Evaluating assumptions and their impact on thinking is a crucial step in critical thinking. No matter how much practice a person might have at this, it always amazes me how easy it can be to make an assumption and fail to recognize that it is not a fact, and then make an inaccurate inference.
Everyone has their own beliefs, and for many, they may seem like facts. For example, a person might believe that anyone willing to live on government financial support is lazy and abusing the system. Such an assumption looks fairly obvious to be a belief or opinion. We use prior experience to build these ideas, and new information is shaped by our assumptions.
Last week, I thought it was a fact that graduate students must be matriculated and taking graduate courses in a university. When I learned my students were graduate students taking courses in our intensive English program, I assumed they were also enrolled in other graduate courses and so there would be some differences in the way their schedules worked compared to the undergraduates in the IEP who have not yet matriculated. I went ahead and inferred that the schedule for these graduate students would necessarily involve just 2 or maybe 3 meetings per week, maybe 2 hours per meeting.
It turns out that these graduate students are in fact enrolled for 20 hours per week of intensive English, for the most part. It turns out their schedule is nearly identical to other IEP students. All of this means I need to be on campus every day, in the afternoon.
Having inferred that these students were somehow a special case with a different schedule also stemmed from my assumption that my teaching request form for the fall would have been considered in scheduling. I indicated that working past noon would be problematic, so I assumed that I would be given some course that takes place in the morning.
None of this needed to come as a surprise, had I thought more about the circumstances of graduate students taking courses in the IEP. My prior experience with this comes from other institutions. The fact that these courses are being offered through our intensive program should have prompted me to ask more questions in the beginning. I also know that my tendency when it comes to schedules is to not spend much time thinking about them.
It's easy to look for ways to excuse or rationalize poor thinking. I was busy, I was distracted (my favorite), I have two kids to care for, I don't spend enough time thinking about details that I believe I already understand well. It takes discipline to stop and rethink what you take for granted; it's always more exciting to consider bigger ideas or novel topics and just speed by the things you think you know so well.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Monday, September 9, 2013
Critical thinking on Mars
There is no time like the present, right? Start writing instead of thinking more about what to write. Right. Whatever I put here stands as reflection and exploration for myself, reminders for my own practice, and ultimately, ideas I can share and build on with others.
Though I usually think of critical thinking in terms of how long I've integrated it into my teaching practice, education that consciously attends to thinking started for me with science. Astronomy courses in college were most memorable since that's when I started to think carefully about my own thinking, though not from any particular guidance provided in the course. It could have been a combination of keen interest in planetary physics and in the lab T.A., or maybe it was my studies in linguistics and Spanish, which had me looking hard at what happens in the mind when we learn another language and culture. Why leave it to chance, though?
When we consider life on Mars, we have to imagine other perspectives. It is an exemplary case of how creativity is crucial to make the most of critical thinking. If we are going to live on Mars, how can we do it? Purpose? Questions? Implications? Significance? Logic? The elements and standards just line up with no end to the revisions!
There are 668.6 days in a Martian year. Each day is around 24'40". So, we have some grounding in our own perspective on earth to guide our imagination as to what life on Mars could be like.
Starting with something familiar, something we can relate to, is fundamental. We all do it with scaffolding or schema activation; we bring in personal anecdotes or ask students to express how they relate to certain ideas. As teachers, we find that we already have activities that involve reflection on thinking. How can we develop these further?
When we have students do reflective journals, it's important to first give them an idea of where they will end up (well, that's always the case). Let them know that they will be monitoring their thinking and how it changes as they learn about and interact with new ideas. Ask them if they've ever paid close attention to their progress as they practice some skill. Give examples of noticing such progress and changes in thinking as you learn (modeling thinking). Elicit their experience. Once they've started on the reflections, have them share from time to time in the class or online, and bring attention to significant observations as well as other details that are relevant but may have been left out. What about the medium? Are they handwritten journals? Oral? Electronic? Public? Private? Why?
I don't actually want to live on Mars, by the way, at least not most of the time.
