Lately I have been thinking a lot about thinking.
More specifically, I have been thinking hard about the absence of thought in education. The absence of thought in students, teachers, administrators and policy-makers. This year’s political discourse is a wider-world reminder of the ubiquitous lack of thought on the part of otherwise educated adults. We know more but are oddly – increasingly? – thoughtless. Why?
Thinking, in the sense in which I am interested, is not mere mental work (or idle mental noodling). There is certainly lots of that going on everywhere. Thinking in the educational sense is not about doing one’s work. Little thought need go into a typical course pacing guide or by a student in filling in a Venn diagram. Those are mental tasks. Such work cannot by itself yield a truly thinking person.
Note that I am not saying that traditional mental work in school is easy or trivial. Learning is often difficult, i.e. you have to use your brain, work hard, and persist in the work, to learn or do whatever it is that needs to be learned or done. To learn to de-code letters or consider four different textbooks for adoption is hard; to learn French verb tenses or Stage 1 in UbD is work; to learn to effortlessly solve simultaneous equations or score tests requires a lot of sweat equity. But strictly speaking, no deep thinking is required in such work.
I can make this a bit clearer by using a different form of the word: education is the enterprise of making people more thoughtful. And too much mere work inhibits deep thought. Thoughtfulness only enters in when I wonder about the meaning of the work. Why am I doing this? What of it? Is there a better way to do it? What does this work or lesson assume that we might question? What are the unintended consequences of our actions? Etc. That’s why we talk about “depth” of thought. Can you dig below the surface, the ‘cover’ of ‘coverage’ to ponder what underlies it? Typically, however, both teachers and students need merely follow through, in a disciplined way, to complete all their assigned tasks. Yours is not to reason why; yours is but to cross-multiply captures the spirit of such schooling elegantly.
If all I do is “teach” you things and then you have to show me you “learned” then, strictly speaking, there is no need for either of us to really think. A need to think only emerges when the work itself is designed to make us both question, really question what we are doing.
Thus, even good schooling may make a “good” student or teacher even less thoughtful. How could it be otherwise, if we simply just do our work, and the work is time-consuming? Our students may graduate without having learned to be thoughtful and many teachers may never grow. One can get straight A’s in almost every school if one merely does all the work. This is not a new idea: I am just updating Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Consider the contrast between being thoughtful and being thoughtless. Thoughtless people lack perspective, self-criticism, circumspection; they think they understand more than they really do; most importantly, they lack self-understanding, as we have known since the Delphic Oracle.
A perfect example of thoughtlessness in education currently has to do with district pacing guides that dictate a calendar of teaching. A moment’s thought would reveal that pacing always refers to outcomes, not inputs: think of what we mean by pacing in track or swimming. The issue is not the teacher’s pace but the learner’s. A perfectly sensible idea – pacing the learning, mindful of a key performance goal – has been utterly ruined by absurdly rigid rules about teaching. That’s thoughtless.
WHAT IS THOUGHTFULNESS? What, then, does it mean to be thoughtful, and how might conventional teaching and learning unwittingly undercut it? A key insight comes from what I noted above: thoughtful people ponder the meaning of what they learn and the consequences of what they do. They bring assumptions and implications of ideas and actions to the surface – and challenge them, if needed. Thoughtful people ask tough questions, of themselves and of others – and they persist in the questioning: Why? What of it? What if? So what? What are you assuming, why? Etc.
Readers should squirm a bit uncomfortably if they are honest: many of us don’t like students or teachers who ask such questions a lot. I was reminded of this in a recent workshop where I praised a participant for asking a tough question and when I asked him to identify himself, half the room laughed and rolled their eyes – oh, yes, the resident skeptic, curmudgeon. And I was reminded of a kid I taught named Chris who did this all the time – a pain in the you-know-what. And as the advisor to the school paper I had to handle crises that arose because of his hard-hitting investigations as editor. I personally admired this guy’s tenacity but many of my colleagues disliked his whole questioning approach to everything. He was viewed as negative. Yet Chris Hedges grew up to be a Pulitzer-prize winning newspaper writer and author. Do we really want thoughtful learners or just compliant hard-working ones?
