Thoughtful Learning Blog

We can't accomplish much in a second. Blink. Breathe. Take a step forward. We can do 60 times as much in a minute, and 3,600 times as much in an hour. Our truly great accomplishments come from combining the little things we do in seconds into long, complex processes that take days or weeks or months.

Learning is one such process. None of us is born walking, but one of us became Usain Bolt. None of us is born writing, but one of us became J.K. Rowling. They learned how to do what they do through a long, involved process. Whether training for an Olympic 100m race or beginning work on a new novel, people who are doing something difficult follow a similar process called inquiry.

What are the steps in the inquiry process?

The inquiry process consists of six steps that can help any novice become an expert in any discipline.

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Social and emotional intelligence refers to your ability to understand and manage your own emotions and recognize the emotions of others. A few free, quick online quizzes can give you a beginning insight into your social and emotional intelligence. The first two quizzes listed below connect to university research projects, and both measure your ability to recognize emotions and facial expressions. The latter two quizzes measure your understanding of emotions in everyday life and in your classroom.

When I write the first draft of a novel, I'm Calvin from the classic comic series Calvin and Hobbes. Brimming with imagination and life, I don't care what may be sensible, realistic, and conventional. I'm full of passion, flying in many different directions. Sure, there'll be plenty of mistakes, but at least they'll be big.

When I revise and edit a novel, I'm Calvin's parents. I have to look dispassionately and critically at what the child mind has created. I have to analyze and evaluate. Patience, persistence, and a kind of longsuffering skepticism must prevail.

To put it another way, the parents' job is to make the child's life safe, and the child's job is to make the parents' life dangerous.

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The Common Core State Standards require students to think more deeply in all classes. But what counts for deeper thinking? Bloom’s revised taxonomy lists thinking skills in order from superficial to deep:

For many years, we’ve done well teaching and testing the top half of the taxonomy. After all, multiple-choice, true-false, and fill-in-the-blank items do an excellent job of measuring what students remember, understand, and can apply. On the other hand, they don’t easily measure what students can analyze, evaluate, or synthesize. What is tested is taught, so our inability to test these skills has meant that they were not getting taught.

However, the new assessments for the Common Core will test the full range of skills required. These tests combine new strategies, interactive environments, simulated research situations, and good-old essay responses in order to assess how well students can analyze, evaluate, and synthesize. Of course, now that these skills will be tested, they must be taught.

How can I teach analyzing and evaluating?

Start by teaching thinking strategies. One strategy that most educators already know is using graphic organizers to stimulate thinking:

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For most educators, the Common Core is a reality. The question is what to do about it. How can we shift from what we have been doing to what we are required to do?

Many groups have created lists of ways that the Common Core differs from previous sets of standards. These differences, or “shifts,” provide educators a focus as they rework and redirect their approach.

Some groups advocate six shifts for each content area, while others present just three. Regardless of the number of shifts or the exact wording, most groups present a list like the one that follows, from AchievetheCore.org:

In order to get students to think critically, you need to help them break through their mechanical thinking and manage their emotional thinking.

What is mechanical thinking?

When students think mechanically, their brains are just repeating looped recordings of thought without considering them. For example, students might have the mechanical thought, “I'm not good at math.” It just crops up in their brains whenever they look at a math problem. Often that little mechanical loop doesn't even relate to reality.

Why do we think mechanically?

Mechanical thinking is useful for routine tasks like walking, riding a bike, keyboarding, driving, playing an instrument, and other activities that have become part of muscle memory. To learn any of these skills takes a lot of critical thinking, problem solving, and practice, but once the skill is learned, it is stored in the cerebellum at the base of the brain. Often a person can do something with great ease but can't explain how to do it to anyone else. The skill is no longer conscious. But to learn new skills, students need to think critically.

How can students break through mechanical thinking?

When students are thinking mechanically about a topic in school, they are recalling old ideas about it and are not engaging the material in a new way. Most often, mechanical thoughts manifest themselves in statements that shut down possibility. You can teach students to recognize such statements, stop them, and replace them with questions that open up possibilities:

Mechanical Thinking (statements that stop thought)	Critical Thinking (questions that start thought)
“I'm not good at math.”	“How can I improve my math skills?”
“That's not the way Mrs. Jones taught us.”	“How many ways are there to do this?”
“There was only one reason for the Civil War.”	“What different factors led to the Civil War?”
“Current Events is boring.”	“How do events right now shape my future?”
“Our group never accomplishes anything.”	“Why is our group getting hung up?”

