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CHAPTER 3

Developing Critical-Thinking Skills and Fostering Engagement

Hope is not a strategy.

—U.S. Air Force Special Ops pilot

Educators’ understanding of effective instruction has shifted significantly, resulting in a move from teacher-directed to cognitively complex, student-directed instruction. As critical thinking is infused in student-directed tasks, students must actively apply their learning (individually and collaboratively). By establishing student-centered instructional strategies, you will challenge students “to successfully own their learning at the highest levels of complexity” (Marzano & Toth, 2014, p. 10).

This is not a quick process. For students to adjust to new expectations of rigor, they need opportunities to frequently engage in cognitively complex tasks. This means establishing a foundation with your students and building on it (see figure 3.1). With appropriate scaffolding, you can support students as they advance from basic applications of knowledge to complex tasks that demand Create-level content. Students will use this new knowledge to solve problems, make decisions, evaluate information, make inferences, critique the logic of arguments, and correct errors and misconceptions, all with less direction from you.

To assist teachers as they make significant shifts in their pedagogy to more student-centered, higher-order tasks, instructional protocols and strategies can help teachers plan lessons to facilitate learning and direct students to take ownership of their learning. Marzano and Toth (2014) state:

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)

Figure 3.1: Scaffolding thinking levels from low to high.

The fifty strategies you are about to discover in chapters 4–7 take this bottom-up approach by establishing processes you can use at the Understand level and then progress to strategies for analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Table 3.1 is organized along these principles. Because the Remember and Apply levels are typically built into activities taking place on subsequent (higher) levels, there are no chapters on these two levels. Likewise, several of these strategies also invoke thinking at levels below them.

Remember, this book is about building a culture of learning that fosters cognitive engagement in everything students do. To that end, this chapter emphasizes the importance of providing students with ample opportunities to apply the strategies, and it establishes three metrics for the fifty strategies to demonstrate how they not only build critical thinking but also maintain engagement: (1) movement, (2) collaboration, and (3) media literacy.

Creating Opportunities for Engagement

Recall from chapter 1 that most classroom instruction (58 percent) operates at lower thinking levels, with only about 6 percent operating at the highest levels (Marzano & Toth, 2014). When it comes to helping students develop critical-thinking skills, this represents a massive loss of opportunity.

When students have multiple opportunities to build and refine their critical-thinking skills, they develop abilities to grapple with cognitively complex tasks. However, this doesn’t happen if you don’t hold students’ attention as they take on work at increasingly higher cognitive levels. Writing for the Institute for Research and Reform in Education, Adena M. Klem and James P. Connell (2004) state, “Students who perceive the situation as challenging actively persist in the face of failure through the use of effort, strategic thinking, problem-solving, information-seeking, and experimentation” (p. 262).

The goal is high student participation and high cognition, thus cognitive engagement. Educators Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison (2011) propose that students engage in authentic intellectual activity by “solving problems, making decisions, and developing new understanding using the methods and tools of the discipline” (p. 10). Achieving this requires teachers to act as facilitators, guiding students to solve complex, real-world problems and thereby having them assume ownership of their own learning.

The following sections establish the roles of movement, collaboration, and media literacy in maintaining engagement as students make their journey toward becoming high-level critical thinkers. Table 3.2 (page 26) lists how each of this book’s strategies primarily align with these engagement criteria (although several strategies cross these lines). You will note that the majority of the strategies fall into the collaboration category, as this is the most common way to achieve engagement.

Engaging With Movement

Brain research reveals a strong connection between cognitive and motor processes (thinking and movement). Sousa (2011) states, “It seems that the more we study the cerebellum, the more we realize that movement is inescapably linked to learning and memory” (p. 353). Movement increases the amount of oxygen in the blood fueling the brain, which, in turn, helps the brain perform tasks (Sousa, 2011). In a study in which high school students were given tasks after walking ten minutes, the academically lower group of students obtained significant increases in the Remember- and Understand-level tasks from the Programme for International Student Assessment, while also demonstrating improvement in both the Apply and Analyze levels (Mualem et al., 2018). Not surprisingly, research also shows instructional tasks that use movement while teaching content deepen students’ understanding and increase energy levels (Marzano & Pickering, 2011).

These connections make clear the importance of including kinesthetic approaches to your instructional practices. Not only do they improve learning but also are a terrific way to foster engagement and, when used to reinforce instruction, help students retain information (Paivio, 1991). In addition, kinesthetic tasks are particularly positive for students of low socioeconomic backgrounds (Helgeson, 2011), which is more reason to incorporate movement into classroom instruction whenever feasible. You will find this movement also positively affects classroom management.

