3 critical questions for any thinking classroom
Try and answer them in 30 seconds.
In our teaching networks, I often start with three questions to help frame our thinking; they are these:
How do you know students are thinking in your classroom?
(What do they do? How to they behave? What do they say? Who do they say it to? )
How do you plan for that thinking to occur with the same precision and intentionality with which you plan for content?
(What do your documents look like? How do you discuss it with colleagues?)
How do you give students feedback on the quality of their thinking?
(Not just their progression through the task… What language or vocabulary do you have for this? What kinds of concepts?)
How did you go?
Very often, teachers have ready answers to these questions. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes the answers are related and interconnected. Sometimes they are not.
It is quite striking, however, that there is not a coherent understanding among educators about what all this looks or sounds like.
So here’s a provocation. Imagine that instead of “thinking” in the questions above I substituted “learning” (and abbreviated the second question to suit). It would be outrageous if we did not have clear, actionable answers that made sense to other teachers. A teacher that could not address those questions would be of suspicious competence.
And yet, we seem happy enough for the questions that address thinking to hang there unresolved. As if they were a curiosity that we might think about in a quiet moment. As if it was secondary to content development. In my view, this is just as outrageous.
As I note in an earlier post (below), thinking is just as important as content. It should not been seen as, at best, an emergent and, at worst, an accidental byproduct, of content knowledge acquisition.
The best way to 'dumb down' a curriculum? Cram it full of content.
No, I did not say content wasn’t important. Let’s get that out of the way. Subject area knowledge is hard won and should be valued. We need it for expertise development and to understand the world in which we live. And it’s interesting. But if the curriculum is stuffed full of content, there is no time for thinking. Nor, for that matter, for developing …
Do these questions deserve an answer? I think so. Do students deserve answers? Absolutely. The burden of proof is on those who think they do not, or that they are automatically answered by recourse to teaching content. We can do better.
As always, your posts make me think through much of my teaching practice. One way I’ve been putting the onus of thinking to the student is asking this question in my conferences: what problem are you trying to solve?
My classroom is highly project based, sometimes in groups. But this question has helped even rising second graders to think about their thinking (projects).
At the risk of looking like the numbskull here, I'm going to go ahead and ask:
Are you trying to suggest that there are objective answers to these questions?
Should there be common or typical answers to these questions?
If you were training teachers, what would you tell a beginning teacher to look for, or what would you tell them about how to redesign their assessments to plumb the quality, focus, or even lack of their students' thinking?