Background

I have been teaching Critical Thinking for three years at Punahou. In the thirty years of teaching I did before I arrived at Punahou, I think that I often tried, in various ways, to emphasize the importance of clear thinking, but my attempts to focus students’ attention on their own thinking were somewhat random and haphazard. I had no clear idea of what I was trying to do or how I was going to do it. Perhaps my students learned some things from me about becoming better thinkers, but if they did so it was more by accident than by design.

When I arrived at Punahou, I was surprised and encouraged to discover that there was a group of teachers meeting regularly to share ideas about how to teach their students to think critically. Furthermore, they had already done research on the teaching of CT and had selected, from among the many available models, a way of thinking about and presenting CT concepts which had been developed by Richard Paul at Sonoma State College in California.

I have since come to understand that there are in fact many ways of thinking about and understading and teaching CT. While these various paradigms or models often have elements in common, they are different enough to make any nearly impossible any attempt to extrapolate from them one common model.

The practical value of a common model is apparent. If every teacher thinks of CT differently, then there is little likelihood that students in one class will be taught the same skills, the same concepts, or the same methods as students in another. They will emerge from their separate classes with no common understandings, and the teachers of the classes they are entering will have no sense of what they might have already learned, or of what they might be ready to work on next. Each teacher must therefore start over from scratch with his/her own set of ideas about CT, and the students must also in essence begin over again. Not only is there no horizontal continuity - the students do not have concepts or skills in common with their peers - but there is also no vertical continuity, no chance to build on skills learned in sequence.

These are the reasons that the Punahou CT teachers decided to adopt a common model, which has come to be known as the “Richard Paul model.” The Paul model has the virtue of being both simple and rooted in common sense. It has in essence three strands: a listing of elements of CT, a listing of CT standards, and a listing of intellectual traits associated with CT. Most CT courses at Punahou have been organized to a greater or lesser degree around asking students to become familiar with the terms and concepts outlined in these documents, and to practice various critical thinking moves - making observations, making inferences, distinguishing between observations and inferences, questioning, considering alternate points of view, assesssing one’s thinking in terms of the standards, and so on. (See the Skills/Strategies Outline for a more detailed listing.)

The Richard Paul model has, perhaps inevitably, become the focus of some controversy as well. There are teachers who think of themselves as being good CT teachers who do not like the Richard Paul model, either because they have another model they prefer or because they reject the idea of models entirely. But it seems to me that the core concepts Richard Paul outlines are so basic and so inescapable that it would be hard to talk about thinking at all without having recourse to most of the terms and concepts he uses. And I agree with those who would argue that some set of core concepts is necessary if students are to be able to connect what they learn in one classroom with what they learn in another.

Reflections on Classroom Practice

One of the real dilemmas facing a subject area teacher trying to incorporate critical thinking is the question of how to balance critical thinking with course content. It goes without saying that a critical thinking course has to give students the chance to actually do some thinking. It is not enough to simply tell the students what to do and then have them do it. That instructional model, although perhaps very efficient in terms of delivering content, doesn’t really involve critical thinking at all.

A typical instructional sequence in a CT class might involve raising a question, modelling a certain kind of thought process that might provide a means of exploring the question, providing students with a chance to practice that thought process under controlled circumstances in class, debriefing what happened during the practice session, having the students practice it again in another context (perhaps a second classroom exercise or a written homework assignment), assessing the results and considering their implications, and then deciding what to do next.

All of this, of course, takes time. In courses which are heavily content-driven - and most courses at Punahou are heavily content-driven - there is a limit to how much time one can allot to any particular concept, text, or unit of study before moving on. The real challenge in terms of instructional design is therefore to come up with sequences of activities that are purposeful, deliver significant content, and provide the students with the chance to be reflective about how they are thinking and why they are thinking that way. It is not an easy challenge to meet, and meeting it is another thing that takes time. I have been actively engaged on a daily basis for three years now in trying to figure out how to teach CT well. My sense is that I am just starting out. One of my early mentors in teaching, Donald Graves of the University of New Hampshire, used to be fond of saying “We teach what we teach this year in order to be able to do a better job of teaching it next year.” It strikes me that this is particularly apt in regard to the teaching of Critical Thinking.