People say that Stonehenge was built to be a giant calendar that marks the winter and summer solstices. To me, that claim has always seemed a little odd. Who would spend 1,500 years building a calendar out of stone? Invent paper, people.

But let’s think of a calendar in deeper terms. A calendar doesn’t just track the days of a year. It tells which days are significant and why: Mardi Gras, Passover, Tax Day, Bastille Day, Election Day, New Years. . . . More than that—a calendar tells us what we ought to be doing on these special days. It is a meeting place where we can plan our future. In that sense, Stonehenge is very much a calendar. It wasn’t meant just to track time, but to provide a space for people to come together for meaningful activity.

Your Class Calendar as a Meeting Place

If you’re like most teachers, you’re used to thinking of your class calendar as an organizational tool that you create to guide you through presentation of the material. It’s your plan. But what if your calendar could be a meeting place? What if you invited students into the process of building the calendar—or at least part of it?

Understand that the students wouldn’t be building the class calendar on their own. They would be participating with you in building it. Here’s an example of how you could build a calendar together:

1. Display a calendar of the coming weeks. (Consider using a collaborative online program like Google Calendar.) Define the empty space that you and the students have to work in. “Over the next three weeks, we will be studying different biomes—or living environments for plants and animals.” Give your student an introduction to the topic—the more imersive and interactive the better.
2. Ask students what they want to know about the topic. Get them to activate their prior knowledge and to come up with interesting driving questions. “I want everyone to take the next five minutes to write at least five interesting questions you want to answer about biomes. Then your table groups will meet for five minutes and discuss your questions. Each table group will present the three questions that are most interesting and that give you the most room to explore the topic.” Write down the top three suggestions from each table group.

“Look, Mom! See the turtle! He is scaly!”

Spend a day with a small child, and you will hear many such observations. That’s because all of us have an innate human desire to teach. Somehow what we learn isn’t real until we share it with someone else.

“Watch what I can do! Let me show you how!”

The exclamation points are almost mandatory, because we want to teach. “Show and tell” is one of the most popular times in elementary school—the chance for students to become teachers. And much of the appeal of social media is allowing middle and high school students to share what they have discovered.

“I want to show you something. You’ll never believe this—it’s so COOL!”

Teaching—Unique to Our Species

You’ve heard the expression, “Monkey see; monkey do.” It’s quite literally true. Great apes learn by mimicking what they see, but they don’t actively teach. Why not?

The act of teaching requires “triadic attention.” When you teach, you have to pay attention to three things—yourself, the other person, and the topic you are teaching. If you lose track of any of the three parts, the teaching moment is lost. Triadic attention is a hat trick that other species can’t maintain for long. Human beings, however, are capable of this feat even before they can speak. That’s why toddlers do so much pointing—to teach you about what they are seeing. Teaching is so central to who we are that perhaps our species should be renamed Homo pedagogues.

How can you shift your classroom away from lecture and toward inquiry? You can get help from the modern phenomenon known as crowdsourcing—the practice of putting many minds to work on a single problem. Inquiry is, in effect, crowdsourcing in your classroom.

What Crowdsourcing Concepts Can Help Me?

The following four concepts from crowdsourcing can help you use more inquiry in your classroom.

1. Distributed Computing. While the term crowdsourcing is relatively new, the idea has been around for a while. One early example is the University of Berkley’s SETI project (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), started in 1999, with over three million people devoting time on their personal computers to process radio signals. Other projects put crowds of human brains to work on even thornier problems. Just last September, over the course of three weeks, Fold.It gamers decoded an AIDS protein that scientists had been struggling with for 15 years. And inspired by the success of Fold.It, EyeWire.org recently launched a project asking people to help color-code neurons in the human retina.

