Creating Cultures of Thinking

The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools

Ron Ritchhart

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118974629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Discover why and how schools must become places where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted

As educators, parents, and citizens, we must settle for nothing less than environments that bring out the best in people, take learning to the next level, allow for great discoveries, and propel both the individual and the group forward into a lifetime of learning. This is something all teachers want and all students deserve. In Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools, Ron Ritchhart, author of Making Thinking Visible, explains how creating a culture of thinking is more important to learning than any particular curriculum and he outlines how any school or teacher can accomplish this by leveraging 8 cultural forces: expectations, language, time, modeling, opportunities, routines, interactions, and environment.

With the techniques and rich classroom vignettes throughout this book, Ritchhart shows that creating a culture of thinking is not about just adhering to a particular set of practices or a general expectation that people should be involved in thinking. A culture of thinking produces the feelings, energy, and even joy that can propel learning forward and motivate us to do what at times can be hard and challenging mental work.

Chapter 1
The Purpose and Promise of Schools

How do we talk about the value of school? How do we define the meaning of a quality education? The value of school has traditionally been measured in term of results—grades on exams, projects, and essays designed by teachers to match the taught curriculum and dutifully recorded in report cards sent home to parents each term. Over the last two decades, these kinds of results have lost ground to external measures: standardized tests that allow for the easy ranking and comparison of students across disparate settings. Increasingly, these have become the markers of quality, the measures by which we assess progress, and the outcome that teachers are teaching for, that students are working toward, and that parents expect. But is this really why we send our children to school? Is this truly the goal of education to which we collectively aspire?

Commenting on education reform in a back-to-school issue of the New York Times Magazine, historian Diane Ravitch stated, “The single biggest problem in education is that no one agrees on why we educate. Faced with this lack of consensus, policy makers define good education as higher test scores” (“How to Remake Education,” 2009). Although the definitions of policymakers surely matter, they are not the final arbiters in this debate. Policy is ultimately shaped by societal, organizational, parental, and student-held definitions of “good” or “great” or any adjective we use to define exceptional quality. These definitions establish the broader context in which schools operate. It is these conversations about quality that give rise to the standards that shape the lives of teachers and students and that define the outcome to which all efforts must be aligned. We must change the way we talk about education. As Elliot Eisner (2003) has said, “As long as schools treat test scores as the major proxies for student achievement and educational quality, we will have a hard time refocusing our attention on what really matters in education” (p. 9).

Ultimately, our definition of “a great school” or “quality education” matters because it will define what we give time to and what becomes a priority in the day-to-day life of the classroom. It will shape our expectations of what schools can contribute to our lives and to our society. In short, our definition of what makes a quality education shapes our aspirations as parents, educators, and as a society at large. So, yes, it matters how we talk about schooling and its purpose. It matters how the society talks to its politicians, how policymakers talk to the media, how principals talk to teachers, how teachers talk to students, and how parents talk to their children. It matters because our talk shapes our focus, and our focus directs our energies, which will shape our actions.

Thinking Differently About Outcomes

To help us think about what makes a quality education and about the purpose of schooling in our society, try this simple thought experiment. When I speak with groups around the world, be they made up of parents, teachers, or administrators, I often begin by posing a question: What do you want the children you teach to be like as adults? Although I use the word “teach,” I mean this in the broadest sense of educating, so that it applies to parents and administrators as well as teachers. When speaking to parents, I emphasize that I want them to think about all the students at the school, not just their own children. This ensures that they consider outcomes as a member of society who has a much broader stake in the outcomes of education. Take a moment now and consider how you would respond to this question. What do you want the children we are teaching in our schools to be like as adults?

Frequently, I have people engage with this question by using the Chalk Talk routine (Ritchhart, Church, & Morrison, 2011). In this routine, individuals share their thoughts silently by recording them on large sheets of chart paper. As individuals share ideas, they read and respond to the written ideas of others by making comments, raising questions, asking for elaboration, making connections between comments, and so on. At the end of ten minutes, we have a very rich image of the kind of student we, the collective members of this particular group, want to graduate from our schools. We are hoping for someone who is curious, engaged, able to persevere, empathetic, willing to take risks and try new things, a go getter, able to problem-solve, creative, passionate about something, a listener, open-minded, healthy, committed to the community, respectful, analytical, inquisitive, a lifelong learner, an avid reader, a critical consumer, helpful, compassionate, able to take a global view, willing to learn from his or her mistakes, collaborative, imaginative, enthusiastic, adaptable, able to ask good questions, able to connect, well rounded, a critical thinker…And the list goes on with much elaboration, explanation, and assorted arrows connecting the various qualities.

