent NCTE inbox issue contained a study with similar findings. The January 12th edition of the newsletter featured an article on a recently released study of learning styles. In the summary section of the article, the authors state that they "conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporate learning-styles assessments into general educational practice" (Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork, 2009, p. 105). Taking these findings into consideration, why do we place so much emphasis on learning styles.
The students we serve thrive not on superficial characteristics, but deep probing questions. They are not unlike ourselves or the young children they used to be. My son is turning two this March 12th, and as I write this he is sitting next to me asking me all kinds of questions (as long as you speak 2-year-old-ese). His "whastht?"s ("what's that) and "whahappnd?"s ("what happened") are the mind's first forays into learning the most essential lessons we learn. He questions me constantly which, as a teacher, I love. He loves learning new words and repeating them...endlessly...until "truck" or "car" or "broken" fall away to newer and newer concepts. His curiosity is insatiable and joyful. Then I think about the lack of curiosity some of my students exhibit, usually on the standard level, and I get angry. Maybe that is the answer for parents who don't like, understand, or trust our schools: they've grown angry with watching learning-styles-driven teaching make students focus on the concrete and forget the importance of abstraction, of searching for meaning.
I for one have taken Jim Burke's new book to heart because it speaks to something I always knew was true. Standard, AP, IB, Honors, etc. are just labels. Question-driven teaching belongs in all classrooms. If a student doesn't understand a concept, make analogies, make connections, but most of all help your students ask the right questions that will guide them to the meanings they seek.
As always, please share your thoughts on the video, learning styles, question-driven instruction, or any ways this topic has come up in your professional lives.
Oh, and have a pleasant March. I'll see you all in April.
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