   Classroom Application

   • A starting point for distributed computing in your classroom is to have students create their own unit overviews. Here’s how. Instead of lecturing to introduce a new unit, assign partners or groups to find out about specific topics in the unit. For example, to introduce a unit on the Civil War, you could list topics such as battles, generals, causes, public opinion, economics, technology, media, casualties, and so on. Then ask partners or groups to select a topic to investigate. Take the class to the library or media center for a half-hour inquiry into their topics. Afterward, have each group report briefly on what they discovered. This distributed-computing approach engages students and fosters research, collaboration, and presentation skills. It also covers the high points of the topic through crowdsourcing instead of lecture.
   • A next step is to have students help develop the tools for assessing their work. Ask students what they want to accomplish—what excellent work would look like. Involve them in creating a rubric. This brainstorming process works even for young students, as is shown in this video about a bridge-building class. By involving students in creating the tools for their assessment, you get buy-in from them and often end up with a more rigorous assessment tool than you would otherwise have.
   • When you and your students gain real comfort with distributed computing, you might have them participate in planning the semester’s syllabus. Have them brainstorm what makes a successful learning experience. Present the core standards on which they’ll be tested, and ask for project ideas to reach those goals. Gather student suggestions on the board and then guide a discussion analyzing how to implement them. By enlisting students in this part of their education, you show that they are responsible for their own learning. You also teach them the metacognitive skills they need to be lifelong learners.
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You may have never tried project-based learning, or you may teach in a purely PBL environment. Whatever your background, you’ll find that PBL can be a powerful instructional approach. Here are ten reasons why.

1. Adult life is project based. Most tasks that adults complete are projects, from simple duties like doing laundry and baking cookies to major endeavors like finding a job or renovating a home. Adults rarely listen to lectures, take notes, and pass tests. Instead, they take on projects. Project-based learning helps students learn content while they practice the skills they need as adults. For a great explanation of this connection, watch this video from the Buck Institute for Education.
2. Projects prepare students for future work. Any project that can be done the same way over and over with consistent results will soon be outsourced, automated, or digitized. Any project that requires nonlinear thinking, decision making, and problem solving requires a human being. It’s a job—the best kind of job for the future. Watch Thomas Friedman's remarks to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, in which he covers these points from minutes 18:00-34:10.
3. Projects teach content and 21st century skills. The only way students can learn to collaborate is to collaborate on something. Yes, collaboration can be messy, but that’s all the more reason students need to learn to deal with the messiness. Projects require students to develop the 21st century skills that they need, such as thinking critically and creatively, communicating and collaborating, and consuming and producing information.

Some very clever people are using fun to solve social problems. The approach is called “Fun Theory,” and it’s tackling all kinds of social ills.

For example, Kevin Richardson suggests creating a “speeding lottery.” Cameras that catch speeders can also recognize those who obey the speed limit. Speeders pay fines into a pot, and those who obey are entered into a lottery to win the pot. Check out the speeding lottery video. Fun!

The mayor of Bogota, Columbia, has his own approach to speeding. Anatas Mockus hired over 400 mimes to stand on street corners, making fun of bad drivers. His reasoning is that it is more of a deterrent to humiliate bad drivers than to fine them. His idea has worked, dropping traffic fatalities by more than half. Fun!

And recently, two 17-year-old Canadians named Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad used fun theory to capture international attention for their backyard experiment. They sent a helium balloon nearly into space, including a Lego astronaut, which they filmed in flight. Fun!

What can fun theory do in my classroom?

Fun theory is limited only by imagination—yours and your students’. First, use fun theory on a source of annoyance. What is your biggest pet peeve? What are you constantly reminding your students about? Here’s a beginning list:

• Lateness for class
• Forgotten homework
• Sloppy mistakes
• Chatting and texting
• Not turning in assignments
• Not putting names on assignments

So you’ve heard of the 4 C’s—critical thinking, creative thinking, communicating, and collaborating—but how are you supposed to teach your own subject and the 4 C’s?

The good news is that the 4 C’s help you teach your subject. They aren’t content. They’re skills for gaining content. Here are 3 simple steps that use the 4 C’s to help students learn your subject:

Step 1: Prompt Critical and Creative Thinking

After introducing and modeling a new concept, prompt students to think critically and creatively about it. Assign a 5-minute activity that students complete individually. Here are some examples:

• Sentence completion: Ask students to complete a sentence in as many ways as possible.
  Complete the following sentence in as many ways as you can: “The cell membrane helps the cell by . . .”
• Definitions: Ask students to define a key term, providing its denotation, along with examples, synonyms, and antonyms.
  Define the term “executive branch,” giving examples, synonyms, and antonyms.
• Problem solving: Ask students to list ways that a problem could be solved.
  List as many ways as you can think of that global economic inequality could be reduced.
• Clustering: Ask students to write an important concept in the center of a piece of paper and to create as many personal connections as they can to it.
  Write “Supply and Demand” in the middle of a piece of paper and circle it. Around it, write ways supply and demand affect your life.
• Modeling: Ask students to represent a concept visually, whether in a sketch, a diagram, a symbol, or some other form.
  Create a visual representation of entropy—a drawing, diagram, graph, or other visual.
• Questioning: Ask students to write five questions about the current topic and to pick the most interesting one.
  Write down five questions you have about logarithms and pick the most interesting one.

