Thinking about thinking

A current, but largely unrealized objective of school education is for learners to acquire thinking skills so they develop a helicopter view of themselves as learners and begin to recognize thinking methods and mental models as useful tools.

Self regulation and "thinking process" knowledge are critical not only to academic success, but are necessary for the new kinds of Knowledge Age jobs and Wisdom Age (wise application of knowledge) jobs that help us survive a world of ever-accelerating change.

Student access to higher level thinking skills depends on the ability of teachers to be role models, to frame rich questions, or to model the framing of questions, so students can learn to evolve or expand upon ideas, rather than simply reproduce what they have been taught.

But "thinking about thinking", otherwise known as metacognition, is hard for many teachers to understand or explain to their students. It is a fuzzy concept.

Although most teacher have declarative knowledge about thinking, they know what it is, and can use a thinking process themselves, they are often unable to identify the steps in a process, name the parts or explain or derive the rules.

Opportunities for students to practice higher order thinking skills are rare because teachers continue to ask mostly closed questions with a restricted range of solutions. To test for understanding. To keep control of the class. Or teach to a standardized test, which is all about short-term memorization.

Metacognition helps children organize complex sequences of thought or action and is effective for both high and low achieving students. Scaffolds are used by teachers to reduce the processing complexity to help the student develop new patterns of thinking, what steps to follow and in what order. The scaffolds are removed as the learner develops the skills to regulate their own activity.

Most programs to introduce thinking skills into schools fail because teachers also have difficulty arranging and facilitating classroom discussions as part of their teaching practice. Time is wasted completing routine administration tasks and maintaining order. Many teachers struggle to frame open-ended questions (for discussion) instead of the usual closed question (to test for understanding). As a result, students do not engage in dialogue or discussion, which defeats the purpose of the activity. Many teachers find they are unable to complete a round of activities in a 60-minute timetabled period.

But there is some good news. There is now an expanding range of tools to support thinking, question asking, and conversation in the classroom. One new method is Six Thinking Hats developed by Dr. Edward de Bono. He associates colors with different kinds of thinking. Red for feelings. Blue for what next. Black for problems or difficulties. Yellow for the benefits. Green for Creative thinking. White for facts. And to make sure that thinking is not a giant muddle, everyone in the group does the same kind of thinking at the same time, which he calls parallel thinking. For example:

White Hat: What do we know about human cloning?

Yellow Hat: What are the benefits of human cloning?

Black Hat: What are the dangers or disadvantages of human cloning?

Red Hat: How do we feel about human cloning?

Green Hat: What could we do creatively with human cloning?

Blue Hat: What should we do next about human cloning?

Another new approach is the Zing team meeting technology which helps teachers learn how to craft sequences of rich, open-ended questions, to conduct a conversation with a peer, and to share all the ideas with others on the other side of the classroom, before moving on to the next question. Students quickly learn how to craft their own question sequences, and with enough practice, develop metacognitive thinking skills by doing. The tool scaffolds not only the thinking process, but also different discourse models, for example, discussion, dialog and dialectical discourse. An example of a thinking process is this activity from Relating Well, 100 self-facilitated workshops for personal development, to develop an understanding of why society has Rules and Laws:

Make a list of all the rules in your school classroom. What are you expected to do/not do?

Make a list of all the rules at home. What are you expected to do/not do?

What happens if you break the rules at home?

What happens if you break the rules at school?

What could happen if you break community rules or laws?

Under what circumstances is it OK to break the rules? eg. To save someone's life. Give some examples.

If there was only one rule in the world what should it be and why?

Describe a bad rule you think we should change because it is unfair to some people.

Make a list of all the rules that help ensure people can live, safe, happy lives.

If you wanted to get support to change an unfair rule or law, what could you do?

Give an example of what can go wrong when people break the law?

Why do we need rules?

So here is a short workshop to "think about thinking":

1. Yes-no questions - Craft several questions which result in a yes or no answer. e.g. Should we go home now? Do you like sponge cake?

2. Closed questions - Craft several questions which have only one response/answer e.g. What is 1 + 1? Who is the president of the United States?

3. Open ended question - Craft several questions that can be discussed by a group and have more than one possible answer. e.g. What makes you feel sad?

