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This week, I had a great conversation with a friend. We wondered if this past COVID school year truly scarred students for the rest of their lives as so many doctors, psychologists and counselors among others have intimated. I say no – not even close to being close.
I said if you truly want to discuss a school activity which has the ability to scar students – it’s testing.
For as much as students hate testing, teachers despise having to “teach to the test”—as they have an eye on far more important goals.
COMPUTER-IMPLEMENTABLE INSTRUCTIONS
When test scores are delivered students are classified, characterized, designated, identified, stamped and tagged with scores used in future “data analysis” and decision-making. Students do their best and leave it up to a “finite sequence of well-defined, computer-implementable instructions to somewhat determine their fate.”
It’s crazy how we still push all the chips to the middle of the table and gamble on testing being the true determiner of learning when all the time, I always thought learning was the byproduct of thinking.
But now you need not think, but rather meet the criteria of testing which somehow fits into algorithms for someone to make sense out of.
Mainstream learning seems to have gone the route of the ability to converge facts, data, information and judgment in search of one best answer. Is it safe to say then, that school has become a place for analytical thinking?
I suppose to answer that question you will need to speak with a student who is a critical thinker.
FIGURING IT OUT
Critical thinkers have an astute understanding of why something is being done. They can think at an abstract level and easily apply their insights to the situation.
We want our students’ learning to be enduring, enabling them to make sense of complexity now and in the future. For this to occur, we need to nudge students beyond the learning of facts and skills to uncover concepts—transferable ideas that transcend time, place and situation.
Learning knowledge and skills is like standing in the middle of a forest, surrounded by trees: It’s easy to spot details but hard to see patterns. For students to think critically, they need opportunities to head up to the mountaintop, pause, and take in the entire forest.
They need the chance to search for big ideas—to generalize, summarize, and draw conclusions by looking at their learning in a holistic way.
ALLOW STUDENTS TO CREATE IT AND OWN IT
By intentionally designing learning activities in which students move between the factual and critical levels of thinking, we can help them construct understanding, facilitate transfer, and build their sense of agency.
I would rather a typical high-school graduate be able to discern truth from lies than diagram a sentence, dissect a frog or play football.
The problem with our school systems often lies in the dissociation between school and life to such a degree that a reasonable person can make a reasonable assertion that the most important skill to learn must be learned outside of the classroom.
High school is a little late to be teaching kids “how to think.” They aren’t kids anymore. They just want to do whatever arbitrary tasks the “adults” have put in front of them to get on with their life.
START AS SOON AS YOU CAN
At the elementary level, we should focus on two learning skills: how to acquire and share knowledge and how to solve problems. So while there’s a push to teach coding in kindergarten, we should throw in some philosophy (critical thinking) as early as we can.
Fareed Zakaria said that India is struggling just as our country is, and that they see improved education in critical thinking and information evaluation being essential to their country’s survival.
Our flavor of the problem is unique, but the overall problem is worldwide. But don’t just take my word for it; think on it a bit.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Consulting. He can be reached at 305-788-4105 or email at ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project.