What is interesting about the lists and charts created by these disparate groups all over the world is how similar they are. It matters little whether the group is from a suburban district of Detroit, an all-boys' school in Melbourne, a gathering of teachers from international schools in Europe, a group of parents in Hong Kong, a consortium of charter schools, or an urban high school in New York City. The same sets of qualities tend to appear over and over again. There is often an emphasis on attributes that drive learning: curiosity, inquisitiveness, questioning. And those that facilitate innovation: creativity, problem solving, risk taking, imagination, and inquisitiveness. There are the skills needed to work and get along with others: collaboration, empathy, good listening, helpfulness. And those that support the ability to deal with complexity: analysis, making connections, critical thinking. And usually there are those that situate us collectively in the world: as a global citizen, a member of a community, someone aware of his or her impact on the environment, able to communicate.

You'll notice that there are few traditional academic skills mentioned. Does that mean they aren't important? Of course not. It's just that they do not adequately define the kind of students we collectively hope to send into the world. Nor do they define the kind of employee whom businesses are looking to hire in the twenty-first century. In a survey of four hundred businesses across the United States conducted by a consortium of human resource, education, and corporate entities (Conference Board, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Corporate Voices for Working Families, & Society for Human Resource Management, 2006), employers were asked to rank the skills they were looking for in potential applicants, working from a list that included both academic and applied skills. Applied skills such as professionalism, work ethic, collaboration, communication, ethics, social responsibility, critical thinking, and problem solving topped the list over more traditional academic skills. Only when it came to the hiring of recent high school students did a single traditional academic subject, reading comprehension, make the top five (it was ranked fifth) in terms of its importance. This list from employers mirrors the qualities that Tony Wagner (2008) heard mentioned in his interviews with business leaders. Wagner distilled these into what he calls seven survival skills: critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration, agility and adaptability, initiative and entrepreneurialism, communication skills, the ability to analyze information, and curiosity and imagination.

It could be argued that businesses assume a high level of basic skills and knowledge as a given and are thus only identifying these applied skills as the icing on the cake. Perhaps, though in the aforementioned survey, this appears not to be the case. Prospective employers recognized deficiencies in academic skills, yet still ranked applied skills as both being more important and even more lacking in applicants than was academic preparedness. One crossover category topped the list in terms of deficiency. Writing in English was identified as deficient among 72 percent of applicants, and its applied skill corollary, written communication, as deficient among 80.9 percent of applicants. After that, the skills, both applied and academic, listed as most deficient were (in order): leadership, professionalism, critical thinking and problem solving, foreign languages, self-direction, creativity, mathematics, and oral communication. All of these skills were identified as deficient in more than 50 percent of applicants. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that applied skills are not considered an add-on, but rather an integral part of workplace preparedness.

The goal of cultivating a lifelong skill set that propels innovation and invention is championed internationally as well. In a 2011 study of the educational practices of the top-performing countries as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment, Marc Tucker (2011) reported that “one cannot help but be struck by the attention that is being given to achieving clarity and consensus on the goals for education in those countries” (p. 5). His group, the National Center on Education and the Economy, found a concern, particularly among Asian countries, with the development of cognitive skills as well as noncognitive skills that facilitated both global competitiveness and personal fulfillment. This sentiment is captured in remarks made in 2002 by Singapore's minister of education, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, in which he described as a top priority the need for Singaporean students to develop “a willingness to keep learning, and an ability to experiment, innovate, and take risks” (Borja, 2004, p. 30). Likewise, China's Central Committee stated that education in the country must begin to “emphasize sowing students' creativity and practical abilities over instilling an ability to achieve certain test scores and recite rote knowledge” (Zhao, 2006).

The qualities I consistently hear as important to teachers and parents, like those emerging from the world of work, are being called for by other sources as well. In 2002, in the book Intellectual Character, I reviewed the call for habits of mind, intellectual passions, and thinking dispositions being championed from various circles and found agreement around six broad characteristics: curiosity, open-mindedness, being strategic, having a healthy skepticism, being a truth seeker, and being metacognitive. The learner profile of the International Baccalaureate promotes students as inquirers, thinkers, communicators, and risk takers, and as being open-minded, reflective, well balanced, caring, principled, and knowledgeable. Likewise, the Building Learning Power initiative (Claxton, Chambers, Powell, & Lucas, 2011) seeks to develop a set of some twenty learning capacities around reflectiveness, resourcefulness, reciprocity/collaboration, and resilience that are quite similar to many of those already mentioned. Philosophers recognize these traits as encompassing a set of intellectual virtues. Once again, the more traditional academic skills that make up the standardized tests, define our graduation requirements, and serve as gatekeepers for university entrance don't appear explicitly on these lists.