More knowledge, more content mastery is thus NOT the antidote to a lack of thought, in either teachers or students. That’s what differentiates me from many reformers. I don’t think most so-called good schools are particularly good; I don’t think “bad” schools should strive to be “good” suburban schools because most of those schools are intellectual stultifying. (As I have noted, we know from SAT data that the only thing that differentiates most “good” from “bad” schools the best is parental income, a sign that the value-added of “good” schools is questionable). More content and more mental work can never make people more thoughtful, if the lessons bypass thought in favor of mere content mastery. Indeed, lots of knowledge without thoughtfulness makes matters worse. I don’t want either eager-beaver students or teachers who merely perform well at assigned tasks. I want them to be thoughtful. Because without thoughtfulness, knowledge is dangerous. Not only is a little knowledge a dangerous thing, but lots of knowledge, with power and without thoughtfulness, is even more dangerous. A recent vice president comes to mind.
It’s that paradox – mere knowledge and work stifles thought, no matter how important the knowledge and work – that has driven me for my entire career as student and teacher. I was bored by school, and only came alive when I studied Philosophy in an elective in high school. For the first time we were able to officially and relentlessly question what we had learned! I taught via Socratic Seminar before it had a name (based on my experience at St. John’s College.) The title of my dissertation was Thoughtfulness as an Educational Aim. I still ponder routinely Arendt’s claim in The Life of the Mind that most philosophers confuse the urge to think with the need to know. I always wonder about Dewey’s tart comment in Democracy & Education that no one has satisfactorily explained why children enter school with more questions than when they leave it. And clearly this issue of inquiry-driven learning is at the heart of Understanding by Design.
A COMMON THOUGHTLESS COMMENT. I have also once again encountered a comment by teachers in workshops that always gets me thinking because I am unclear if they have thought about what they are saying. You may think I am referring to rude behavior. No, that rarely occurs. What always intrigues me is the comment: “There is so much content to cover, I have to cover it all.” Huh? You have to teach superficially to improve learning? A little bit of thoughtfulness here should lead to some self-directed questions: Just because I mention it, do they get it or have interest in it? Does superficial disjointed teaching really optimize learning and test scores? Must I tell them everything that is in the book or on the Internet – in other words am I (falsely) assuming that only teaching causes learning? etc. The essential question here is: what’s the best use of precious class time, given the desired outcomes and the nature of learning? I have met few teachers who have really thought this question through, regardless of the external demands.
A thoughtful teacher would realize that “coverage” is not a goal but an action unsupported by clear aims. (By definition, coverage means there are no priorities and no explicit performance goals). “Teaching all the content” is not an educational goal at all; “learning to draw upon and use content thoughtfully and effectively” is the educational goal. Your job is to design backward from that goal, not march though stuff without considering the consequences.
Please don’t write me saying that I don’t understand tests, standards, teacher accountability, the realities of school, etc. etc. I understand. Rather, consider: this same thoughtless coverage is done by college and private school teachers working under no external test or accountability demands, and such coverage has been taking place forever. So, it can’t be exactly as you are saying it. No one ‘has to’ cover but most do. I am asking you to think a bit about the meaning of those words. I am asking you, perhaps, to be thoughtful in the face of thoughtless demands.
Indeed, the claim that “I have to cover all the content” is thoughtless in another way. Look at the language: it is egocentric, cast only in terms of what you will do. But teaching is not about what you will do; I am interested in what the student will be able to do of value as a result of your teaching, because that is all that matters. Thoughtful teachers don’t design backward from the content (the inputs); they design backward from worthy performance in using content (the outputs).
Ralph Tyler said it clearly and plainly 70 years ago:
“The purpose of a statement of objectives is to indicate the kinds of changes in the student to be brought about so that the instructional activities can be planned and developed in a way likely to attain these objectives; that is to bring about these changes in students. Hence it is clear that a statement of objectives in terms of content headings is not a satisfactory basis for guiding the further development of the curriculum.” Pp. 45-6 in Basic Principles of Curriculum.