Table 3.1: Summary of Strategies Classified by Bloom’s Taxonomy Revised Levels

Table 3.2: Instructional Strategies for Engagement

Engaging With Collaboration

Strategies that include student collaboration provide numerous benefits. You already know from the introduction of this book that employers identify problem-solving and collaborative skills as the two key soft skills to prepare students for work life (Greenberg & Nilssen, 2014). By collaborating, students learn to handle controversy and different perspectives while accomplishing a task, which fosters deep cognitive learning.

Another benefit of collaboration is the increased level of student engagement. In The Role of Education in Building Soft Skills, teacher Gareth Hancox (as cited in Greenberg & Nilssen, 2014) states:

If you watch two learners working on something together, you see that their learning is deeper. They are the ones making the discoveries and asking questions, and consequently teachers are not prescribing all of the information to the children, and instead letting the children have ownership of their learning. (p. 12)

Collaboration increases active participation and student ownership of learning. Often via collaboration, the end result is a better outcome and improved student learning. But there is another reason that collaboration is a great format for engagement and learning—it prompts questions.

During the collaborative process, students often pose many questions to deepen their understanding of a task. Questioning shows students are actively engaged in learning, thus making learning visible (Ostroff, 2016). Unfortunately, questioning in classroom environments is something that research finds erodes over time.

In studies, preschool children ask seventy-six questions per hour to understand and gain information (Chouinard, Harris, & Maratsos, 2007); however, in kindergarten those are reduced to two to five questions in a similar time frame. Dismally, by fifth grade, students ask between zero and two questions per school day (Engel, 2011). Interestingly, an analysis shows top technology geniuses and inventors possess one common feature—asking great questions (Dyer, Gregersen, & Christensen, 2011).

When students ask a question, their intrinsic motivation shows in their internal desire for understanding. Ostroff (2016) states, “Whoever asks the questions holds the power” (p. 100). Students need to know teachers value their questions, and when they know that, questioning can be an ignitor for critical thinking. (Strategy 11: Visual Thinking, on page 46, provides some question stems to spark student questioning.)

Engaging With Media Literacy

Media, which includes online videos, television, newspapers, magazines, movies, songs, cartoons, pictures, and posters, is pervasive in society. The capacity to view media, however, is not the same as understanding it. That requires a specific literacy skill set. For the purposes of this book, media literacy is the “ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a variety of forms” (Chen, Wu, & Wang, 2011, p. 85).

Media literacy education increases higher-level-thinking skills in students rated as low and medium school achievers (Jeong, Cho, & Hwang, 2012; Webb & Martin, 2012). Further, using media to learn is tied to higher rates of student engagement and teacher creativity in instruction. It’s also a daily, sometimes hourly, aspect of students’ lives; it’s a part of their culture. The National Council for the Social Studies (2016) states:

At the core of learning is Literacy—the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and produce communication. Media literacy expands the traditional concept of literacy to include the forms of communication that dominate the lives of our students. If our students are to be literate, we must teach them the skills and habits of literacy for print and non-print mediated messages. (p. 183)

Given this, bringing media into the learning environment is not just a way to grab students’ attention but also connect with them. But what is it that makes media so powerful?

Media has points of view and values. Students can learn how to use it (and how others use it) to influence people’s behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. Ithaca College professor Cyndy Scheibe and media literacy strategist Faith Rogow (2012) detail four main areas associated with media literacy: (1) understanding the media messages, (2) analyzing the message purpose, (3) making reasoned evaluation of media credibility and point of view, and (4) reflecting on how the media aligns to students’ values and beliefs. Likely, you can already see how these skills translate into all the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy revised (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). The fact that effectively using media to aid in students’ learning is also a great way to hold their attention is icing on the cake.

In the following chapters you will see how movement, collaboration, and media literacy join with the fifty strategies for building students from the Understand level to the Create level, and developing a culture of true critical thought in your classroom.

Discussion Questions

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

1. What instructional strategies do you use to promote student movement?

2. What strategies do you find most effective for engaging students in critical thinking and collaboration?

3. How do you integrate media to engage students in critical thinking?

4. What are challenges with incorporating movement, collaboration, and media in classrooms?

5. What other strategies do you use to promote cognitive engagement in your classroom?

Take Action

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

1. Review the instructional strategies for engagement in table 3.2 (page 26). Highlight the strategies you currently use in your classroom.

2. Analyze one of your units of study. Record a chart similar to the one in table 3.2 listing the strategies you use that utilize movement, collaboration, and media.

3. Select one lesson you use that needs more cognitive engagement. Identify one way you could integrate more movement, collaboration, and media into that lesson.