While we may want to teach our students to think, it is also important for us to know that our students know how to think. To find out how our students think, we can use graphic organizers to “peek” into our students’ minds.

As mention in my earlier posting, “Framing our thinking with graphic organizers”, graphic organizers can help students to learn to think.  From the teacher’s point of view, a graphic organizer can also help a teacher assess the thinking processes of the students. Assessment of the ability to think is important. If there is no assessment we will not be sure if our efforts to teach our students to think have actually taken root in our students’ minds. Through assessment, we will also know if our students are able to transfer that thinking process to other situations.

A good teacher who uses graphic organizers to teach thinking will model or demonstrate the use of these graphic organizers. The teacher will also teach the students how to use the graphic organizers in stages so that the student understand the mental processes that are taking place. The teaching of the mechanical routines of the thinking processes must be followed by more practice and also opportunities for students to transfer that newly-learned thinking skill in other situations.

Throughout all these stages of teaching thinking with graphic organizers, teachers will be able to “see” their students’ thinking processes. Timely intervention can be done to correct flaws in the thinking processes before poor thinking habits or processes become fossilized. The thinking becomes clarified on pen and paper (or any other media) for all to see and assess.

Perhaps more importantly, it is not only the teachers who can see how their students think. The students themselves would be able to see where their thinking has gone awry and make the necessary changes to their thinking processes. When students can make those changes on their own, then they are on their way to becoming independent learners.

Recently, I went to a local hospital where I heard an officer try to explain or convince the audience that there is no real loss to potential kidney donors if they ever decided to donate one of their kidneys. The officer said that on average, kidney donors live longer than the average person. She went on to explain that this is because the kidney donors are usually people who are already fit because otherwise they would not be considered as donors.

Of course the audience seemed convinced by her arguments and no one seemed to be able to detect the flaw in her argument. To put it simply her comparison was invalid. If the goal of her argument was to convince potential donors that their life will be least affected by the transplant, then she should compare the lifespans of those who actually donated their kidneys against those who are at the same level of fitness as these donors but who do not have their kidneys removed. This would show if there is a shortening of the lifespan of the kidney donors.

What is striking is that most (if not all) in the audience couldn’t spot the error in the comparison made by the officer. As someone who is very interested in the teaching of thinking skills, I am both amused and saddened by this error going undetected. I doubt that the officer concerned did it maliciously. I am in fact quite certain she herself didn’t realize the error in her argument. But this episode does point to the importance of teaching our students to think.

I will not elaborate at length why it is important to teach thinking skills as I have discussed it in some of my other postings about the economic reasons for teaching thinking and I believe the example above is sufficient to illustrate its importance in life in general. However, perhaps we ought to consider seriously about how the teaching of thinking skills is to be done. I will try and illustrate the issues concerned with teaching thinking skills with some examples from my experience in Singapore.

In Singapore, the teaching of thinking skills has been going on for quite awhile. Officially, the powers that be here, recognized the importance of teaching thinking. De Bono‘s CoRT was once a staple in Singapore schools until it went out of fashion. Today one is more likely to see the approach taken by Robert Marzano
and others which is basically to infuse the teaching of thinking skills into the subject content area in the school curriculum. However, even then I will argue the way that is implemented means that Marzano’s framework for teaching thinking skills has been sacrificed at Singapore’s altar of Pragmatism. While the thinking skills advocated by Marzano is used officially, the manner in which it is being used leaves a lot to be desired (see my comments here).

Furthermore, in practice, Marzano’s framework seems to be used only for the teaching of social studies, history and geography (they are separate subjects in Singapore). Little is heard about it being used for the other subjects like Maths, Science, Art and others . Why is this so? This is because only in this three subject areas, there are what is known as the thinking skills type questions in the examination papers. Even in the three subjects, the use of this framework for thinking becomes somewhat of a joke (see same link above for my comments).

If teachers in Singapore are cynical about the teaching of thinking skills, some of the blame perhaps can also be placed on the shoulder of the Curriculum Planning and Development Division (CPDD) of Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE). I have attended courses and briefings organized by the CPDD in the past. In their attempt to allay the fears of a tired and overworked teacher audience who is going to be asked to accept another “initiative” to their teaching load, quite often it is heard from CPDD officers that the then “new initiative” pertaining to the teaching of thinking skills is not new (duh!) and something that the teachers have been doing. If you are in that audience, you too would feel then there is no real need to change the way you teach since you have been teaching thinking already!

So what happens here is that although the MOE has officially accepted the idea of teaching thinking through infusion into the subject content areas, in reality, what is practised is very different. Thinking skills still exists in silos in Singapore’s education system.

The other issue that has to be considered with teaching thinking skills is the type of thinking skills that is to be taught. The post, “Coaching Critical Thinking to Think Creatively” by Zaid Alsagoff, illustrates, among others, the dilemma that is faced by educators pertaining to the teaching of thinking skills. What teaching skills should be taught? Should we teach critical thinking or creative thinking or problem-solving (though they all may not necessarily be separate entities)? I think we are in this state of flux with regards to the teaching of thinking because we are not clear what end-product (kind of students and adults) we want. The economic needs seem to define the kind of “education” that ought to be given but are we clear how to get to the end product.

Personally, I see two approaches. At the tertiary level perhaps, the approach has been more focused on the kinds of workers we want in the future workplace. This leads to thinking courses being focused on perhaps problem-solving and creative thinking or the more specific stuff like SWOT etc. At the school level, educators tend to focus more on the more “generic” thinking skills as suggested by the Marzano model. I think there is a place for all these different approaches but in my view, they should be integrated or infused into the core curriculum and not taught separately.

The different subjects anyway will lend themselves quite differently to the different kinds of thinking skills. They should reflect the kind of thinking that is done by professionals in the subject areas, which means if they are taught thinking in history, they must be taught how a historian thinks. The thinking skills demanded by a scientist is quite different. Having said that, there are also thinking skills that overlap in the different disciplines. For example, the inquiry approach is common to both the historian and the scientist.

There are also the “thinking skills” that more reflect perhaps cognitive habits that must be inculcated in everyone. For example, the “Habits of Mind” as proposed by Costa and Kallick comes to mind. In short there is a whole range of thinking skills to be taught.

In my mind, the teaching of thinking skills should, therefore, not be done in a one-size-fits-all manner. To do so would be wrong even if it is in the name of teaching thinking skills. To use an analogy, very often at the tertiary level, the IT Department would conduct almost the same ICT course across the disciplines found in a tertiary institute. So a student studying accountancy would be given the same course as an engineering student (see this example). This is done usually out of administrative convenience or intellectual laziness, or perhaps also more likely, because the various departments do not know what ICT skills are really essential for their very different student requirements.

So the teacher of science should know what thinking skills lends itself best for the teaching of science. The teacher of History should know what thinking skills goes well with his discipline and so on for the other subject areas. This requires the teachers of the various disciplines to be clear themselves about what they think a product of their department ought to be able to do with his head.

Lastly perhaps,  the teaching of thinking skills should be explicit in the sense that students ought to know what thinking skills is being used or taught. Thinking skills should be taught explicitly because stduents must be made aware of the thinking that goes on in their heads. They have to be more conscious. Teachers too will be made more conscious that they ARE teaching thinking and that it is not done by some hidden osmosis-like and accidental processes. The teaching of thinking should also be done explicitly while the “content” is being taught instead of just dishing out “facts” from the textbooks. Teachers who are not familiar with the the infusion of thinking skills in their subject content areas should therefore seriously undergo professional training in this area.