THINKING ABOUT OUR CONTINUING THOUGHTLESSNESS. So, none of this is original thought, as I said above in reminding us of Plato’s Cave. Tyler’s thought, too, is an old thought: Kant, Whitehead, and Dewey all said as much. That’s what makes me think about it all. The wonder here, the true food for thought, is not that teachers everywhere and from time immemorial cover content. The thought-provoking issue here is that most educators agree with these thinkers – but then fail to see that when their work deviates from what they assented to. The truth about thoughtful teaching is accepted, then continually ignored. Critical thinking is praised as a goal, but the work assigned often doesn’t demand it. Why? How are even good teachers blind to our own thoughtlessness? I admit I was; I admit I still fall into the same problem in workshops. That’s why I de-brief every workshop; that’s why I get participant feedback. I, like all teachers, have a blind spot when I am teaching. But why? How come we keep thinking of our job as the teaching of stuff, decade after decade, century after century? And it’s not the factory model: the same error occurred for centuries before the industrial revolution. That glib answer – heard often – is just another excuse for not thinking.
In a beautiful lecture to science teachers, Richard Feynman the Nobel physicist captures both my unease with conventional education and the way forward:
There is a first grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science, because it starts off on the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog–a windable toy dog–and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says “What makes it move?” Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question, “What makes it move?” Then there is a picture of a motorbike and the question, “What makes it move?” and so on.
I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about–physics, biology, chemistry–but that wasn’t it. The answer was in the teacher’s edition of the book: the answer I was trying to learn is that “energy makes it move.”
Look at it this way: that’s only the definition of energy; it should be reversed. We might say when something can move that it has energy in it, but not what makes it move is energy. This is a very subtle difference. It’s the same with the inertia proposition.
Perhaps I can make the difference a little clearer this way: If you ask a child what makes the toy dog move, you should think about what an ordinary human being would answer. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around.
What a good way to begin a science course! Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy, the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people devising the ratchets and other things.
Suppose a student would say, “I don’t think energy makes it move.” Where does the discussion go from there?
I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition.
Test it this way: you say, “Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language.” Without using the word “energy,” tell me what you know now about the dog’s motion.” You cannot. So you learned nothing about science.
Have you taught an idea or just a definition? Have you covered a lifeless fact or uncovered a vital insight inside an inert textbook claim that needs exploration? When I see teachers (and textbooks) fixate on technical definitions or authoritative claims to be treated as Gospel I always get a chill up my spine. Because it may be just as Feynman is implying: memorization of technical terms or claims that you just accept is the epitome of thoughtlessness. Yet, in good as well as bad schools, students are expected to learn and recall hundreds of meaningless terms and textbook claims AS IF such short-term drill work ended up as transferable working capital. To assume that learning means learning what is in a textbook, no matter how good the textbook, is to fail to think things through.
A thoughtful teacher would fear the power of the textbook to lull thinking into submission, and work extra hard to counteract this tendency. Because Feynman’s point is generalizable to almost every textbook or Web site: the presentation of knowledge as unquestionable information stifles thought, undercuts understanding. It slyly reduces understanding to Authoritative Knowledge. It not only simplifies but thus subtly ends discussion on all key points – by design. When have you seen a textbook that asked you to completely reconsider the previous chapter of the textbook? When has a textbook asked you to question the points just made in the textbook? I can think of only 1 or 2 – yet this is how real thoughtfulness is engineered by design.
Some current programmatic approaches to standards-based learning are worsening things by dividing up all the standards into 368 utterly low-level objectives that somehow are supposed to add up to a good higher-level education – even though a moment’s thought would make you realize that this is impossible. The same thoughtlessness occurred 20 years ago with Mastery learning. Take a great idea – mastery – then bastardize it by saying 80% or better on any dumb low-level quiz is mastery. Jeesh.
