Thoughts on teaching & educational technology

I shy away from jargon like “critical thinking” because it’s overused; it lacks meaning at this point. So I’ll just call it ‘thinking’ instead — call it semantics derived from my attitudinal issues, but there it is. Consider this: what is uncritical thinking, but not really thinking at all? So slapping ‘critical’ on the front end doesn’t do much.

Real thinking is rational, based in facts used as evidence. It makes sense because it avoids fallacious reasoning, and actively seeks to debunk the fluff that so many people pass off as reasoning. Real thinking buries arguments supported only by “well that’s my opinion….” It enjoys slapping around the ‘hobgoblin of inconsistency.’ In short, it is demonstrated mastery of content through the practiced application of reasoning — knowledge for a purpose. Thinking enables a comprehensive mastery of content, because the understanding of it is arrived at through that rational thought. The two go hand-in-hand.

I suppose content knowledge could be attained without thinking — that’s just Bloom’s 1 & 2 at work. One could easily memorize another’s analysis, and parrot it when necessary. But in that there is no understanding, no ability to look at the content from different angles or use it in different situations. That’s pretty mindless — maybe good for playing Trivial Pursuit, but not for a whole lot else.

The social studies — and I’ll mainly use history as my example — is the perfect place to first learn and further hone thinking skills. And what a tremendous waste it is when history teachers do not realize this, and conduct their classes to enable that learning. Why bother learning about the Persian Wars? Who cares about the Roman Republic? How about coloring locations on a map, or creating (copying?) a timeline? These are pretty worthless pursuits, I believe, unless students are taught — and in part forced — to truly think in order to engage in them. The content then has purpose, and the students will have learned skills that are far more important to their lives than, say, the fact that corvus was a spiked plank. That fact is pointless unless they can answer the questions of why it was important, and how it impacted its times.

So there it is, I think. The study of history, for secondary students at least, lacks real value unless it is taught in such a manner that enables and requires students to learn actual thinking skills, rather than just rote memorization. That’s where historical inquiry comes in, and I’ll address what I believe it to be — based on what I’m doing in my classroom and what I’ve cobbled together from various people & sources — in the next post.

jdg