4. When might it be appropriate to ask a closed question? Give examples.

5. When might it be appropriate to ask open-ended questions? Give examples.

6. Concepts catalyze/stimulate other concepts in memory. What do you immediately think about when you hear these words: animals, house, party, game, clothes, water?

7. Rich concepts are very powerful catalysts. What comes to mind when you hear these word combinations? Happy days, famous people, sensitive touch, glorious colors. 

8. Brainstorm a series of rich open-ended questions/activities to explore the topic: Body Image - how we look and feel about ourselves. e.g. What do you feel about magazines presenting "thin" as the normal body shape?

9. Here is a list of different kinds of thinking activities. Feel, Choose, Decide, Plan, Consider benefits, Consider disadvantages. Compare alternatives, Make sense of information, Recall facts, Understand something.  Choose a kind of thinking and ask a question to ask others what they are thinking e.g. What do you feel about the issue?

10. Create a three-question feedback method to find out what people like or dislike about something, using these three kinds of thinking as a starting point. Like. Dislike. Learn from this e.g. What did we like about the meal we just ate?

11. Most thinking processes start with a focus on the problem or the issue. Brainstorm a list of problems or issues as a concept to be understood: e.g. World peace. The distance from earth to the moon.

12. A great place to start is with what we know, the data, "facts" or prior knowledge. Craft a question/instruction which asks participants to recall what they know. e.g. Make a list of at least five small animals. What do you like about small animals like dogs and cats?

13. The logical order in which thinking steps should be undertaken is like a "thinking journey". Convert this planning process to questions and assemble them in the best order. First five steps. Team members. Success measures. Cost estimate. Main tasks. Technology/tools to be used. Description of the project. Milestones (dates). Project Title. Theory to inform the project. Resources required.

14. Undertake one kind of "opposites" thinking at a time. Split this question into two questions. "What are the benefits and disadvantages of immunization?" Or this one: What did you like or dislike about your holiday?

15. Here is a closed question. What color is the sky? Rewrite this question so that people will share their unique experiences of the sky and what was happening at the time.

An excess of remote experts

Ever wondered why so many kids find the concepts we teach and the methods we use too abstract, and disconnected from how they participate in the world? And why what they know life away from school - their tacit knowledge - does not seem to matter.

We teachers start our careers prepared to make a difference. But it's so much easier to follow a textbook, prescribed syllabus or worksheets developed by an expert. An expert - who knows what is best for us - who tells us what to teach, and how to teach, and places us in ever tighter straight-jackets, with fewer and fewer degrees of freedom.

But some of the latest research coming out of the Teach for America program shows that teachers who really make a difference, several grades in a year, are those who give themselves wings to fly, who do it their way, who focus on what they believe is best for their kids, right now. Who place the object of study at the center of the learning process, so young people can directly touch and feel it. And who constantly try new methods.

At the heart of what we mostly do as teachers, there is a remote expert who seems to "control" what we do, someone who has developed yet another new way to teach, with proven metrics to support it's use. And some content expert somewhere in the dim, distant past who decided what we collectively know about the world.

Much of the knowledge we have accumulated has been discussed, debated and resolved into concepts, models, theories and methods. We deliver these prepared "packages" to kids. Like so much of the food that we find on supermarket shelves these days. So far from the source kids don't know milk is from cows and bacon was once an animal.

As the image shows, the learner is three steps removed from the object of study.

We mostly learn how to teach in lecture theaters. Instructed by an expert, who learned from another expert. We learn to practice the art of teaching alongside teachers, many of whom are reluctant users of new technologies and stick with "tried and true" methods of "chalk and talk". In some countries, efforts to improve schools performance has lead to the phenomenon of "teach to the test". To keep our funding and our jobs. The hand of the remote expert shows up again..

From a systems thinking point of view, its a self-reinforcing loop that ensures the old ways persist. If the education system was a brain, we would all have obsessive-compulsive disorder, cycling through the same old patterns, unable to create new neural pathway, and snipping off the least used neural circuits to reinforce the old patterns.

And although I'm one of those so called "experts", with my doctorate of philosophy in education, which says I am an expert in a microscopically small part of the education universe, I am in favor of placing the learner center stage as a co-creator of new pedagogical possibilities. And the teacher center stage, with all the encouragement in the world to be inventive and daring. Because there is an urgent need. The jobs of today and tomorrow require these thinking and relating skills.