So, a thoughtful teacher always listen for a lack of understanding, regardless of the good quiz results. Thoughtful teachers realize that their goal of higher-order thinking can never be met by texts that require only low-level mental work. They count the number of high-level questions they as well as their students ask, on guard for the tendency of content-driven work to produce increasingly lower-level thinking. Most importantly, a thoughtful teacher ensures that there are questions, puzzles, paradoxes, and inconsistencies in the content, since that is how thoughtfulness is activated and strengthened – regardless of how inert and didactic the textbook is.
So, as a new year begins I want you to be a little alarmed, too. I want you to ponder the idea that well-meaning texts can cause learners not to think by the way we typically teach and ask students to learn. I have never met a teacher who wanted to stifle thoughtfulness. But I have met thousands of teachers who do not realize that their methods of teaching and measuring learning may unwittingly stifle thoughtfulness. Your students can only be thoughtful if you model thoughtful questioning of the content and if the curriculum makes them thoughtfully probe the content and its meaning, not just learn it.
There is a surprisingly practical pay-off here in improved test results. Really! In the 2nd part of this Essay, next week, I’m going to revisit a claim that I have made before, which I think is supported by looking at dozens of released test questions and the results from the tests: most of the “hard” test questions require something other than content mastery; they require thoughtfulness in how learners draw upon their repertoire. I will ask you to think through some of these test questions and the test results with me. You may find, as I have, that a disturbing fact exists under the radar of test-bashing: many standardized test questions are far more thought-demanding than are most local tests (as verified in audits we have done with teachers). I trust you will find, as I do, that there is much to be gained in thoughtfully considering test results instead of thoughtlessly bashing the tests, as so many of our colleagues do.
PS: I made a few edits based on some thoughtful criticism, if this looks a bit different from when you first saw it.
41 Responses
Well done! Thoughtless teaching, textbook driven curricula, and a lack of rigor and relevance are the death of student learning.
Thank you for this terrific post. You have articulated what my partners and I are working to combat, yet so many teachers and administrators limited their thinking about curriculum and instruction to the safety of the textbooks. My mantra when I work with teachers on the instructional implications of the Common Core standards is that the Common Core invites us to “Teach less, learn more.”
I think there is tremendous opportunity…and need…to shift our national work to promote critical thinking and problem solving. That shift will require courage, however, for all manner of reasons, not least of which is that the kinds of students such an education would produce would not slip quietly into place in an economically stratified society.
The tests are what I most generally see held out as the barrier to making thinking and deep understanding the goals of education, which is paradoxical, as you say here. I look forward to next week’s post on assessment questions!
Grant, I enjoyed this piece a lot (I rated it 5 star). It did remind me (from my ‘old life’ as a management consultant) of the concept of an “organisational vision” though. That is, something that it is genuinely inspiring, but not really attainable.
Why not attainable? It could be due to limitations in the means, motive or opportunity of all the participants. It seems to me that considerations like yours imply that the “lack” is due to “opportunity”. Not enough space is being allowed for thoughtfulness to be nurtured and allowed to emerge…
Hence opening participants eyes to this shortcoming is a necessary (and perhaps sufficient?) condition for thoughtfulness-to-have-a-chance.
My concern is that this necessary step will be far from sufficient. And this is where I risk sounding like an elitist (which I hope I am not).
Here is my thought experiment: allow participants to freely choose (let’s imagine that is possible) where they will learn and educate. The thoughtfulness-model – if I can call it that – ought to attract all the participants to it in time. But that will not occur, according to my understanding of the world-of-learning.
What may occur is that participants “segment” along a continuum of offerings covering the spectrum of thoughtfulness-playfulness-“usefulness”-“advancibility”. Perhaps the choices for the learners could be driven mostly by their parents. Perhaps the choices for educators could be largely be driven by perceived comfort and competence with each of these environments.
What I am saying is that your call for thoughtfulness-in-education may go largely unheeded (if ones uses simple majoritarianism voting-with-feet to make this call). You allude to Arendt saying “most philosophers confuse the urge to think with the need to know”.
What happens if many humans have neither of these drives strongly? Do we then try to “cure them”?
Once again, thank you “for putting this profound consideration out there”.
