The best way to 'dumb down' a curriculum? Cram it full of content.
Content is not king. Thinking is just as important.
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 deep understanding.
Let’s look at something else I didn’t say: you should prioritise teaching thinking skills over teaching content knowledge. You shouldn’t. But neither should you ignore thinking on the assumption that it will take care of itself.
The apparent tension between teaching for thinking and developing deep content knowledge is the result of false dichotomy, a lazy, rather insidious framing that lacks a conceptual structure or language to accommodate the teaching of both.
It is important to see thinking and content knowledge as co-targets. One does not take care of the other. In fact the best way to do both is together.
As Ron Ritchart and David Perkins tell us:
…the true promise of the teaching of thinking will not be realized until learning to think and thinking to learn merge seamlessly.
Let’s also go to John Dewey:
Thinking is the method of intelligent learning.
The key word here in Dewey’s quote is method. The pathway to effective learning crosses thinking territory. Thinking is the means of production of knowledge.
Some would have it that thinking well is an emergent property of deep content knowledge. In this view, content knowledge is not only necessary for thinking but sufficient for it. If you have the knowledge, the thinking follows. But if this were true, then everyone with the same knowledge would think just as well as each other. You might think that any difference is just a matter of intelligence, but intelligence and critical thinking are not the same thing.
There is a lot to unpack there, and some of it will be in later posts, but for now, let’s go to the heart of this issue.
The facts first fallacy (or no thinking until you’re full!)
So here, then, is what I think is the greatest fallacy in education, something I call the facts first fallacy (FFF). I could phrase it many ways, but this will do
Content knowledge acquisition must precede thinking skills development.
In other words: cover all the content and then, if you have any time left, do some ‘thinky’ stuff. This kind of pedagogical procrastination puts off attending to thinking skills until, well, forever if you play it right. It also shows a deep misunderstanding of both learning and thinking.
The FFF spins off a whole bunch of derivative or associated received wisdom, including:
If you’re thinking, you must be thinking about something!
Thinking is result of deep content knowledge.
Thinking skills are domain specific.
Thinking skills are not transferable.
Critical thinking can’t be taught.
These range from trivially true to demonstrably false, and are the result of poor experimental design, vague or inadequate definitions, bald assertions, or inferential bridges that would not support a lepton on a diet.
It would take me too long to fully address each of these (they will be addressed in future posts) but here’s a shot-from-the-hip response:
If you’re thinking, you must be thinking about something! Trivially true, but consider that sometimes what you are thinking about is your own thinking—metacognition, anyone?
Thinking is result of deep content knowledge. Sure deep content knowledge can help you think about things that need it, but does that mean those of us with no deep content knowledge of particular areas can’t think well? Or that children can’t think?
Thinking skills are domain specific. From what domain are we pontificating here? This ignores a vast body of knowledge about reasoning skills and practices that is widely used and well evidenced.
Thinking skills are not transferable. If you pay no attention to thinking skills, and only hope they develop from deep content knowledge, it is not surprising you come to this conclusion. There are many counterexamples to this claim (including those with deep transfer, i.e. across domains).
Critical thinking can’t be taught. If your definition of critical thinking assumes it’s an innate ability, or you conflate it with intelligence, then that’s a logical response. This is almost always the case with such claims.
Are you really an ‘explicit teaching’ school?
I hear a lot of schools boast that they have an ‘explicit teaching’ focus. That’s fine, I see no reason to not be explicit when teaching (the problem is, of course, all the associated baggage, including poor generalisations from research, that often comes with this; but let that slide for now).
My challenge to these schools is:
How are you being explicit about student thinking? How are you paying attention to, and planning for the development of, student thinking will the same precision and intentionality as you would for content?
If there is no clear answer to this, then I would say that both thinking and learning are being done less effectively than they could be.
One of the most striking findings from the schools we work with is that teachers who focus on thinking and learning find they get more out of their students at the same time as they are doing less preparation. Not less thinking about their classes, they do more of that, but they gain time.
Putting more of the cognitive load on students is not only what students rise to but how they prefer learning (no, I’m not talking about making their tasks harder to understand or deliberately confusing them—stand down, cognitive load theorists).