I just read three brilliant blog posts by neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, in which he identifies three parts of our human brains:

• The primate brain (cortex) focuses on connecting with others.
• The mammal brain (limbic system) focuses on approaching rewards.
• The reptile brain (brain stem) focuses on avoiding harm.

Though we like to think of the primate brain as the foremost part (after all, primate means “first”), many believe it was the last part of the brain to develop. It is also the last part to receive signals from the spinal cord. So Dr. Hanson deals with the most ancient part, the brain stem, first. Read more

Let’s say four friends decide to do some fall fishing. All four have varying degrees of experience and success with fishing. For this particular outing, however, one individual, Aaron, is better prepared than the others. His grandfather owns a cottage on the lake, and he has fished here far more often than his friends have. So when they get out on the water, the others will naturally ask Aaron when they have questions about depths, structures, and baits. But they will also share their own ideas about fishing in these conditions. In a setting like this, friends simply work together, and, in the process, they learn new things, experience some success (in this case, catch some fish), and have a good time.

A 21st century classroom should function pretty much like the friends in the boat do—with individuals working (and learning) together to achieve a particular goal, and you, the instructor, serving as the lead learner—the person who knows the lake best. As you learn along with your students, you also provide the necessary leadership and guidance to keep the boat afloat and moving in the right direction.

10 Tips for Being a Lead Learner

• Marvel at and show interest in all types of ideas and events—past, present, and future.
• Promote learning through inquiry (questioning), collaboration, testing, rethinking, and so on—an authentic process that occurs in the science lab, in the workplace,
  . . . and on the lake.

Which is more important for today’s students, critical thinking or creative thinking? It’s a trick question. I may as well ask which is more important, breathing out or breathing in? “Whichever one I need to do right now” is one good answer to this last question. Another is “Neither—since I need both to stay alive.” It’s the same with critical and creative thinking.

The Thought Exchange

Creative and critical thinking are two halves of a cycle: inspiration and expiration.

• Creative thinking draws in possibilities. It is an expansive process, filling you with new ideas from the outside. Creativity reaches beyond what is known and into the unknown . . . to discover something new. Creativity is not necessarily discerning. You don’t separate the nitrogen from the oxygen in the air before you breathe it in. Your chest simply expands, and in it comes. Creative thinking can be exhilarating, flooding you with new possibilities.
• Critical thinking, on the other hand, sorts through the possibilities to do something practical. Critical thinking analyzes, applies, and evaluates. It categorizes, compares, contrasts, and traces causes and effects. It’s like separating the oxygen out of the air you breathe in, in order to enrich your cells, or extracting the carbon dioxide from your blood, in order to exhale it. Critical thinking takes what creative thinking has amassed and sorts it, keeping the best and discarding the worst.

If you or your students are new to inquiry and project-based learning—or if you just need some popular-culture inspiration for your program—you should check out the following hit TV shows. Each one uses the inquiry process to create amazing projects:

1. Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel is a classic show that investigates modern myths and viral videos, using science to determine whether they are confirmed, plausible, or “busted.” (Let’s face it, the more formal term—burst—doesn’t work as well as busted.) In every episode, Jamie Hyneman, Adam Savage, and their cohorts test myths using the inquiry process. Each show starts with a myth that the team wants to examine.
   • Questioning: The team asks the key questions about the myth. What are its parts? How can we test each part? What are the potential hazards of our testing? How can we use the materials that we have? How can we ensure great TV from picking apart this myth?
   • Planning: The next step often involves sketching ideas, creating scale models, rapid prototyping, and benchmarking. At this point, the team is considering how they can confirm or deny the myth.
   • Researching: When the crew needs to find out more, they search online and even travel off-line to places like NASA or bomb ranges to get the necessary information.
   • Creating: The team gathers the materials and tools they need and builds an experiment for finally testing the myth. They use all sorts of motors, computers, high-speed cameras—and not a little duct tape.
   • Improving: Rarely do things go right the first time, so the team must reevaluate what they are doing. They make adjustments, adding, removing, rearranging, and reworking parts.
   • Presenting: At long last, the team runs the final, definitive test to determine if a myth is true or not—often with surprising results. Recently, Jamie and Adam tried to make a Newton’s cradle out of wrecking balls. That’s radical science!