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.

Does your child’s school teach your child to take notes? This may sound like a very trivial question but a school that goes out of the way to teach its student population the art and science of note-taking shows the degree of commitment that the school has towards teaching your child to be independent learner. The term “independent learner” or “independent learning” is often been used by schools to catch the attention of parents who want their children to have the virtues of an independent learner instilled while their children are in school. Parents know that this is one of the qualities that the future workforce is expected to possess.

Yet referring to my original question again, how many schools actually teach students to do effective note-taking? Note-taking is a basic skill that everyone needs if he is to be able to learn effectively. Through effective note-taking, the student learns to make decisions about what is important about the learning that he is undergoing.  Effective note-taking implies that a lot of thinking is done by the student to help him sort out the relevant from the irrelevant and to get the information into some organized and effective structure. A student will also be a very much more active learner if he makes his own notes. Independent learners need to be active learners, in fact they have to be pro-active about their learning.

But do schools actually encourage this pro-activity with regards to student learning? To put it another way, do schools actually encourage students to be lazy? The truth is many schools do, and this is true even of the  higher educational institutions. Teachers and lecturers have been guilty of spoon-feeding students with stacks of notes. Today, some educational institutions, like some the polytechnics in Singapore, take pride that their students can get access to lecture notes online. Pride in their new ICT ability to store notes online takes precedence over real learning in such cases.  It seems that today, even at the tertiary levels of education, notes are expected to be given out even though one would expect that at least at that level, students should be encouraged to be more independent and take greater responsibility for their learning. This spoon-feeding is often seen as “good” for the students because it helps the students pass the examinations because the lectures are usually geared to the questions in the examinations.

It seems that if the goal is to produce students who are examinations smart, schools will continue to dish out notes to their students. However, it ought to be noted that such practices do not contribute in any way to the making of an independent and life-long learner. Educational institutions must make a serious effort to get students to be independent learners. It reflects poorly on such educational institutions if the basic skills of independent learning is not emphasised.

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Workers who are independent learners have become one of the most important characteristics of the workforce of the future. Independent learners would know how to seek whatever information on their own when they enter the workforce. They would be resourceful workers. Also according to Carol Sanford in “Myths of Organizational Effectiveness at Work”:

“The foundational element in effective work systems is self-correcting, self-managing, self-accountable, self-governing behavior. Energy spent on monitoring and attempting to affect the behavior of team members or other entities from the outside is energy wasted and energy that could be better expended on improving the business and the capability of people. The critical element is to increasingly create self-governing capability.”

The old factory line approach to teaching and learning that features the teacher doing most of the thinking and talking has to give way to students having to explore, do their own research and thinking about what they are learning. Teachers would have to craft lessons that excite their charges with that spirit of inquiry that has as its basis in the natural curiosity of children and teenagers. Part of that crafting includes the need to design appropriate activities that comes with appropriate assessment strategies because not only would the teachers need to know what goes on in the heads of their students but also the latter would also need to know if his learning is going in the right direction.

That is the new challenge for teachers everywhere, including those in Singapore, if they are serious about preparing students for the future. Students must be made to take more responsibility for their own learning. They will have eventually decide when they have left school, what is it that they have to learn or re-learn, how they will be learning, when and why. They will have to be able to monitor their own progress to see if their work skills suits whatever work they have been employed to do or that they hope to do. How do they know if they are on the right track?

Already experts are talking about workers having two or even three careers in a lifetime. overnment leaders in Singapore are echoing this same view about multiple careers ina life time too.This implies of course a lot of learning and re-learning is required of workers in the economy of the future. In fact, it is already beginning to happen. With this scenario, it becomes imperative that teachers teach students how to do their own self-directed learning and link to this, also how to do their own self-assessment of their own learning. Teachers, therefore, need to devise in schools today, assessment strategies for their students to learn to monitor their own learning. Assessment can no longer be in the sole responsibility of the teachers. Students must learn to assess their own learning.