Here are some questions to explore this issue:

1. What were the main pedagogical techniques when you went to school? Make a list.

2. What are the main pedagogical techniques that are used in the school classroom today?

3.  Here is a list of skills that today's young person needs to be successful in the workplace. Explain how students learn these skills in today's classroom. Working in teams. Leading and managing teams. Using thinking and decision making skills routinely e.g. problem solving, strategy, project planning, feedback, design thinking or learning processes for others to follow, make sense out of data, use a computer to create a spreadsheet, write a report, conduct a meeting, deliver a presentation, make a movie, tape an interview, create a model, contribute to and edit a wiki, write and edit a blog.

4. Brainstorm a list of tools (or functions on tools e.g Google Maps) that students use in their personal lives that are not used in the classroom, e.g. mobile phone.

5. Describe what you could do as a teacher to invent or encourage students do invent new pedagogical/learning methods using new and existing tools.

6. Describe what you could do as a teacher to encourage students to experiment with and create new models and theories about real events/things in their lives that are relevant to science, mathematics, social studies etc.

Transforming the "customer"/learner experience

Question: How do you improve the patient experience at a busy hospital? Answer: You ask staff to directly experience what it is like to be a patient.

Giving staff a simulated experience of being a patient is what a big hospital in Cleveland USA is doing, as part of their introduction of "Serving Leadership", a way of inverting the leadership pyramid, serving the interests of others, raising the bar on what people do and achieving a higher purpose.

You soon discover what it feels like to take away your clothes and your possessions. To wait. And wait some more. To be shunted around from one diagnostic test to another. To be told little or nothing. To become a number in the system. To be patronized. To be unable to see what doctors and nurses record about you and your condition, in case they have it all wrong. Not enough respect for your liking. Being bossed around. Eroding your self esteem.

So what if we could the same for schools? So we teachers could have a direct experience of how young people see the impact of what we do. The fear of closed questioning that shuts down your brain. Constant knowledge telling. Blah. Blah. Blah. Making demands about behavior. The constant testing. Marking the attendance register. Sitting quietly until spoken to. Ridicule or sarcasm if you can't answer a question or to make you sit still/quietly. The resentment at being treated disrespectfully.

Seymour Papert of MIT Media Lab once said that there were three professions that had changed so little during the 20th century that anyone transported from 100 years ago could perform the job just as well as anyone born today. Health workers. Prison officers. Teachers.

The customer experience all depends on the kind of relationship we choose to have with our customer. The global management consultancy, McKinsey, says the next big thing in the business world is co-creating the future with the customer. No longer does the supplier have all the knowledge. And customers know what they want to be different or better.

It's the same in the world of education, particularly with easy access to the Internet, where knowledge is ubiquitous. Kids can easily teach themselves about amost anything if they are sufficiently motivated. In the United Kingdom, where an effort is being made to improve the learning experience for a disenchanted generation, schools are listening to what their students have to say about their lessons, so teachers can design classes that are more exciting, engaging and effective. It's called Student Voice. And because administrators have not been listening to the issues encountered by their teachers, there's a similar program for teachers, called Teacher Voice.

The new relationship with our customers also demand a change in the language we use. If we want to become a "serving leader" organization, little will change if we talk to each other in the old ways. It's like a computer programmer, brain surgeon or an airline pilot trying to use the language of 10,000 years ago to do their job. There are thousands of concepts and their meanings missing from an Agricultural era vocabulary which limit what you can communicate, or result in such impossibly long descriptions, you would need two or three paragraphs or pages to describe a concept.

Its seems time then to define the respective roles of the patient/nurse or doctor, and the student/teacher and the nature of the relationship in new ways.

So here's a workshop to change the learner experience, which could be just as easily applied to hospital patients.

1. Describe the student experience in a school classroom. What do teachers do and say, and what are the consequences for their students?
2. Form into several groups of four or five people. One person is to be the teacher, the rest are to be students. Act out what teachers do or say. Repeat the activity with a different person as the teacher.
3. Thinking about each of the actions the "teachers" performed, what they did and said, how did you feel and how did you want to respond?
4. Thinking about your reactions, develop ideas for what teachers can do or say to engage with students that improves the "customer" experience, e.g. is respectful, positive and helpful/conducive to learning.
5. What should be the role of the teacher and the student in the context of 21st century values?
6. What names could you use for "teacher" and "student" that better reflect their new roles?