The connection to O. D. work with Mission and Vision is a connection we made in Schooling by Design. Have a look at our book if you haven’t done so. I happen to think it is our best book, better than UbD. because it makes a clear case for being principled in any organization but especially in a school. And we argue that no dispute in school can ever be resolved without agreeing to agree to a Mission, a Vision of the mission, and a set of commitments based on it.
I am a high school science teacher and have mostly Junior and seniors. By the time they are in my class, they have been indoctrinated to acquire correct answers and spit them back. The most common question I deal with is “what is the right answer” and my response is invariably “What do YOU think the right answer is?” (followed by “Why?” after they answer. I spend two days discussing critical thinking, brain (mal)function, and why the scientific method helps correct for them.
It is alas true and telling that you used the term ‘indoctrinate’. My question is then simple and blunt: why do we as educators permit it? Why do you as a member of science dept tolerate it? In fact, why isn’t the mission of the science dept in your school to aggressively work against it? My favorite mission statement for a science program anywhere in the country is from the Putney School: leave Science at Putney with curiosity intact.
I have always been a “fan”/follower of your work, Dr. Wiggins, but this is probably the greatest piece you have written. THIS is the reason Back-to-Basics didn’t work, why NCLB is a miserable failure, and why we now find ourselves, as a nation, wondering what have we done? where are our jobs? where are the products we use to manufacture gone? and, why do we continue to do the same thing we have always done? Thoughtlessness; there is our answer. This 21st century form of zombieism (although I noticed in the Urban Dictionary that zombies actually have an insatiable desire for brains!!! LOL) has created an idiocracy that I find scary and treasonous (following) the Pied Pipers of government and big business right into the abyss.
I will re-read through this several time so as to grasp all the gold nuggets. Now, my question to you is WHAT are we going to do about it? Or, is that beyond our power?
Thank you, sir, for your insight and forthright assessment.
Thanks for your kind words. I hesitated in publishing it – too long, easily misconstrued. So – thanks.
[…] today, however, I stumbled on Grant Wiggins’ latest blog post – Thinking about a lack of thinking. Grant likes to do “longer posts”, too. See…it’s not only me – and thank God he […]
they want us all to be robots…
I often think Pink Floyd knows more about this matter than most teachers…
When we talk about thoughtfulness do we assume that if it is done well it would lead to similar, if not identical, conclusions? (Did you not think we should all agree in your evaluation of a certain Vice President?) Not in the real world, because when we read or listen to the truly thoughtful people we do not see unanimity. But, that brings up the question of why thoughtfulness is important to foster in students. It cannot be because we want them to agree with us (because we are thoughtful persons ourselves). It must have some important end, must it not? Becoming thoughtful could have wonderful results in that our charges would be more creative, more careful to see ramifications, and more introspective. On the other hand, what is the connection between thoughtfulness and morality? Jonathan Haidt in his insightful book, The Righteous Mind, says, “Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason….most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation…. This explains why the confirmation bias is so powerful, and ineradicable. How hard could it be to teach students to look on the other side, to look for evidence against their favored view? Yet, in fact, it’s very hard, and nobody has yet found a way to do it.” (89-90) I don’t equate thoughtfulness with reason, but it is one of the most valuable thinking tools.
The end in mind with fostering thoughtfulness is to overcome our natural bent to accept the world as we have been socialized into understanding it and to use the tools of thinking to validate our notions. People who question the questions and challenge accepted assumptions find themselves in trouble, do they not? And yet, I dare say, many of the people who find UbD liberating and useful have gone through these troubles. But, they are the few. Is there hope or a good reason that they should become the many? Or perhaps, engendering thoughtfulness in small doses is good enough for the bulk of students we are given to be their teacher.