There is a full armoury of pedagogical practices, fairly bursting with pre-tested and preloaded resources, that can help teachers conceptualise, operationalise, implement and assess for student thinking at the same time they develop content knowledge.
Thinking should not be an accidental byproduct of content acquisition. Surely we can do better than that.
My next post will discuss some aspects of what I’ve raised here. Probably.
1. What is “trivially true” is still true - indeed incontrovertible. So why are you including this under the heading of “fallacy”? As for metacognition, when I’m thinking about my thinking, I am either a) applying a very general heuristic (like “check your working” or “consider alternative perspectives”) or b) testing my reasoning against my pre-existing content knowledge (“that answer can’t be right because it is greater than 180 degrees”). The first sort of metacognition is a body of procedural knowledge that can be very quickly explicitly taught but which will only “stick” when practiced on specific problems in defined knowledge domains. The second is a byproduct of my content knowledge, not separate to it. Metacognition isn’t as mysterious and mind blowing as you imply here. Pretty much all there is to know about how to think better has been packaged into (rather slim) books by de bono, feynman, polya and kahneman. Obviously, this stuff is good to teach students - explicitly. I doubt asking them to think about their thinking about their thinking is going to be a good use of anyone’s time.
2. You can think VERY well about topics you are ignorant about and come up with profoundly wrong conclusions that have disastrous consequences. There are conspiracy theorists in their mum’s basements thinking very hard and very beautifully right now. We all seem to be endowed with an ability to think about all sorts of things that we aren’t experts in and novices CAN sometimes come up with insights that experts have missed. But your opponents would say this proves their point not yours: basic critical thinking, they would suggest, is biologically primary and so does not need to be turned into a school subject. Learning to walk isn’t a “general capability” in the syllabus. “Learning to think critically” needn’t be either.
3. “We” are not pontificating. You’re the one in the pulpit. Is this question meant to be rhetorical? Surely the answer is “educational psychology” or something like that? One or both sides in the debate might be wrong, but it seems pretty clear that this is an empirical question and that it fits into a broad domain of inquiry. If you are saying that “thinking” is so wild and mysterious that it transcends any empirical study, you’ve crossed into the domain of spirituality and metaphysics and probably need to get a new job as an actual pontiff.
4. This is a better point and it can be tested to some extent. I would say that there seems to be at least as much evidence for non-transfer as for transfer. My guess is that some domains transfer better than others (e.g. skill in chess will probably transfer better to Go than skill in scrabble). My other guess is that there is a limit, quickly reached, to the complexity of problems where transferred thinking skills make a difference. (As a grown-up, I’ll have a better chance of successfully rebooting a frozen PlayStation than my infant son, because I’ve done similar procedures with my work computer. But unless I’m a mechanic, we’ll be equally helpless if the car won’t start.)
5. Saying critical thinking can’t be taught isn’t necessarily saying it is fixed and innate. The argument is, rather, that we can get better at critical thinking as we learn more about the discipline we are thinking IN. Doctors are obviously much better at critical thinking about bodily signs and symptoms than engineers of the same IQ. But if you try to teach critical thinking in isolation from content, your impact will max out quickly.
Ellerton’s armoury (if it has anything to do with Ritchart and Perkins) is likely to turn out to be an assortment of useful mnemonics and metacognitive strategies that nudge students towards asking more and better questions. I’m personally doubtful that teaching these generic routines really counts as teaching a distinctive “critical thinking skill”, useful though they may be as scaffolds for student inquiry. I’m also confident that the most way to help students acquire these skills (if you can call them that) would be to show them how to use them via “I do/you do/we do”.
Assessing content knowledge, that is, a student’s ability to encode, store and then retrieve declarative knowledge (under exam conditions) remains the dominant process used to establish a ‘data spread’ or distribution of student academic ability within subject areas.
Add a simple prompt to your AI research assistant such as “identify any limitations in studies x, y & z” to ensure a (paraphrased equivalent) A-level response for that criterion; and you have pretty much all you need for an A-grade education right?