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CHAPTER 1

Understanding Cognitive Engagement and the Thinking-Based Classroom

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

—Roger Lewin

Should education focus on ensuring acquisition of knowledge (that is, information, facts, and data) or building skills (creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking)? Traditionally, the behavioral or transmission model emphasized that learning required reciting and reproducing information. This model focuses on transmission of knowledge through delivering content, not on the learner (Koenig, 2010). A thinking-based classroom looks remarkably different. It centers on building students’ skills and their thinking processes (see table 1.1). It is a path to deeper learning, which is a high-leverage strategy to propel learning as students engage in complex tasks.

This all begs the question of what thinking is in the context of learning. To be sure, thinking covers a variety of categories and cognitive levels from information analysis to problem solving and effective collaboration skills. Bloom’s taxonomy revised (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) is a key part of all this, and we’ll cover those connections in detail in chapter 2 (page 11), but in this chapter, we start with a focus on two broad-based concepts that succinctly establish the core aspects of the thinking-based classroom—critical thinking and cognitive engagement.

Table 1.1: Transmission Model Versus Thinking Model

Transmission Model	Thinking Model
• Teacher-centered classrooms • One right way to answer a problem • Focus on grades • Testing culture • Students not allowed to talk • Speedy answers encouraged	• Learning-centered classrooms • Divergent ways to solve a problem • Focus on the learning process • Learning culture • Student discussions of diverse ideas and solutions • Authentic, intellectually demanding work

Source: Adapted from Ritchhart, 2015.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a common descriptor in modern education, but it’s not always one that teachers truly know how to define. Critical thinking is a reasoned approach to problems, decisions, questions, and issues. This kind of thinking is skillful and a precursor to all learning.

We can all identify times in our lives when we didn’t think critically about a problem, decision, question, or issue. Maybe a few of these examples will resonate with you.

• Dated someone for superficial reasons (such as having nice hair, pretty eyes, or a cool car)

• Decided to go on vacation without considering possible consequences

• Took part in a class or professional development session without focusing on its content or mission

• Took a stance on an issue with little evidence or support

• Considered evidence from an unreliable source

By reflecting on times when you didn’t engage your full cognitive self, you can start examining the attributes that do describe critical (or skillful) thinking. The following list describes the Habits of Mind related to critical thinking (Swartz, Costa, Beyer, Reagan, & Kallick, 2008):

• Persisting at a task that requires thinking

• Managing impulsivity in thinking and acting

• Thinking flexibly

• Striving for accuracy and precision

• Thinking interdependently

• Listening with understanding and empathy

• Communicating with clarity and precision

• Responding with wonderment and awe

• Creating, imagining, and innovating

• Taking responsible risks in thinking

• Finding humor

• Questioning and problem posing

• Applying past knowledge to novel situations

• Gathering data through all the senses

• Remaining open to continuous learning (p. 19)

Which areas of this list are your areas of strength?

Even if you are personally strong in several of these areas, or even if you feel you have strengths in all of them, that is only the start of the process. To truly establish a thinking-based classroom, you need to impart these qualities to each and every one of your students. Education author and consultant David A. Sousa (2011) states, “If something is worth teaching, it is worth teaching well” (p. 150).

Memorizing information does not tend to support transferring the learning to new situations, but when tasks require students to process information deeply and develop understandings, transference is more likely to occur. Being smart isn’t memorizing a lot of facts. Sousa (2011) further emphasizes, “The cognitive research supports the notion that transfer occurs more easily if students have processed the initial learning in ways that promote deep, abstract understanding of the material, rather than emphasizing the rote application of superficial similarities” (p. 159).

True intelligence is the ability to solve problems, apply new learnings, and carefully evaluate. Author Rhoda Koenig (2010) comments, “Without this higher-level processing, we succeed at nothing more than adding to our students’ ‘bank’ of inert knowledge” (p. 22). Research shows that students perceive cognitively challenging tasks as meaningful and intriguing (Marzano & Pickering, 2011). Professor John Hattie (2009) finds cognitive challenge to have an effect size of 0.57 on student learning.

Effect size, which is a numerical representation of an effort’s impact on learning, derives from measuring the impact of implementing a change versus not doing so using an experiment group and a control group (Olejnik & Algina, 2000). An effect size of 0.57 is in the moderate to strong gain range, representing one to two years’ worth of academic growth.

The point of emphasizing all of this is simple: as instruction becomes more complex and stimulating, students become more engaged in the learning process. The question becomes, How do you emphasize critical thinking in your own instructional practices? Education author Bonnie Potts (1994) identifies four key areas important for teaching critical thinking that remain resonant as a core rule set for establishing criticalthinking practices in your classroom.

1. Learning with others in a group setting

2. Posing open-ended questions that are ill-defined and challenge students to think creatively

3. Providing wait time for students to develop their thinking by asking questions, discussing with others, and refining their thinking before responding

4. Practicing critical-thinking skills in various contexts to ensure students apply the skill in new situations

The fifty strategies in this book all place an emphasis on one or more of these key areas, and when you join these aspects of critical thinking with components that foster engagement, your students will fully realize the benefits of a thinking-based classroom.

Cognitive Engagement

Closely related to critical thinking, cognitive engagement refers to the “psychological effort students put into learning and mastering content” (Fisher, Frey, Quaglia, Smith, & Lande, 2018, p. 135). When students are cognitively engaged, they might lose track of time and say things like, “Is class already over?” Some other attributes of cognitive engagement include persevering and learning from experiences, sharing learning with others, and enthusiastically engaging in the learning process (Fisher et al., 2018). I like to say, “The worker is the learner.” I can recall going over review sheets or leading Jeopardy! review games; I was working really hard, but the students were not as engaged. As educators, our work must lie in designing rigorous tasks that lead students to grapple with content and engage in the heavy-lifting work called learning. When it comes to time spent in the classroom, your students should always be working harder than you are.