So what have I learned so far? What has worked? What's at the heart of my teaching of critical thinking? In the sections to follow, I will try to develop some of the thoughts that I have at this point in time. As I suggested in the previous paragraph, my sense of what I am doing as a teacher of critical thinking is in a continual state of evolution. Which is, I believe, as it should be. If I allow my own thinking to become rigid or formulaic, I won't be a very effective thinker. The same, of course, applies to my teaching. So I offer these remarks in the spirit of exploration. This is where I am now. I expect that by this time next year, I will be in a different place in my thinking.

Questions

In the summer of 1998 I had a job interview with Harry Grzelewski. One of the things that I remember Harry said to me at that time was that if he were to come to observe my classes, the thing that would be of greatest concern to him would be the kind of questions that I asked. Now, three years later, I find myself focussing more and more on teaching myself to ask questions that lead to better thinking. It's not always easy. There's a real danger of asking questions which, although they are well-intentioned, actually inhibit thought. For example, I might phrase a question in such a way as to imply, however subtly, that there is a correct answer I already know. As soon as the students sense this, the focus of the thinking shifts from exploring their own thinking to trying to guess or intuit MY thinking. It becomes a game to see who can get the teacher's approval by coming up with the "correct" answer first. Typically, there will be a smallish subgroup of students in the class who will participate in the game because it's a game they know how to play (and some of them like playing it), and there will be a larger group of students who will play another game: the waiting game. If there's a right answer, it will eventually come out. In the meantime, they don't really need to think. They need only to wait.

So one of the design issues I face when I go to plan a class is to figure out what questions I want to ask to start with, and what questions to follow up with. If my goal is to stimulate and improve student thinking, then I need to come up with questions that will give students the chance to think, allow them to compare their thoughts with the thoughts that other students have come up with (in large group? small groups? pairs?) and then have them go through some sort of a process by which they can assess the thinking they have been doing. Then I need to design followup activities for the next day, and the next day, and the next day, which allow students to build on what they are thinking and learning in some sort of logical sequence.

All of this may seem painfully obvious; at least it seems that way to me as I write it out. But the fact remains that it's not easy. It's something I work at every single day in the classroom, some days with greater success than others.

Even more important than the kinds of questions the teacher decides to put to the students are the kinds of questions that students learn to ask for themselves. It has been my experience that students are not very good at asking questions. Many of them don't really know what kinds of questions to ask. Some of the ones who do are reluctant to ask them for all the obvious reasons: they don't want to reveal what they don't understand; they don't want to attract the attention of other students, some of whom would be openly disdainful of someone taking an active interest in a subject in school; they have been taught since entering school that having the answers is more important than having questions.

I ask my students to practice brainstorming questions. We frequently pause what we are doing - reading a text, having a class discussion, writing a reflection - to consider what kinds of questions we are working with, what other kinds of questions might be relevant or useful, how we can teach ourselves to ask better questions. I am frequently amazed that in class discussions students are willing to sit and listen to other students make preposterously unclear statements without asking them for clarification. So we wind up talking about the importance of clarifying questions: that it is not only possible but essential to good thinking that if someone says something you do not understand you follow up with a question like "Could you say that again?" or "Could you give me an example of what you mean?"

Since I teach English, a lot of what we do in class is text-based. We read stories and poems and we discuss them in class. Most of high school students are not in the habit of thinking about what they read. They tend, at least at first, to be satisfied if they understand the plot (and to be very frustrated by any kind of reading which subordinates plot to other considerations.) One of the CT skills that I therefore have to try to develop more or less from scratch is the ability to probe a text through the use of questions. Reading, or re-reading, a text with a particular well-designed question in mind is a very powerful way to arrive at a deeper understanding of the text. The problem is that many students don't know how to come up with the kinds of questions that will allow them to change their reading and thinking patterns. So that becomes a major instructional emphasis in Soph CT English.

During the second semester of the 2000-01 school year, I spent a lot of time with my students looking at a different kind of question entirely, a kind of question I decided to call, for lack of a better term, an "essential question." Going into the second semester, I asked each student to identify one key question, related in some way to the study of English, about which the student had a genuine interest, and to which working toward an answer, or set of answers, would provide genuine satisfaction. (Click here to see a listing of some of the essential questions students came up with.)

