After school yesterday, I was given the opportunity to attend a Clinton Golding workshop held at Mana education. Clinton used to be based in Wellington but is now over in Melbourne University where he is considered an expert in developing thinking in the classroom. I really enjoyed the session (despite being from 4:45pm to 8pm near the end of a school year!). Here are some of my top take away points from the session.
Reality Check
Clinton asked us to say what makes a thinking classroom. After a few minutes discussion, he pointed out that we can’t say that we have a thinking classroom unless pupils and saying and doing things that show they are doing good thinking. There is no point talking about using PMIs with your class unless the children are able to independently use PMIs when it is appropriate. The children have to be actively selecting and using thinking tools rather than the teacher saying, “Now we are going to do a PMI class”. Obviously, you would need to have built up to this with the teacher leading the process but the children need to take over the decision making at some point otherwise it is the teacher doing the ‘thinking’ and the work rather than the children. Clinton gave the example that this is like the teacher lifting the ‘thinking’ weights and expecting the children’s ‘thinking muscles’ to get stronger in the process. Tony Ryan had a similar message in his workshop at Ulearn. When children are using his thinkers keys, he suggests having the keys on the table and asking children which key should be used and to explain why they have chosen those keys rather than being told by the teacher.
Make it Challenging
As teachers, we can worry about children experiencing failure and we therefore often scaffold tasks so that they children can progress with little difficulty through the content we are covering. However, doing this all the time is actually doing a disservice to the children in the classroom as then they are not experiencing real challenges which means that they are not developing problem solving and coping strategies for when things do get difficult. Clinton again used the lifting weights analogy. If we only ask children to lift light ‘thinking weights’ we can’t expect them to develop their ‘thinking muscles’. We therefore need to make things just a little too hard for them at times where the children don’t know the answer AND don’t know how to solve the answer. Then you can give them some strategies on how they could come up with a problem solving approach to that problem. Dr John Langley at Auckland University has also talked about the lack of challenge in many schools which means that children are a lot less resilient when they hit a problem they can’t solve. This lack of resilience, at the most extreme end of the spectrum, may be adding to our high suicide rate. We also need to make sure that the challenges we offer students are around concepts that are important to explore and central to what we want the children to understand. We can focus too much on the processes of learning rather than exploring the underlying concepts behind these processes. For instance, we need to have discussions with children around what numbers are and why we use them rather than just teaching them how to count and add.
Add Rigor to Classroom Discussions
Clinton made many of us laugh with his description of a typical primary school teacher responding to answers in the classroom: “That’s a great answer”, “Well done Johnny” etc We want to reward children for participating in our classroom programme so will often accept all answers given regardless of the quality of the response. This again does not encourage good thinking in the classroom. We need to move away from a teacher-centred classroom where all the discussion is guided by the teacher with mostly teacher to student interactions as then it is the teacher doing most of the work. We also need to move away from a student-centred classroom where children are asked to respond to an answer with no connections made to the thoughts already contributed and where anything is accepted. What we need to aim for is an idea-centred classroom where ideas are offered by students and then these ideas are built on or examined by the other students. I have recently read a website that asked teachers to consider a similar approach. The site is a pop quiz for teachers on their teaching style based on how the brain learns best. See you you go with the quiz.
To help children learn how to participate in an idea-centred classroom, Clinton suggested that we need to give them a range of sentence starters to help them retrain their thinking. Examples he gave included “A reason against that is…”, “Is what you mean…?”, “To explain that further…” He pointed out that we need to give them many opportunities to practice these until they become ‘thinking routines’ and that we can’t expect children to start using these automatically or naturally until they have done these for over 30 or 40 repetitions at least so you can’t expect results overnight. We all have phrases that we find harder to use than others so we should help children identify which types of phrases they need to practice more than others so that these can become part of their thinking vocabulary.
Teacher as a Thinking Coach
The teachers role is still critical within a thinking classroom. Often we ask questions where we know the answer we are looking for and the children respond to our body language to figure out when the ‘correct’ answer is reached. We need to move away from sifting through the answers of children to see if they are ‘right’ and having the children play, “Guess what is in the teacher’s head” to listening to responses and considering what needs to be done to help develop the thinking habits of that child. This first involves having enforced thinking times before AND after an answer is given. Wait time after a question is asked will improve the quality of the answers given. Wait time after an answer is given will help the children to consider this response so that they can further build on these ideas or express their opinions of the idea. Teachers need to have a repertoire of phrases they use to help children do this such as “Can you explain ….. in a different way?”, What is a different idea about ….?”, “What evidence is there to believe…?, “What now makes sense?”
This has been a fairly long post but I think that this is the heart of all teaching and learning. Clinton went as far as to suggest that if you don’t put developing thinking as your first priority in the classroom, then you shouldn’t attempt to put in place a thinking programme as the things you value above developing good thinking will always push the thinking programme to one side. An interesting point! This was a great session and if you get a chance to work with Clinton, you should do so.
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