Читать книгу Fifty Strategies to Boost Cognitive Engagement - Rebecca Stobaugh - Страница 10

Introduction

When students enter Mrs. Tanner’s language arts classroom, they see their work posted on the wall. As class begins, they lead a discussion about their reading assignment from the night before. They pose questions to one another and share their thinking without fear of being wrong. Mrs. Tanner communicates the learning target for the day, but not the product. Students have a choice in how they demonstrate proficiency on the learning target. With classroom tasks framed around broad questions, students move around the room to the various furniture arrangements: workstations for individual reflection, group conversations, teacher-student conferences, and technology applications. Throughout the unit, students design authentic products like writing letters to the editor and hosting school poetry nights.

This model represents a new and necessary approach to instruction and learning. It is a model that shifts away from a culture of stand-and-deliver instruction to one that emphasizes a culture of thinking. With an increase in engagement and intentional thinking strategies, students can experience long-term understanding of the content. They learn and develop problem-solving and critical-thinking skills that will serve them well in their lives beyond school.

The purpose of this book is to offer you strategies that will help you transform your classroom from one of passive knowledge consumption to one of active engagement with activities that foster cognitive engagement and develop deep-level processing. It is about creating a thinking classroom culture.

But first, let’s take a quick look at the changing demands of the professional workplace and the policy and assessment systems that make this book’s content and strategies so valuable to both you and your students. Then, we’ll establish the full scope of what you’ll find in this book.

Changing Workplace Demands

Workforce needs are rapidly changing. In the 20th century, if a person could quickly produce facts and memorize information, he or she was considered intelligent. Through modern technology, anyone can retrieve information on almost anything within seconds. But how often is that information reliable or valid? How often does the user know how to interpret that information and make the most use of it?

The new, valued commodity for the 21st century is refined thinking skills. In The Future of Jobs Report (World Economic Forum, 2016), interviewers asked chief human resources and strategy officers from leading companies what employment skills they require. Table I.1 (page 2) highlights the changing needs industry experts expect as we transition from 2015 to 2020. Notice the increasing value of the bolded skills.

Table I.1: Top-Ten Skills for Employment

In 2015	In 2020
1. Complex problem solving 2. Coordinating with others 3. People management 4. Critical thinking 5. Negotiation 6. Quality control 7. Service orientation 8. Judgment and decision making 9. Active listening 10. Creativity	1. Complex problem solving 2. Critical thinking 3. Creativity 4. People management 5. Coordinating with others 6. Emotional intelligence 7. Judgment and decision making 8. Service orientation 9. Negotiation 10. Cognitive flexibility

Source: World Economic Forum, 2016.

Clearly, skills related to critical thinking are increasing in importance. Similarly, in a Hart Research Associates (2013) survey, 93 percent of employers agreed a job candidate’s “demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems [was] more important than their undergraduate major” (p. 1). Job expectations are changing!

In the Wall Street Journal, reporter Kate Davidson (2016) writes, “Companies have automated or outsourced many routine tasks, and the jobs that remain often require workers to take on broader responsibilities that demand critical thinking, empathy or other abilities that computers can’t easily simulate.” In researching qualities of Google’s top employees, surprisingly, Washington Post education reporter Valerie Strauss (2017) finds the company regards STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) expertise to be less important than six other key identifiers: (1) being a good coach, (2) communicating and listening effectively, (3) valuing different perspectives, (4) demonstrating compassion toward colleagues, (5) exhibiting strong critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, and (6) formulating connections between complicated concepts.

Despite all this, schools are not consistently preparing students for this world. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation (n.d.) states, “Somewhere along the road from education to employment, the system is not routinely equipping all students with all the skills they need to succeed” (p. 2). The skills the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation (n.d.) cites as necessary align very closely with those that business leaders noted in table I.1.

• Teamwork and collaboration

• Problem solving and critical thinking

• Organization

• Interpersonal communication

• Leadership

• Work ethic and persistence

• Creativity

• Relationships and conflict resolution

These findings are not just common to the professional world. In The Role of Education in Building Soft Skills, researchers Alan D. Greenberg and Andrew H. Nilssen (2014) find that when teachers, administrators, parents, and students are asked about what qualities are most important, problem solving caps the list, with 65 percent finding it very important, followed by collaboration (56 percent), persistence (50 percent), creativity (37 percent), academic knowledge (33 percent), and leadership skills (35 percent).

The question that naturally evolves from this is, How do we move from knowing there is a need for cognitive engagement to ensuring our education system can deliver on it?