As a standing assignment, I asked the students to maintain a commonplace book or journal for the semester. In this book, students were asked to make entries that related in some way to their essential questions. The entries could include quotations from assigned or outside readings, pictures, diagrams, ads, personal reflections, anecdotes or poems, anything at all as long as it connected in some way with the essential question. Periodically I asked the students to hand in status reports which addressed three questions: "Where am I now?" (in my thinking about my essential question); "Where do I want to go next?" and "How do I plan to get there?"

For many of the students, this was the first chance they had ever had to identify for themselves an area of essential concern and to be given the opportunity to explore it in some depth over an entire semester. The culminating assignment for the year was a semester project, which for many of the students arose from the work they had accumulated in regard to their essential questions. (For a look at the assignment, click here.)

The only drawback of the project, from my point of view, was that the course content (other required reading and writing assignments) made it difficult for some of the students to put as much energy into the commonplace books as they might have otherwise.

The Sideways Move

When considering the elements of thinking, it is clear that some of them are easier to grasp than others. Given some practice, for example, it is not too hard for students to understand the distinction between an observation and an inference. The distinction between an inference and an assumption, on the other hand, is less easy to pin down; and the whole question of the assumptions we make and how they influence our thinking is more complex than the question of the role that observations play in our thinking.

Likewise, some of the elements have a more central and visible role in our thinking than others. The single most powerful critical thinking move, in my judgment, is the move that is connected with point of view: what I like to call "the sideways move." The term is analogical; it arises from the act of visualizing thinking as a three-dimensional process. If I picture myself as a person moving through a physical landscape, then by analogy where I am standing is where I am currently in my thinking. Behind me is the information I have already acquired, the assumptions that have gotten me to where I am, the inferences I have already made. I look behind me to see where I have come from and how I have gotten here. In front of me is my goal or my purpose: where I am headed. I look ahead to consider the consequences and implications of my current thinking.

Where I've been, where I am, where I'm going: these considerations come naturally; they're almost automatic. The interesting move, the move that students do not always think to make, and yet enriches their thinking when they do make it, is the move to the side. The sideways move consists of saying to yourself, "I know what things look like from where I stand. But what would they look like from over there?" In other words, is there another point of view? Another way of looking at this landscape? Another way of thinking? Richard Paul is fond of saying that there are two principles of critical thinking. The first is that "There is always a way." The second is that "There is always another way." Asking students to make the sideways move requires them to consider what another way of thinking about the problem at hand might be.

Given the assignment to go home and write about what they think on any topic, most students will be content to simply state their own point of view and be done with it. The better students, the more disciplined critical thinkers, won't stop there. Their written work will include a move that will begin with "A second (or third, or fourth) way of looking at this would be...." Another formulation might be something like, "Everything I have said so far is true, but it doesn't get to the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is that...."

I tell the students early and often that in their written assignments I will be looking for evidence that they have made the sideways move. The move to consider another point of view is linked, in my mind, to the standards of breadth and depth: looking at a subject from more than one perspective is in fact a way to broaden your understanding, and a necessary precursor to understanding the subject deeply.

Reflections - Making Thinking Visible

The word "reflection" can mean a number of things: it can refer to the physical act of turning back light, to the image one sees in a mirror, to the act of pondering, to a piece of writing which makes thinking visible. At Punahou, many teachers use the word "reflection" in this latter sense, and ask students to write reflections, which typically give the students a chance to step back from what they are doing and try to articulate how they are doing it, how it's going. Many teachers ask the students to write reflections at the end of a project, or a paper, or a marking period, in order to give students the chance to explain what the experience felt like from the inside: what worked, what didn't, what problems they encountered, what they think they have learned from this process.

In CT classes, reflection papers are a very powerful tool for getting students to think about their thinking. It is probably not an overgeneralization to say that most students operate unreflectively most of the time. They simply doing what they are doing in the way that they are used to doing it. If they are asked to do something new, they will listen and try to do what they are told to do. But they are not necessarily in the habit of asking themselves questions like "How am I going to do this?" or "What would be the best way to do this?" or "What am I learning from this?" or "How does this connect with what I learned yesterday?" or "What have I done well?" These are all questions which have to do with the process of thinking and learning.