No, actually, I DIDN’T think everyone would agree with my judgment about the VP. In fact, this is the great mess of education in which people equate Understanding with unanimity or consensus. I don’t think most teachers have thought AT ALL about the distinction you and I are making here – i.e. that our goal is NEVER to get people to think what we think. Rather, the goal is to get people to think AS we think, i.e. thoughtfully, logically, with open0minded interest in what others think. I have always believed that a focus on the goal of understanding instead of Knowledge means that we make safe a world in which people disagree but still understand each other. We make this claim in UbD. By its very nature Understanding means that there can be and usually are different understandings. “We have different understandings, but I understand your understanding.” That is the aim of education in my view. What I always told my kids when teaching was: there are no Right answers, but some are better than others. Your job is to figure out what I mean by that claim (i.e. come to understand that an answer has to have depth and evidence and logic, regardless of the particulars.)
I am in complete agreement that a lack of thoughtfulness is rife among teachers. My question is to why this is true. I laud your efforts to make Understanding the goal of education, but is it a reasonable goal? Is human nature pulling too strongly in the other direction?
A little over ten years ago my school used UbD to rethink and revamp our curriculum. We had the most difficulty in getting the idea across to our faculty of being thoughtful as a part of the process. A good number of the teachers thought this was a waste of time. They had an intuitive (or perhaps textbook-driven) understanding of the curriculum. Why should they put thoughtfulness into it? I don’t think our staff was much outside the mainstream on this.
Do you not think that there are a lot of right answers? It is just that those answers are not the ones that move our lives. We can pinpoint historical events in time, place, and outcomes. Evaluating these events and applying lessons to the present are impossible to be so sure about. Understanding is the key.
Keep up the good work!
Working with the autism population where the traditional intervention is one of static/rapid response, I recognize that it’s not what you know but what you do with what you know.
Your article came to me via one of our parents who appreciates the importance of mindful guiding, thoughtful discourse and that the brain is an experience dependent organ. In this regard, building an integrated neurological system, the backbone of dynamic intelligence, with his son.
Thnx to him and thnx to you. (You have quite a few new fans.)
Dr. Sheely
RDIconnect
I appreciate your comments. We need to make clear that regardless of your gifts or lack of them it is the tangible effect you have that is what matters – hence the importance of getting and using feedback in self-advancement (see my feedback article). I always ponder Piaget’s insight about when he was a young trainee working with Binet that there were mentally challenged kids who did poorly on the IQ test (recall its original purpose was to find educable retarded kids) but when asked to engage in a clinical conversation about their answers showed a kind of intelligence missing from their inability on the official test. Hence, the Piagetian interviews….
[…] Thinking about a lack of thinking – Thank you Grant Wiggins for this great essay. How can we foster more thought in the educational process? Not just for the students either. Share this:TwitterEmailLinkedInFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2012 at 9:44 am and tagged with Education, teaching and posted in Weekly Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. « Happy New Year!!! […]
A wonderful post Dr. Wiggins. Many teachers seem to have their sense of being tied very closely to their teaching style, and, as soon as we begin to brooch the issue of textbooks and teacher-directed classes the hackles rise very quickly. As workshops presenters also, how do we “sell” this without alienating participants?
Write the book version of this!
[…] Wiggins recent posting on “thoughtlessness” discusses our focus on “covering content” vs. developing depth of thought. He […]
Thank you for this great piece of writing. You have elegantly written what I think many people are struggling to say. As a science teacher, I endeavour to have my kids use critical thinking. As a physics teacher, I’m usually delighted when my students tell me at the beginning of the year that they’ve forgotten the physics from their junior science classes. It gives us a chance to start fresh with an open mind and push towards meaningful (and thoughtfullness) learning.
[…] “A link to the design of core academic experience becomes clear: any genuine learning has to involve perspective on what is learned, not an authoritative march through Official Knowledge[…]”-Grant Wiggins […]
We agree with the author that the state of schools, which comes from State Boards, creates students who are taught content but not to think. One way to teach problem solving is to allow students to think out-loud and to use multiple resources. Have them give voice to the problems they are having, solving the issue being discussed. It has been this way for so long, that teachers do not always have the professional development to teach thinking. Nor do they have the time and resources necessary to go deeply instead of broadly. How do we convince shareholders, like state boards and parents, that thinking is more importantly than memorization of knowledge content?