Given the importance of cognitive engagement to learning, how prevalent is it in schools? Authors John V. Antonetti and James R. Garver (2015) conducted a study based on 17,124 classroom visits. They conclude that a majority of the classrooms (87 percent) emphasize low-level thinking focused on knowledge and comprehension, 9 percent of classrooms require students to apply or analyze, and 4 percent of classrooms promote synthesis and evaluation. As part of this study, they define and measure a classroom’s level of engagement based on three criteria: (1) off-task classrooms had a significant number of students not participating in classroom tasks, (2) on-task classrooms had students compliantly following the teacher’s expectations in an orderly classroom, and (3) engaged classrooms were cognitively engaged (Antonetti & Garver, 2015). Table 1.2 summarizes these results. Are you surprised?

Table 1.2: Cross Tabulation Between Engagement Level and Thinking Level

Source: Antonetti & Garver, 2015, p. 81.

When measuring cognitive engagement, it is important to focus on student behaviors rather than teacher behaviors. This is where we see the relationship emerge between critical thinking and cognitive engagement. Notice how, when thinking levels shift from low to middle there is a 27 percent increase in engaged learning followed with a 13 percent increase when instruction moves from middle-to-high levels of thinking. Antonetti and Garver (2015) caution, “Attempts to improve student engagement without concurrent efforts to raise the thinking levels of student work can lead to learners enthusiastically participating in low-level tasks” (p. 30).

We find supporting evidence for this conclusion from a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study, which examines fifth-grade classroom observations (Pianta, Belsky, Houts, & Morrison, 2007). It finds 58 percent of students’ time is spent on learning basic skills, with less than 13 percent on higher-level learning involving analysis and inference. Less than 5 percent of instructional time involves collaborative work, and less than 1 percent of students are highly engaged. It concludes students are either compliant or defiant, but few are truly engaged (Pianta et al., 2007).

To move students toward engagement with a strong critical-thinking component, Marzano and Toth (2014) analyzed more than two million classroom observations, finding the highest level of thinking tasks include hypothesis generation and testing and that these are apparent in less than 6 percent of instructional lessons. Marzano and Toth (2014) assert that for students to be successful on revised assessments and in college and careers, they must be able to analyze and synthesize. To do this, they posit that students need opportunities to take knowledge and apply it in authentic situations.

As you reflect on the data on the proliferation of classrooms with low cognitive engagement, ask yourself: “Do you see parallels to this data in your classroom or school district? What percentage of your instruction focuses on higher-level thinking?” If there is room to improve, that’s OK. It’s common for teachers to struggle with incorporating critical thinking. Fortunately, there are a few practical ideas that can support teachers in this transition.

Antonetti and Garver (2015) identify the following questions that highlight eight characteristics that ensure high-level cognitive engagement.

1. Does the activity, strategy, task, or idea allow for the student to personalize his or her response? Can they bring their life experiences into the activity and make it their own?

2. Are there clear and modeled expectations?

3. Is there a sense of audience above and beyond the teacher and the test? Does the activity have value to someone else?

4. Is there social interaction? Do students have an opportunity to talk about the learning and interact?

5. Is there a culture of emotional safety? Are mistakes valued because they are an opportunity to learn?

6. Do students have opportunities to choose within the activity?

7. Is it an authentic activity? This doesn’t mean it always must connect directly to the student’s world, but it should connect to reality.

8. Is the task new and novel? If kids are bored, is it hard to see engagement?

In their research, Antonetti and Garver (2015) determine that if three of the eight characteristics are present in a classroom, students demonstrate sustained cognitive engagement between 84 and 86 percent of the time. However, when two characteristics are present in classrooms, engagement levels drop to 16 percent of the time and further drop to less than 4 percent when only one characteristic is present.

Critical-thinking skills enable students to be successful in careers and in life, and classrooms offer tremendous power and opportunity to team critical thinking with student engagement. Such instruction can be challenging, while also being interesting and appealing to students. Given the research-backed importance of increasing levels of cognitive engagement, and to truly understand the fifty strategies in this book that accomplish this, it’s important to examine the full scope of thinking as defined in Bloom’s taxonomy revised (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). This is the purpose of the next chapter.

Discussion Questions

As you reflect on this chapter, consider the following five questions.

1. Review table 1.1 (page 5). Is your classroom instruction more focused on transmission or thinking? How can you further evolve your practices to make yours an increasingly thinking-based classroom?

2. How do you define critical thinking? What characteristics do you most value?

3. What evidence of critical thinking do you see in your classroom? How might you create more opportunities for it?

4. When you see your students demonstrating cognitive engagement, what does it look like? What evidence do you have that your students are engaged?

5. When you actively engage your students in learning, are they working at lower or higher levels of thinking? How can you shift more of this engagement toward higher levels?

Take Action

Use the following three activities to put this chapter’s concepts to work in your own classroom.

1. Create a survey with the fifteen Habits of Mind (Swartz et al., 2008) related to critical thinking (see page 6). Ask your students to identify which habits they demonstrate on a routine basis, and then have them select a few habits they need to enhance. Using this information, determine some ways you can help them strengthen those habits.

2. Select an activity or assignment you use with your students and review it with the eight important characteristics of cognitive engagement listed in the Cognitive Engagement section (page 7). Evaluate whether the activity or assignment meets each characteristic. Identify ways to improve the assignment.

3. Work with a colleague and observe each other’s classroom. Similar to Antonetti and Garver’s (2015) research, chart the level of engagement in the classroom as off task, on task, or engaged, and the thinking level as low, middle, or high. Reflect on areas of strength and identify areas for improvement and how you can achieve that improvement.