Teaching Critical Thinking

Using Seminars for 21st Century Literacy

Laura Billings, Terry Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317925156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Help students meet today's literacy demands with this new book from Terry Roberts and Laura Billings. The authors show how a seminar approach can lead students deeper into a text and improve their speaking, listening, and writing skills, as recommended by the Common Core State Standards.

Roberts and Billings provide easy-to-follow information on implementing Paideia Seminars, in which students discuss a text and ask open-ended questions about it. When teachers use this lesson format, students are exposed to a wide range of increasingly complex texts. They also learn how to collaborate, talk about, and reflect on what they're reading, to make meaning independently and together. Seminars can be done in English class and across the curriculum, using social studies documents or math problems as the texts under discussion.

Teaching Critical Thinking also offers an array of practical resources:

• teacher lesson plans
• student samples
• a list of possible ideas and values for discussion
• a guide to asking good questions during a seminar
• six full seminar plans (including the texts), covering literature, social studies, and science topics

1

What Is Thinking? Can We Teach It in School?

“Intellect presupposes Literacy.”

—Jacques Barzun

Perhaps the hardest part of designing a program for teaching thinking is to define simply and clearly what thinking is. Philosophers have been doing that for centuries; our real challenge is to define thinking in a way that helps us understand how someone learns to think more skillfully and how to teach those skills. Attempts to teach thinking are as old as the ancient world and as recent as yesterday; unfortunately, most of the attempts have had little influence on what currently goes on in classrooms.

Our challenge in preparing to write this book has been to create a definition of thinking that most teachers and most students can understand, and then use the definition itself as a tool for improving their own thinking. With this in mind, we have come to define thinking as “the ability to explain and manipulate a text.” By text, we mean “a set of interrelated ideas, often represented in a human artifact.” Learning to think, then, is the process of successfully explaining and manipulating increasingly complex texts. By definition, increasingly complex texts contain more discrete elements and more complex relationships between and among those elements. Perhaps this definition makes more sense when you realize what we mean by the word text; used here, it is not limited to works in the form of printed language. Obviously, a fable by Aesop, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and the Pythagorean Theorem are all texts. But the Periodic Table of the Elements and a painting by Leonardo da Vinci are also texts. Needless to say, the standardized curriculum is full of texts (books, problems, experiments, and other human artifacts) that represent the core ideas and values that shape the curriculum.

In fact, a text can be almost any human artifact that is rich enough in ideas, complex enough in relationships, and ambiguous enough in meaning to support extended examination and discussion. In history, this designation includes things as varied as maps, treaties, court decisions, and speeches; in science, it includes things as varied as diagrams, charts, classifications, and data tables; in mathematics, it includes things as varied as definitions, formulas, graphs, and problems of all kinds; in literature, it includes things as varied as dictionaries, poems, novels, and plays. Even this list is not exhaustive; rather, it is only suggestive of the rich possibilities that infuse any curriculum or discipline. In order to generate the kind of discussion that both inspires and teaches thinking, a text must be rich in ideas and values, complex in the relationships between those ideas and values, and ambiguous enough to defy easy explanation (see Appendix A for a list of ideas and values for discussion). The point is that just as any curriculum is built on a foundation of ideas, those ideas live in the dozens of texts that must be studied in order to master that curriculum if mastery means true understanding and not mere memorization.

With this distinction in mind, let’s return to our original definition of thinking: “the ability to explain and manipulate a text.” And the definition of learning to think: “the process of successfully explaining and manipulating increasingly complex texts.”

How Can Students Learn to Think About Texts?

Explaining and manipulating a text often involves the intellectual skills that are commonly referenced in education circles. For this reason, many of the terms that we have traditionally used to discuss thinking in school make perfect sense in the context of this definition. For example, we often ask our students to describe, clarify, predict, analyze, synthesize, and so on. If you imagine applying these skills to a text like a Shakespearean sonnet, they immediately take on clarity.

Let’s hand our high school English class Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun...”) and a definition of an English or Shakespearean sonnet (three quatrains followed by a rhymed couplet). If we break the class into collaborative groups and give each group a thinking process to practice, we should elicit something like the following: One group describes the four sections of the sonnet using the language of the definition. Another group clarifies the rhyme scheme of the poem by labeling the rhymes within each section and chanting the rhymes for the class. Another group reads only the first twelve lines of the poem and predicts what the closing couplet will say. Another group analyzes the diction of the sonnet by creating a T-chart of sensory language used to describe the idealized woman versus the speaker’s mistress. Yet another group synthesizes the whole by showing the relationship of the closing couplet to the first three quatrains of the poem with words or graphic images. The point is that all of these thinking processes are ways of explaining the “text” that is the poem. Having thoroughly explained Shakespeare’s sonnet, our students might well be ready to write their own, thereby manipulating the sonnet form.

