Before the age of the “talkies”, there was the silent movie era where movie stars graced the silver screen minus any sound except for the sound of some pianist in the movie theater. Occasionally, you will see some text dialog appear on screen so that the audience can keep pace with the story. Some of us may have watched videos or movies with the volume turned off. Of course it is strange to be watching the moving pictures without the sound. But with the pictures, we can still make good inferences about the possible dialog or even story line.

We can use this approach for teaching inference skills to our students. Choose an appropriate video. It can be clips  a documentary or a news broadcast or even a short story. I would not recommend a long one for practical reasons.

Play the video in your class with the intention that the students use the visual clues to guess what is being said. The students can be asked to pay attention to familiar scenes or faces for contextualizing. The students can be reminded to use their prior knowledge of things to make more sense of what they are viewing.

Get them to write in groups a possible script for the video clip that they have seen. Replay the clip as and when is necessary. Get the class to share their script by reading it as the clip is being replayed. When they have done so, show the clip with volume on.

Get the rest of the students to compare the student-created scripts against the original video clip’s script. How similar were their scripts to the original and how different were they? Remember this is not about getting an exact match. It is about getting something which is reasonable and acceptable and consistent with the visual clues they see in the clip. This is what making inferences is all about.

One of the best sources for teaching inference as a thinking skill are advertisements. It does not matter if the advertisements are in pictorial form, just plain text, audio or even video. What is important is students be able to re-examine them. Therefore, video and audio advertisements would need to be recorded for this purpose.

Advertisements are produced to promote certain products or even values. They are designed to persuade the observer to a certain point of view. Students should be taught to be aware of why certain words are used. They should be made more conscious of the images that is being used in advertisements. In video and audio advertisements even the music and tone of the voiceovers can show attempts to persuade the observer. Advertisers also use colors to denote certain messages.

Teachers need to direct their students attention to these by asking them mainly the “why” questions. For example, why were certain words used? Why was the music upbeat? Why did they use a picture of a child? They must not tell the latter their thoughts about the advertisements. Let the students do the thinking. Let the students learn to do the interpretation. Allow for any plausible interpretation of the advertisements. Teachers can also engage the class in a  discussion of the varying interpretations of the same advertisements. The teacher can get the class to compare the interpretations and decide which of them is the better interpretation.

Using advertisements to teach eventually can be used a s precursor to the teaching of another more sinister form of advertisements. The teacher can then introduce the students to propaganda materials for discussion.

I have written a few posts about the directions that Indonesia’s schools should take. Sekolah berstandar internasional (SBI) seems to be the education-related idea most talked about Indonesia. This SBI idea itself is a move in the right direction, provided that everyone concerned is clear about what it should be. It is not just about getting the school certified as an international examination center. It is not just about having science or computer laboratories. It is, as I have indicated in an earlier post, not about all that glitters. It is at the end of the day the quality of the learning and teaching.

In some other posts, I have also suggested using David Perkins’ Smart School model with its emphasis on deep learning and thinking as model for the creation of an SBI. It is not to create a school where the focus is on the creation of examinations-smart students like we tend to see in countries like Singapore. It is about producing students with an attitude and the skills to fit the future that these students will live in.

For Indonesia, it becomes even more important that schools aspiring to be world-class educational institutions should emphasize on the importance of thinking among its student population. The learning of thinking skills ought to be emphasized. This is because Indonesia today is a young democracy. In democratic states, it is a requirement for the democracy to succeed that its people be able to make informed and intelligent choices. They must also be people who are actively participative in the democratic process, able to look beyond themselves. An authoritarian educational system like the traditional systems we see in schools in even countries with supposedly good education system like Singapore, will never be able to produce citizens for a democracy. The over-emphasis on competition in schools only breeds undemocratic attitudes and values because the emphasis in such competitive environments is the individual’s own success. A system that emphasizes only examinations will not encourage space for thinking either as there is usually little time for anything else except examination preparation which is the raison detre of such schools. Yet the need for a thinking population is vital for a democracy to work.

For the above reasons, Indonesian schools must avoid just blindly aping neighbours’ educational system. The values of their neighbours may differ from that of Indonesia. No doubt some of the values that these neighbouring countries represent is good, like hard work and honesty but do Indonesians really want to copy everything without thinking through the implications for her future.