THE THINKING CLASSROOM: Learning and Teaching In a Culture of Thinkingby Shari Tishman; David N. Perkins; Eileen Jay

Introduction: The Idea of a Culture of Thinking

Schools are places of culture. Not only in the sense that they introduce students to great intellectual achievements, but also in their sense of community, their spirit of common enterprise. Spend a little time in any classroom and you will instinctively see it - a particular culture of teaching and learning. It is evident in the way students and teachers interact, in their expectations of one another, their common ways of talking, their shared understanding of what is acceptable, what is interesting, what is valuable.

Naturally, not all classrooms have the same cultural feel; some are rigid, others open; some value answers, others questions. But every classroom has a culture of some sort, and this cultural aspect of education is one of the things that makes the experience of schooling so much greater than the sum of its parts.

This book is about teaching thinking. In particular, it is about how to transform the culture of the classroom into a culture of thinking. The purpose of teaching thinking is to prepare students for a future of effective problem solving, thoughtful decision making, and lifelong learning. This book is about how to achieve these goals.

So why focus on the culture of the classroom? In recent years there has been lots of talk in education about thinking skills - critical thinking skills, creative thinking skills, problem-solving skills, and the like. To be sure, thinking skills are important. Crucial, in fact. But simply having a skill is no guarantee that you will use it. In order for skills to become part of day-to-day behavior, they must be cultivated in an environment that values and sustains them. Just as children’s musical skills will likely lay fallow in an environment that doesn’t encourage music, learners’ thinking skills tend to languish in a culture that doesn’t encourage thinking.

A CULTURE OF THINKING

What does it mean to talk about a culture of thinking? Broadly, the notion of culture refers to the integrated patterns of thought and behavior that bind together members of a group. To draw attention to the cultural aspect of a community is to point to things that are shared by most or all community members. For example, community members may share a language or a vernacular, similar values and ideals, similar habits and expectations, a sense of identity, like-minded ways of interpreting the world.

Culture is an aspect of large, national communities, such as French culture, Xhosa culture, or Mexican culture. It can also be an aspect of smaller communities, bound together by factors other than race or geography. For example, one might talk about the culture of youth, the culture of education, the culture of small-town America, the culture of classic car collecting. To talk about a classroom culture of thinking is to refer to a classroom environment in which several forces - language, values, expectations, and habits - work together to express and reinforce the enterprise of good thinking. In a classroom culture of thinking, the spirit of good thinking is everywhere. There is the sense that “everyone is doing it,” that everyone - including the teacher - is making the effort to be thoughtful, inquiring, and imaginative, and that these behaviors are strongly supported by the learning environment.

SIX DIMENSIONS OF A CULTURE OF THINKING

This book explores six dimensions of good thinking and how to take a cultural approach to teaching them. These six dimensions are:

1. a language of thinking

2. thinking dispositions

3. mental management

4. the strategic spirit

5. higher order knowledge

6. transfer

A language of thinking has to do with the terms and concepts used in the classroom to talk about thinking, and how the language used by the teacher and students in the classroom can work to encourage more high-level thinking.

Thinking dispositions have to do with students’ attitudes, values, and habits of mind concerning thinking, and what the classroom environment can do to promote productive patterns of intellectual conduct.

Mental management (sometimes called metacognition) concerns students’ thinking about their own thinking processes, and how the classroom culture can encourage students to take control of their thinking more creatively and effectively.

The strategic spirit is a special kind of attitude encouraged in a culture of thinking, one that urges students to build and use thinking strategies in response to thinking and learning challenges.

Higher order knowledge looks beyond the factual knowledge of a subject matter and focuses on knowledge and know-how about the ways of solving problems, using evidence, and doing inquiry in a discipline.

Transfer concerns applying knowledge and strategies from one context to another, and exploring how seemingly different areas of knowledge connect to one another.

TEACHING THINKING: AN “ENCULTURATION” APPROACH

Culture-based teaching, or “enculturation,” involves somewhat different teaching techniques than the topic-based teaching techniques that might be used to teach students factual knowledge about the metric system, for example, or the nineteenth-century China trade.

Think about any culture you are part of - an extended family culture, an ethnic culture, an interest-based culture like car collecting or square dancing. Enculturation into any of these kinds of communities typically occurs in four broad ways.

To begin with, you are exposed to models of the culture - people who are cultural “insiders” or experts and engage in the kinds of activities that are central to the culture. Cultural models provide examples, or illustrations. For instance, a cultural model of an extended family would be a family member acting in a family-like way (acting brotherly or maternally, for example). A model of a culture of thinking would be an example of someone or something demonstrating good thinking practices.

A second way of enculturation happens is through explanation: someone or something straightforwardly explains a key piece of culturally important knowledge. For instance, in the culture of square dancing, you might be directly taught certain dance steps (accompanied, most likely, by square dancing models - examples of people square dancing). Explanation in a culture of thinking might include direct explanation about specific thinking tactics (such as the tactic of brainstorming), as well as direct transmission of important information pertaining to good thinking (information about the concept of evidence, for example).