Just as there is a fairly common language that educators use to describe various thinking skills in the classroom, there are also several well-known—and quite valuable—taxonomies of thinking skills that almost any teacher will recognize if not quote on demand. The best known of these, of course, is Bloom’s Taxonomy, originally developed in 1956 by a group of educational psychologists headed by Benjamin Bloom. Bloom’s original six levels (knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) have been supplanted to a certain degree in a book titled A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing, by Bloom disciples Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl. The “new” Bloom replaces the “old” Bloom’s six familiar nouns with six verbs (remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating), culminating in “creativity” rather than “evaluation.”

Perhaps the best-known contemporary taxonomy other than Bloom’s is that developed by Robert J. Marzano and his associates in a number of contemporary works. This essentially breaks down classroom thinking skills into seven categories: knowing, organizing, applying, analyzing, generating, integrating, and evaluating. It is interesting to note that Marzano also calls this the “new taxonomy,” perhaps also in reference to the “old” Bloom. These taxonomies, both old and new, have enduring value, especially when they serve to remind us that too often the intellectual life of the classroom gets mired at the lowest cognitive levels and that what we desperately need is a proven way of teaching higher-order thinking skills.

In writing this book, we are not advocating radical new forms of thinking—or even a radical new nomenclature for thinking skills that already have widely accepted names. Rather, we want to describe a strategy whereby students deliberately practice these traditional skills while discussing a text through a structured process in a controlled setting. Because the setting is controlled, teachers and students work together to create an environment where it is safe to take intellectual risks. This is a naturally slow, but transformative process. In addition, the teacher and students collaboratively challenge and sharpen each other’s thinking all along the way.

Teachers and students work together to create an environment where it is safe to take intellectual risks.

How Conversation Helps You Think

The subtitle of this book stresses “using seminars” to teach thinking. The reason is that the tool that we use to understand and manipulate texts, regardless of subject area, is almost always language (or a symbol system like color or number that is similar to a language). The key to teaching thinking, then, is to teach it as one of a cluster of interrelated skills: as part of reading and writing as well as speaking and listening. That is precisely what we propose in this book: to teach thinking through the consistent use of full Paideia Seminar cycles. The Paideia Seminar, which will be described further in the next chapter, is a collaborative intellectual dialogue facilitated with open-ended questions about a text. The literacy cycle of the Seminar includes five steps: pre-seminar reading, preparation for speaking and listening, the dialogue per se, a reflection on speaking and listening, and a post-seminar writing assignment. The goal of practicing reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills together is to become more clear, coherent, and sophisticated in our thinking and to contribute to the quality of our lives.

The notion that thinking and language are profoundly related is not a new one. Consider John Locke’s explanation from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690):

Words are sensible signs, necessary for communication of ideas. Man, though he have great variety of thoughts, and such from which others as well as himself might receive profit and delight; yet they are all within his own breast, invisible and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made to appear. The comfort and advantage of society not being to be had without communication of thoughts, it was necessary that man should find out some external sensible signs, whereof those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others. For this purpose nothing was so fit, either for plenty or quickness, as those articulate sounds, which with so much ease and variety he found himself able to make. Thus we may conceive how words, which were by nature so well adapted to that purpose, came to be made use of by men as the signs of their ideas; not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea. The use, then, of words, is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for are their proper and immediate signification.

As Locke notes, part of thinking clearly and coherently is to make explicit the relationship between a word and the idea its represents, so that we can use words to explain and manipulate ideas. For this reason, it is important that we as teachers realize that part of learning to think is language acquisition. The implication is that we must become more literate as scientists, mathematicians, and historians if we are to master these disciplines. As a teacher, you can’t coach a student’s thinking unless the process is externalized through speaking and writing, and a student can’t receive your coaching in turn except by listening and reading. As a result, the more fluent a student becomes as a reader, writer, speaker, and listener, the deeper her or his conceptual understanding—regardless of the subject.

Another interesting perspective regarding thinking in connection to speech is in Thought and Language (1934/1986), by the seminal Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. He wrote that “thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them” (p. 218). As the raw material of thought (images, sounds, incoherent bits of language) rise up through the levels of consciousness, we form them into increasingly more organized structures—almost inevitably linguistic structures. And when we extend this internal process into the external world so that we can share our thoughts, even use them to explain or manipulate the world around us, they become yet more organized. Thus, Vygotsky and his colleagues argued that “thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them.”