Valles Marineris is named after the orbiter that first showed pictures of it, the Mariner 9, and at one time, it was thought that water may have carved these valleys into the crust. You can see what looks like a system of rifts or canyons running east-west near the equator. What these canyons are and the status of water on Mars remind me how important it is to recognize and appreciate errors in thinking (rather than being embarrassed and potentially shutting out or even condemning other ideas). Questions shouldn't be dismissed with answers, answers should refine questions, bringing others. Mistakes should not be swept under the rug, they should be scrutinized for what they mean and other possibilities. Whether or not there has been water on Mars has gone back and forth and elsewhere over many years.
While science appears to involve critical thinking de facto, the crucial reflective component often goes missing. We can bring critical thinking into any topic, and we must in order to become more effective learners and decision makers. Integrating CT shouldn't take time away from the curriculum you already have because it complements it, and learners should make better progress than they have before. There should be more time for projects and deeper involvement, not less!
In this post, I thought a lot about S-14 and my much beloved, S-28. I looked up complement to see if there was a better choice (and because I notoriously mix up spelling of homophones). I always wonder how often other people use dictionaries, and how they use them. It's a fascinating issue when it comes to language class. There are so many great things to discover in dictionaries! My go-to (monlingual English) online dictionary says that complement refers to something that 'completes or makes perfect.' Great! On that note, I hope to see more CT blogs appear in the future!
Though I usually think of critical thinking in terms of how long I've integrated it into my teaching practice, education that consciously attends to thinking started for me with science. Astronomy courses in college were most memorable since that's when I started to think carefully about my own thinking, though not from any particular guidance provided in the course. It could have been a combination of keen interest in planetary physics and in the lab T.A., or maybe it was my studies in linguistics and Spanish, which had me looking hard at what happens in the mind when we learn another language and culture. Why leave it to chance, though?
When we consider life on Mars, we have to imagine other perspectives. It is an exemplary case of how creativity is crucial to make the most of critical thinking. If we are going to live on Mars, how can we do it? Purpose? Questions? Implications? Significance? Logic? The elements and standards just line up with no end to the revisions!
There are 668.6 days in a Martian year. Each day is around 24'40". So, we have some grounding in our own perspective on earth to guide our imagination as to what life on Mars could be like.
Starting with something familiar, something we can relate to, is fundamental. We all do it with scaffolding or schema activation; we bring in personal anecdotes or ask students to express how they relate to certain ideas. As teachers, we find that we already have activities that involve reflection on thinking. How can we develop these further?
When we have students do reflective journals, it's important to first give them an idea of where they will end up (well, that's always the case). Let them know that they will be monitoring their thinking and how it changes as they learn about and interact with new ideas. Ask them if they've ever paid close attention to their progress as they practice some skill. Give examples of noticing such progress and changes in thinking as you learn (modeling thinking). Elicit their experience. Once they've started on the reflections, have them share from time to time in the class or online, and bring attention to significant observations as well as other details that are relevant but may have been left out. What about the medium? Are they handwritten journals? Oral? Electronic? Public? Private? Why?
I don't actually want to live on Mars, by the way, at least not most of the time.
Valles Marineris is named after the orbiter that first showed pictures of it, the Mariner 9, and at one time, it was thought that water may have carved these valleys into the crust. You can see what looks like a system of rifts or canyons running east-west near the equator. What these canyons are and the status of water on Mars remind me how important it is to recognize and appreciate errors in thinking (rather than being embarrassed and potentially shutting out or even condemning other ideas). Questions shouldn't be dismissed with answers, answers should refine questions, bringing others. Mistakes should not be swept under the rug, they should be scrutinized for what they mean and other possibilities. Whether or not there has been water on Mars has gone back and forth and elsewhere over many years.
While science appears to involve critical thinking de facto, the crucial reflective component often goes missing. We can bring critical thinking into any topic, and we must in order to become more effective learners and decision makers. Integrating CT shouldn't take time away from the curriculum you already have because it complements it, and learners should make better progress than they have before. There should be more time for projects and deeper involvement, not less!
In this post, I thought a lot about S-14 and my much beloved, S-28. I looked up complement to see if there was a better choice (and because I notoriously mix up spelling of homophones). I always wonder how often other people use dictionaries, and how they use them. It's a fascinating issue when it comes to language class. There are so many great things to discover in dictionaries! My go-to (monlingual English) online dictionary says that complement refers to something that 'completes or makes perfect.' Great! On that note, I hope to see more CT blogs appear in the future!
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