Critical Thinking in the Classroom

“Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.” — Confucius

 

My final individual Learning Walk of the school year had a different focus; most often, I visit a class to observe the teacher, but on these visits I went specifically to observe student thinking. This foray into the classroom at Brimmer and May transpired over a few weeks’ time, extended across the final weeks of the year and through all divisions of the school, and encompassed a variety of student learning experiences: Precalculus, Drama 6, French II, Spanish III, Grade 2 Social Studies, Grade 3 Meeting, Grade 8 History, AP English Language and Composition, Geometry, Darkroom Photography, Science 6, and LS Spring Concert (yes, this counts too). It was leisurely undertaken in one respect, yes, as I took my time over a few weeks, but a cognitive workout when I was at it. In each classroom, I worked hard to discern the specific and tangible thought tracers shot out of the multiple student physiognomies or manually produced in the classroom during my observations. 

 

Specifically, I looked for evidence of students’ critical thinking identified in Bloom’s Taxonomy, a framework of educational learning objectives consisting of a hierarchy of thinking skills:  Remember/Know, Understand/Comprehend, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate/Synthesize, Create. This construction is a hierarchical ordering of cognitive skills framed in the last century by Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist.

 

Despite my being solo on this classroom sojourn, it wasn’t a lonely walk, as I encountered students and teachers who were engaged in their classroom activities and who uniformly welcomed me into the room. I was expecting nothing unexpected, however: I anticipated effective teaching, student engagement, and thinking—like expecting to see biodiversity when entering a tropical biome and seeing a butterfly on an orchid stem. This was a matter of entering the rainforest, detecting and identifying the wildlife, and enjoying a sweat-inducing walkabout. I knew what I was looking for, but it still might be a jungle…

 

In his article, “16 Characteristics of a Critical Thinking Classroom” published on the TeachThought website (August 4, 2021), Terrell Heick poses this question “…what are some indicators that rational thought and careful, critical thinking is not just ‘visible,’ but a part of the culture of a classroom[?]” An excellent question, this, and one that got me thinking through a couple of Bloom’s levels of my own. I had to determine what would be clear evidence and indicators of student thinking in the classroom and what levels of thinking students were using. 

 

Fortunately, an ample variety of activities and behaviors in the classroom are evidence of student thinking, including some you might readily guess: asking questions, answering teacher or peer questions, producing work, and performing tasks to name a few of the most prevalent ones. Students’ externalized thoughts are represented through speaking, writing, drawing, and performing in the classroom and these activities and behaviors present evidence of critical thinking, creative thinking, and problem solving. Finding these would be like discovering the city of El Dorado beneath a lush tropical forest topography.

 

And I found the El Dorado of student thinking right on the surface of Brimmer’s classroom topography!

 

In our classrooms, student thinking appears frequently as a result of inquiry—in response to direct questioning from teachers, questions posed by classmates, questions that arise from work being completed in the classroom, and questions derived from genuine student curiosity. Thinking takes the form of both input and output: a student listening to spoken Spanish and replying in Spanish, writing about Brazil and revising writing based on teacher feedback, taking notes on postulates about circles and finding the length of a chord. Students routinely ask and answer questions to understand the concept or task in their studies, simultaneously building and flexing their critical thinking muscles—they unearth previously understood knowledge, make inferences and predictions, analyze and explain, find solutions, and create meaning.

 

In Grade 2 Social Studies student thinking was evident on paper as they wrote their Brazil travel brochures. They considered teacher feedback and understood and applied concepts and vocabulary about their writing—how to turn notes into sentences and a paragraph; the idea of a complete sentence versus a sentence fragment; and the structure of a paragraph in the form of a Burger: top bun, support, bottom bun. I read student writing that featured simple, complex, and compound sentences and well-placed modifying prepositional phrases. Students were assessing and creating—clearly thinking—while they wrote.

 

In Drama 6 thinking appeared in a students’ retrieving a definition (Remembering/Knowledge), explaining a process (Analyzing), appraising and estimating the quality of a character— presented in response to a teacher’s question as an answer with nuance, not merely a yes/no rejoinder (Evaluating)—role playing a character (Creating).

 

In Precalculus, student thinking is evident in the effective use of vocabulary — “foil,” “tangent,” “conjugate”— in questions posed as they checked in on their processes or explained them to the class. As a check on knowledge, students answered questions such as “What’s the formula?” before engaging in verbal or written problem solving.

 

World Language classes offer constant opportunities to see student thinking—in seeing students listen, speak, read, and write. It’s all processing, all thinking, all the time! In the article “To what extent does Bloom’s taxonomy actually apply to foreign language teaching and learning?” Gianfranco Conti suggests, “In modern language learning, all three levels (analyzing, evaluating, creating—the top 3 in the hierarchy) equally require ‘depth of processing’ and the processes that underlie these three cognitive skills often unfold concurrently and synergistically in our brain. Think about the process of writing an argumentative essay in a foreign language: is generating ideas about a given question/topic a higher skill than evaluating their degree of relevance to that question/topic, as well as their suitability to the task and audience? Aren’t the two levels so closely interwoven for anyone to be able to separate them? And how can one determine which one is more cognitively demanding than the other, especially in a foreign language, where evaluating the accuracy of the grammatical, lexical and sociolinguistic levels of the output is extremely challenging? It is my belief that the two sets of processes and even the third one, Analyzing, are parallel in foreign language processing rather than sequential.”

 

In Spanish III students recalled and used vocabulary (Remember), listened and watched a video (Understand), read aloud from a book (Comprehension/Application), and offered responses in a second language (Create) as they processed and thought their way through the class period. Ellas y ellos piensan! 

 

While our students worked on language, social studies, math, acting or writing, my brow furrowed, my eyes squeezed tight as I used my mind to observe their minds at work—thinking about thinking!  I saw the thinking happening, and it was no blurry image of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or a UFO. It was clear, real, and tangible. Student thinking was evident visually, auditorially, and authentically. It was inspired by teachers and peers, enveloped in content and skills, and inspired by the opportunity to create. It resounded in the classroom like the final chord of “A Day in the Life.”