Teachers everywhere have standards or essential knowledge and skills that lawmakers have provided for them. I wonder if any of these lawmakers have researched whether the amount of content for which teachers are being held accountable can actually be taught in the physical amount of time we have available to us. Thoughtlessness is rampant throughout our society. Is there any wonder that we have the troubles we do? Until educators start thinking, being thoughtful, about what we are being asked to accomplish by others, until we start pushing back against unreasonable expectations, we are doomed to struggle with thoughtlessness of others.
The idea that resonated most with me was that “Your students can only be thoughtful if you model thoughtful questioning of the content and if the curriculum makes them thoughtfully probe the content and its meaning, not just learn it.” I constantly struggle with aligning with district expectations and measurements while allowing my students the opportunity to really think about the content. They are always asked to produce a product or to answer a question so that we can measure their level of mastery, but in doing that, we are putting them in a box that limits their thinking and tends to put all of their minds on a “one way track” which ends in the same place. If we want to be truly successful in making our students into good thinkers, we need to rethink our delivery and expectations. I need to shift my thinking from expecting a product to allowing my students to really think and learn from each other. Parents and students need to open themselves up to being challenged and not seeing results in a neat and tidy package.
In reflecting upon this article, we discussed how students even at a young age learn that there is one answer and feel uncomfortable in challenging the teacher’s interpretation of the “correct answer.” Most students feel the need to please the teacher with the one correct answer. This only compounds as students move through middle and high school. We thought of an example of a teacher asking students to research social issues of the election and discuss them in class. One student then reported back to parents who became upset with the lesson and complained to the principal. This landed the teacher in the principal’s office to defend the lesson. We believe that the parents will be a harder sell in this new model of teaching than the teachers. One question that we came up with is how do we convey this thinking shift to parents? We hope that increasing transparency of the classroom and allowing word of mouth between parents will ignite interest in changing the way we teach. Spotlighting teachers on websites as well as in newsletters can help as well.
Mr. Wiggins, I really appreciate your article. My colleague and I found the article very enlightening. We strongly agree that there is great importance in thinking and learning how to think, not only for students but for teachers as well. Without the ability to think, we lose the ability to reflect and analyze. We have to teach for our times. However, the curriculum and textbooks need to be taught, but should be taught to promote thinking. Parents, teachers, students, and administrators need to have a paradigm shift and realize that we might have to teach differently in order to encourage and nurture thinking in students. My colleague and I were taking about how teachers need to give the students time to think and formulate their answers, and explain what they mean, rather than give “the right answer”.
We connected to the quote “teaching all the content” is not the goal but “learning to draw upon and use content thoughtfully and effectively” is the educational goal. Our job is to design backward from the goal, not to march through stuff without considering the consequences. Begin with the end in mind – we need to think about not just where our grade level needs to be but where we need kids to be at the end of other grade levels and what we need them to internalize in order to get there. The power is in the thought provoking questions from both teachers and students.
The thinking shift is not to skim the surface of whatever the learning is but to go deeper by questioning and extending their thinking in other disciplines, and giving them time to internalize what they are learning. Teachers must shift their thinking by allowing students time to internalize and reflect on their learning. Teachers have to let go of the control and allow the students to extend their own learning.
How do we keep the faith that the students can get there when we have standardized tests and our scores may dip due to the shift?
Thinking about the lack of thinking…
Students need the opportunities to absorb and think about the content presented in any format before we ask them to demonstrate understanding. They need time to think. Students love to respond to classroom questions with ‘I don’t know’ for various reasons. But given a couple of responses to allow for more thinking time, like ‘I need more time to think or ‘Come back me later’; students have the chance to think about a great response. Time may be the only connection for thinking and understanding.
The shift for teachers, parents and students alike is NOT to assume that either the learner does not know (understand) or knows little just by a lack of use of academic vocabulary and a quick shallow response. Time must be given to process new knowledge and develop a thorough response. Deep questions require lengthier responses and more time to think and provided multiple formats and avenues to allow students to express their knowledge.