Thus a new vision of what a quality education is and what it should offer arises from the data. Although a host of different vocabulary is used and the traits parsed slightly differently, what emerges is a rich portrait of the student as an engaged and active thinker able to communicate, innovate, collaborate, and problem-solve. What we see as most important to develop is not a discrete collection of knowledge but rather a set of broad characteristics that motivate learning and lead to the generation of useable knowledge. Some might say this is the profile of a twenty-first-century learner (Trilling & Fadel, 2009); others might see it as what it means to be a well-rounded citizen (Arnstine, 1995; Meier, 2003); still others might incorporate this definition as part of global competency (Boix-Mansilla & Jackson, 2011). I choose to see this portrait of a student as the vision of what a quality education affords. This is what we must be teaching for and trying to achieve for every student. The big questions then are: How do we get there—how do we realize this vision? How are our schools doing currently in producing this vision of students as thinkers? What are the forces we must marshal and master to truly transform our schools? These are the questions I take up in this book.

Teaching as Enculturation

The qualities found in the various lists I've mentioned—reflective, imaginative, curious, creative, and so on—are often classified as dispositions. A disposition is an enduring characteristic or trait of a person that serves to motivate behavior. When we say a person is curious, a particular dispositional attribute, it is because we see a pattern of behavior—such as questioning, exploring, probing, and so on—emanating from that person over time and across circumstances that relates to that particular disposition. Our dispositions define who we are as people, as thinkers, as learners. In previous writings, I've argued that the dispositions that define us as thinkers make up our intellectual character (Ritchhart, 2002).

We might think about these dispositions not only in terms of the outcomes of a quality education but also, to borrow a phrase from Ted Sizer, as the residuals of education—that is to say, what is left over after all the things practiced and memorized for tests are long forgotten. What stays with us long after we have left the classroom? Speaking at the Save Our Schools rally in Washington DC on July 30, 2011, Matt Damon highlighted the importance of these residuals, saying, “As I look at my life today, the things I value most about myself—my imagination, my love of acting, my passion for writing, my love of learning, my curiosity—all come from how I was parented and taught. And none of these qualities that I've just mentioned—none of these qualities that I prize so deeply, that have brought me so much joy, that have brought me so much professional success—none of these qualities that make me who I am…can be tested.”

The key aspect of these dispositions, even though they are manifest in the exhibition of specific skills and actions, is that they cannot be directly taught or directly tested. Think about it. It would be absurd to teach a unit on curiosity or risk taking or collaboration and then to give a multiple-choice test to assess students' development. Sure, students might learn “about” the disposition, but they would be unlikely to develop the disposition itself. Rather, these qualities, these dispositions, have to be developed over time. They must be nurtured across a variety of circumstances so that they become ingrained and are likely to emerge when the situation calls for them. Dispositions must be enculturated—that is, learned through immersion in a culture.

One of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky's most famous quotes is, “Children grow into the intellectual life of those around them” (1978, p. 88). This statement beautifully captures what enculturation means. It means surrounding the child with the kind of intellectual life, mental activity, and processes of learning to which we want them to grow accustomed. It suggests that learning to learn is an apprenticeship in which we don't so much learn from others as we learn with others in the midst of authentic activities. If we take Vygotsky's...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction: Demystifying Group and Organizational Culture
• Chapter 1: The Purpose and Promise of Schools
• Chapter 2: Expectations: Recognizing How Our Beliefs Shape Our Behavior
• Chapter 3: Language: Appreciating Its Subtle Yet Profound Power
• Chapter 4: Time: Learning to Be Its Master Rather Than Its Victim
• Chapter 5: Modeling: Seeing Ourselves through Our Students' Eyes
• Chapter 6: Opportunities: Crafting the Vehicles for Learning
• Chapter 7: Routines: Supporting and Scaffolding Learning and Thinking
• Chapter 8: Interactions: Forging Relationships That Empower Learners
• Chapter 9: Environment: Using Space to Support Learning and Thinking
• Chapter 10: Moving toward Transformation
• Appendixes
• References
• Subject Index
• Name Index
• End User License Agreement