Policy and Assessment Systems Changes

These demands for student competencies are shaping national and international assessments. The Central Committee of the Communist Party states that education in China must begin to “emphasize sowing students’ creativity and practical abilities over instilling an ability to achieve certain test scores and recite rote knowledge” (Zhao, 2006). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, n.d.), whose focus is to enhance economic progress and world trade, defines global competence as the ability to evaluate global and culture challenges from many viewpoints through a critical lens and comprehend how perceptions shape differences, so to effectively communicate with others from various backgrounds. The foundation of this global competence resonates on well-developed analytical and critical-thinking skills—interpreting the meaning of information, approaching problems logically, and evaluating the validity and reliability of information. To this end, the organization established the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa), a cognitive assessment program to measure understanding (along with analytical and critical thinking) while engaged in real-world problem solving on international issues.

Similarly, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (https://parcc-assessment.org) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (www.smartbalanced.org) are designing rigorous assessments to evaluate college and career readiness through critical-thinking tasks measuring analysis skills instead of rote memorization. Stanford professor emerita and president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute Linda Darling-Hammond (2012) avows:

Performance tasks ask students to research and analyze information, weigh evidence, and solve problems relevant to the real world, allowing students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in an authentic way. The Smarter Balanced assessment system uses performance tasks to measure skills valued by higher education and the workplace—critical thinking, problem solving, and communication—that are not adequately assessed by most statewide assessments today. (p. 2)

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA; 2015) also transfers the focus from remembering and recitation to higher-level thinking, as shown in one of the ESSA major areas directed toward access to learning opportunities focused on higher-order-thinking skills. Authors Channa M. Cook-Harvey, Linda Darling-Hammond, Livia Lam, Charmaine Mercer, and Martens Roc (2016) write:

Rather than the rote-oriented education that disadvantaged students have regularly received, which prepares them for the factory jobs of the past, ESSA insists that states redesign education systems to reflect 21st-century learning. The new law establishes a set of expectations for states to design standards and assessments that develop and measure high-order thinking skills for children and provides related resources for professional learning. (p. 1)

The evidence of the need for developing a thinking-based culture in all classrooms is clear. With all this in mind, let’s examine how this book will help you build critical-thinking skills in your students and what it will take to make a thinking culture an everyday part of your classroom.

About This Book

This book will support educators as they seek to embed critical thinking into instruction by providing fifty easy-to-implement strategies that lead to high levels of student engagement that deepen learning. States, districts, and even individual schools all have valid ideas and systems in place they believe will serve student interests, but ultimately, it comes down to teachers.

As researchers Robert J. Marzano and Michael D. Toth (2014) write:

If we hope to move students to these higher levels of skills and cognition, it’s imperative that we equip teachers with the “how,” those essential teaching strategies that will scaffold students to problem-solve and make decisions in real-world scenarios with less teacher direction. (p. 11)

Seventy-six percent of educators state they don’t have sufficient knowledge and training to nurture creative problem solving (Adobe Systems, 2018). Similarly, in a large-scale study of teachers applying for National Board Certification, a key element differentiating those who earned and didn’t earn certification was their ability to plan curriculum that transitions students from understanding to deeper learning outcomes (Smith, Baker, Hattie, & Bond, 2008). Possessing the ability to design tasks with high-cognitive-level outcomes is an advanced teaching skill.

This book will help you enhance your ability to design these high-cognitive tasks in the following ways.

• Chapter 1 fully defines critical thinking and cognitive engagement, details ways to involve students in deep-level processing strategies, and provides guidelines on establishing a thinking classroom culture.

• Chapter 2 focuses on Bloom’s taxonomy revised (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), describing each level of its cognitive processes while also providing numerous classroom examples to highlight how you engage students at the levels most likely to engage their critical-thinking skills.

• Chapter 3 establishes the criteria for this book’s strategies organization. It also clarifies the three supporting components of the strategies that produce the engagement necessary to allow critical thinking to happen.

• Chapters 4–7 contain the fifty strategies for critical thinking at the heart of this book. Chapter 4 provides strategies that emphasize the Understand level of Bloom’s taxonomy revised (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001); chapter 5 highlights strategies at the Analyze level; the strategies in chapter 6 align with the Evaluate level; and chapter 7 provides strategies that produce the highest and most demanding kinds of thinking, the Create level. These higher levels on Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) challenge students to think critically and problem solve, better preparing them for life outside of school.

• Chapter 8 wraps up this book by outlining several key aspects of a thinking classroom culture. The knowledge in this chapter is the cement that will hold all the strategy bricks together.

Each chapter ends with a series of Discussion Questions and a Take Action section that provides activities you can use to put this book’s ideas and strategies to work.

When you consider the vital importance of thinking skills to students’ future prospects, the need for all teachers to cultivate a classroom culture high in cognitive engagement is clear. If you’re ready to make this essential transition, you need only turn the page.