The relationship between thought and word, then, is highly synergistic; thought can find its form only through language, and language devoid of thought is meaningless. Locke addresses this concept:

First, He that hath words of any language, without distinct ideas in his mind to which he applies them, does, so far as he uses them in discourse, only make a noise without any sense or signification; and how learned so ever he may seem, by the use of hard words or learned terms, is not much more advanced thereby in knowledge, than he would be in learning, who had nothing in his study but the bare titles of books, without possessing the contents of them. Secondly, He that has complex ideas without particular names for them, would be in no better case than a bookseller, who had in his warehouse volumes that lay there unbound, and without titles, which he could therefore make known to others only by showing the loose sheets, and communicate them only by tale (p. 298).

Words without thought are mere sound; thought without words mere phantoms. To teach thinking then, regardless of the subject, we teach the speaking and listening as well as the reading and writing of that subject.

Practical Thinking

At this point, it’s appropriate to pause for a clarifying confession. The kind of thinking we are describing here—highly verbal and externalized—is not the only kind of thinking there is. In fact, just as language itself is limited in its ability to illuminate human experience, so is this kind of academic thinking limited. But because our subject is not just thinking skills but the ability to teach those skills in the classroom, we have narrowed our definition of thought to one that is both clear and practical.

To illustrate further how we are defining thought, let us describe briefly what it is and what it is not—within the boundaries of this discussion. In his intriguing book, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind (wonderfully subtitled “Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less”), Guy Claxton argues that “roughly speaking, the mind possesses three different processing speeds. The first is faster than thought. Some situations demand an un-selfconscious, instantaneous reaction” (p. 1). We might call this “instantaneous” response instinct or intuition, and Claxton describes it as “a kind of ’intelligence’ that works more rapidly than thinking.” The second processing speed that Claxton describes “is thought itself: the sort of intelligence which does involve figuring matters out, weighing up the pros and cons, constructing arguments and solving problems.” The third processing speed is a “mental register that proceeds more slowly still. It is often less purposeful and clear-cut, more playful, leisurely, or dreamy. In this mode, we are ruminating or mulling things over; being contemplative or meditative” (p. 2).

Although the first and third levels of mental activity that Claxton describes are both fascinating and important,¹ this book is about his second type, the type of thinking that occurs most often in learning an academic discipline. Claxton describes this level of mental processing as a “way of knowing that relies on reason and logic, on deliberate conscious thinking”; it is this type of thinking that involves giving our thoughts structure and clarity through language. In strictly human terms, this highly verbal, external type of processing may not be the most important kind of mental activity that we experience in the course of our lives, but it is the focus of our efforts to teach critical thinking in schools. It is this type of thinking that occurs when a student learns how to explain and manipulate a text rich in the ideas and values of the curriculum. It is this type of thinking that we believe can be taught successfully through careful reading, dialogue, and writing.

In this chapter, we have given a full description of the kind of thinking that we believe can and should be taught in schools—both by saying what that category of thought is and what it is not. In the next chapter, we will give you a full, working vocabulary to use in teaching thinking through dialogue.

Chapter One in Sum

♦ We define thinking as the ability to explain and manipulate a text. By text, we mean a set of interrelated ideas, often represented in a human artifact. Learning to think is the process of explaining and manipulating increasingly complex texts successfully.

2

Coming to Terms: Using Language to Describe Dialogue

“Definitions, like questions and metaphors,
are instruments for thinking.”

—Neil Postman

American author and educator Neil Postman says that that the authority of a set of definitions “rests entirely on their usefulness. We use definitions and distort them as suits our purposes.” To that end, we would like to provide you with what we believe to be the key definitions for terms we use in this book. For those of you who—like us—could use a “cheat sheet” of the most pertinent terms, we have provided a glossary at the back of this book that summarizes the words and phrases we discuss in the first two chapters.

Teaching Complex Texts

In the previous chapter, we argued that becoming more literate in a discipline is the key to learning to think in that discipline. According to our working definition, learning to think also involves explaining and manipulating the raw material of that discipline, and this usually means explaining and manipulating increasingly complex ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Free Download and Video
• Introduction: The Role of Thinking in Today’s Schools
• 1 What Is Thinking? Can We Teach It in School?
• 2 Coming to Terms: Using Language to Describe Dialogue
• 3 The Paideia Seminar in Action
• 4 Introducing Speaking and Listening Skills
• 5 Mastering Speaking and Listening Skills
• 6 Developing the Mind Through Dialogue
• 7 Assessing the Quality of Thoughtful Dialogue
• 8 Socrates Teaching Thinking: A Secondary Seminar
• Appendix A: Things Worth Talking About
• Appendix B: Questions Worth Asking
• Appendix C: Sample Seminar Texts and Plans
• Bibliography
• Glossary