A third way of enculturation occurs is through interaction with other members of the cultural community. For example, spending time talking to car buffs is a good way to become initiated into the culture of car collecting. In a culture of thinking, interaction involves thinking along with others - cooperative problem solving, for instance, or participation in thinking - oriented discussions.

Finally, enculturation occurs through feedback. Feedback occurs when members of a community provide evaluative or corrective information about people’s behavior within that community. Feedback can be explicit and overt, for example through point-blank criticism. Or it can be tacit and embedded in community values and traditions. Feedback in a culture of thinking occurs when people receive positive or negative input from the culture about their thinking processes. An example of such feedback would be when a teacher praises a student for providing sound supporting reasons for a particular point of view, or when a student’s peers comment on the strengths and weaknesses of a student’s solution to a problem. Feedback also includes traditional assessments and examinations, because students experience these things as behavior-shaping judgments about their intellectual performances.

Some forms of traditional assessment do indeed convey useful feedback, for example when they provide information that helps students revise or improve their work. But often traditional assessments fail to convey useful feedback about students’ thinking: they simply judge students’ thinking as right or wrong, without revealing what is right or wrong about it. In a culture of thinking, feedback should be informative and learning-centered. That is, it should provide students with useful information about their thinking behaviors - information that can help them learn how to think better.

In sum, there are four powerful cultural forces in the thinking classroom: models, explanation, interaction, and feedback. How do these forces play out in terms of the six dimensions of thinking mentioned earlier? Here is an example.

Recall that one of the six dimensions of good thinking is called “the strategic spirit.” Part of cultivating students’ strategic spirit involves teaching them to use strategies when tackling important thinking challenges, for instance, decision making. Imagine, then, a sixth-grade teacher who wants to cultivate students’ strategic spirit by helping them think strategically about decision making.

The first thing she (or he) does is straightforwardly explain to students the importance of strategic decision making (cultural force: explanation). As a way of making the explanation vivid, she describes a situation in which she herself used a decision-making strategy to help decide which kind of car to buy (cultural force: models).

She then teaches students a simple decision-making strategy, one that tells them to look for creative options, and to think carefully about pro and con reasons for their choice. She explains each step of the strategy, and draws a model of it on the blackboard (cultural forces; explanation and models).

Finally, she asks students to work in groups of three and use the decision-making strategy to think through a decision in American history: the colonists’ decision to dump tea in Boston Harbor. “Talk among yourselves and pretend you are the colonists,” she says. “What are your options? What choice would you make? Why? (cultural force: interaction). As students work, she circulates the classroom, providing advice and encouragement (cultural force: feedback).

So far, this example, illustrates a relatively frontal approach to cultivating thinking, a point-blank lesson that harnesses the four cultural forces. However, culture is pervasive - not just a matter of lessons occasionally taught but how things happen in general. Alert to this, our teacher does not stop with the above and a couple of more lessons on decision making and history; she works to keep the strategic spirit alive around decision making.

• She puts a poster up displaying key ideas about decision making (cultural force: explanation).

• When opportunities arise, she explains and demonstrates strategic approaches to decision making concerning historical events - Pearl Harbor, the dropping of the first atomic bomb (cultural forces: explanation and models).

• She encourages strategic decision making in whole class settings (let’s use this strategy to decide between these field trips”), small group settings (“decide strategically which topic you would like to research”), and individual settings (“each of you list some options and make a strategic decision about your essay topic”), across the subject matters (cultural force: interaction).

• She involves students in some decisions about what they will study next, sharing her own thoughts and thinking strategically with them (cultural forces: modeling and interaction).

• From time to time, she gives direct process feedback about whether students have considered lots of options, whether they’ve developed reasons for options, and similar criteria for good decision making (cultural force: feedback).

• She gives process advice - “Maybe we should look for more options here” - which informs by redirecting rather than by criticizing (cultural force: feedback).

This does not happen all at once or all the time in any one subject matter. It is occasional, opportunistic and varied. Through such tactics, our teacher tries to keep the strategic spirit alive around decision making.

Examples such as this one, in which the cultivation of students’ thinking is discussed in terms of the four cultural forces, occur in many places in this volume, for each of the six dimensions of thinking.

HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED

Readers who have already perused the Contents know that the chapters in this book are organized in pairs. For each dimension of thinking, a first chapter provides an overview and explanation of the core ideas of the dimension, and a companion chapter immediately following it provides of practice” - examples and illustrations of the thinking dimension in practice in the classroom. For those interested in trying some of these ideas out in their classrooms, the “pictures of practice” chapters also offer guidelines for instruction. Readers who are not at present looking for specific instructional tactics may choose to skim parts of the “pictures of practice” chapters.