How do we achieve this in 180 school days on 8 hours and 5 days a week? In other words, the current system does not compliment disruptive thinking.
We made several different connections while having a discussion about your article. We really liked the point that you make about really knowing the content by explaining the information learned without using the new core word. As teachers we will make an effort to not be thoughtless and allow students the ability to express their learning through reflections by facilitating as a “guide on the side”. We need to be more thoughtful when it comes to students questioning and allow them to create their own independent learning styles to allow them the opportunity to question or express their own learning in an individual manner.
When discussing thinking shifts we need parents to begin having deeper discussions about school content and also have a true understanding of learning and help support students and teachers when trying to have deeper meaningful reflections of knowledge. Students will have to be made more aware of their ownership in their own learning and that it does not fall back onto the parents and teacher. Plus they will need to be more willing to take a risk in a learning environment. The teacher will have to make more shifts by following the “gradual release model” and allow and accept student questioning that we may not know the answers too.
Susan Wilkins
Michelle Hammack
This philosophy is very thought provoking yet challenging to wrap your mind around given the expectations that are required of educators. Although it would be ideal to shift learners into a more thoughtful learning environment, realistically educators still feel the pressure to perform at a satisfactory level on a standardized state required assessments.
Add to that, the vast array of learning styles, not all students will successfully and comfortably adapt to this thoughtful learning process. There are as many learning styles in a classroom as there are children, so we should acknowledge and validate all styles of learning.
-How can we shift to this philosophy of “thoughtfulness learning”, when the way students are assessed don’t reflect that style?
-How can we incorporate this philosophy to include all learning styles, specifically children who need a structured learning environment?
-Can/Should there be a “compromised” version to this philosophy?
In the late 90s I attended one of your workshps at my district (D207 in Park Ridge,IL). At that time I heard you talk about Understanding by Design and I thought to myself — this sounds like Plato rehashed, teaching through questioning. I walked away agreeing with everything you said, curious as to why you were sayhing it, but not having enough teaching experience to appreciate it your perspective.
Now 10+ years later I am now teaching a philosophy elective class and have embraced a perspective on teaching and learning which is all but identical to yours. I am delighted to know that your OWN philosophy class turned you on to learning. I only wish I had talked to you more back then.
[…] We sometimes go further and speak cynically (if elliptically): “You know, he just doesn’t have much going on upstairs,” we say to a colleague who knowingly nods. Or we complain about the number of students we have who are “just not cut out” for demanding work. My thesis title, Thoughtfulness as an Educational Aim, came in a flash when a colleague of mine in a summer program for talented kids none the less said of his students, “They’re bright, but they’re so damn thoughtless!” […]
Reblogged this on Antilogicalism and commented:
A good education consists not only of the memorization of facts or methods, but, more importantly, of the development of understanding and thoughtfulness, which arouse the mind to curiosity and innovation.
[…] We sometimes go further and speak cynically (if elliptically): “You know, he just doesn’t have much going on upstairs,” we say to a colleague who knowingly nods. Or we complain about the number of students we have who are “just not cut out” for demanding work. My thesis title, Thoughtfulness as an Educational Aim, came in a flash when a colleague of mine in a summer program for talented kids none the less said of his students, “They’re bright, but they’re so damn thoughtless!” […]
[…] have been pondering Grant Wiggins blog post on the absence of thought in education. The following quote demonstrates Wiggins frustration with our current system or process of […]
[…] 2. Read this bolg post about encouraging thoughtfulness in students […]
[…] on the blog “Thinking about a lack of thinking:” Wow! Did this blog ever force reflection and get the gears turning! As I read, I found myself […]
[…] Grantwiggins. (2012, Sept. 3). Thinking about a lack of thinking. https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/thinking-about-a-lack-of-thinking/ […]
[…] vs doers is one that many others have written about, with Paulo Freire being a favorite (and Grant Wiggins too). The school system narrative described above, where the opportunity to process experiences […]
[…] article first appeared Grant’s blog; also previously published at TeachThought.com image attribution flickr user […]