They are even less likely to ask themselves questions like this when they get stuck. For example, I often ask students to read material which is outside the range of their experience as readers, and which is therefore hard for them to understand. For the majority of students, when they finish reading such an assignment - assuming they do finish it - their first reaction is to say something like "I read it. It was stupid. It didn't make sense." This is, as the professorial types like to say, a teachable moment. I love this moment, and part of what I see as my job as a CT teacher is to get the students to love this moment as well. This is where I will ask the students to reflect - sometimes orally, sometimes in writing, most often both - on the process they are using.

Questions abound. Does everyone, for example, agree that the passage doesn't make sense? (Usually everyone does not agree, which leads us into a discussion of what kind of sense other students make of it, and what sort of reading and thinking they did to arrive at the meaning they see.) Is it safe to assume, when I initially do not understand something that I have read, that it "makes no sense?" Is it possible for me as a reader to change the way I am reading or thinking about this piece, in order to be able to understand it differently, enjoy it more, get more out of it? What kind of a reader would I have to be to read this passage with understanding and pleasure?

Critical Thinking has often been defined as metacognition: thinking about thinking. A somewhat more narrow definition, but one that has always interested me, is that critical thinking means "Knowing what to do when you don't know what to do." Most students, when they get stuck, stay stuck. The good critical thinkers are the ones who know how to get themselves un-stuck, who have a range of strategies, a tool box of sorts, by which they can help themselves solve whatever problems they encounter as they do their schoolwork or live their lives.

I often ask students to hand in a reflection paper along with any other assignment. One of the purposes of the reflection is to give students practice in practicing self-assessment, to have them think about their thinking. A second purpose is to give me a window on their thinking, so that I can myself address the essential questions of instructional design: where are we now, we do we need to go next, and how are we goign to get there? A third purpose is that the reflection papers themselves offer a chance for students to compare notes. I sometimes will photocopy excerpts from several different reflections and ask students to consider the range of possibilities already in place within the class for solving the problem at hand. (Click here for samples of midsemester and end-of-the-year reflection papers.)

I believe quite strongly that writing is the most powerful tool for self-instruction that we possess. I ask students to write frequently, in a variety of forms, and for a variety of purposes. But perhaps the single most important form, from a critical thinking standpoint, is the reflection paper. Writing makes thinking hold still. It allows us to shape our thinking. It allows us to move from first thoughts to second thoughts. Even as I type these words, I see my thoughts and the many relations between them becoming more visible to me, and each thought I write down leads to another. I want my students eventually to be able to experience not only the value, but the satisfaction, and ultimately the pleasure, that can be taken from thinking and writing well.

Using the Standards

The standards are a useful tool for keeping certain issues in front of the students. I have a set of cards, about 5"x12", posted at the front of the room with one standard listed on each. I have them grouped as follows:

Clarity

Accuracy - Specificity - Precision

Logic

Significance - Relevance - Plausibility

Breadth - Depth

You will notice that there are ten standards listed here. I use these ten because there is a logic to the grouping that satisfies me. I have seen listings with as few as five, and as many as fifteen. It's not that there is a magical number. It may well be that in some disciplines or in regard to some problems one configuration of standards may be more relevant than another. For example, if I am playing poker and am about to bluff, the single most important standard that I may need to try to attain for myself - and more importantly, the other players - is that of plausibility. If the others don't believe my bluff, they're going to call it. So my primary purpose at that moment is to establish plausibility. Of course the other standards also come into play. I need to calculate with some precision and accuracy exactly how much to bet so as to discourage others from calling while at the same time protecting myself from a disastrous loss in the case that someone does decide to call. How much that turns out to be depends on a number of other factors, including the logic of the game as it is being played on this particular evening - who's there, how they play, what the betting limits are, and so on.

In any case, since my English class is heavily weighted toward reading and writing and thinking well, the single criterion we refer to most often is clarity. If we're not thinking clearly, or if we're unsuccessful in communicating our thinking clearly - another issue entirely - we're dead in the water. We will not be able to move on to other concerns. That's why I put clarity first in sequence.

Accuracy, specificity, and precision seem to me to be ways of establishing clarity. One of the thinking paradigms identified by Richard Paul is a sequence that goes "state-elaborate-exemplify-illustrate". If you can state your idea, elaborate (give an explanation in more detail, give one or more examples (the move toward specificity), and illustrate it (by means of an analogy, for example), then there's a good idea your audience will understand you clearly.

Logic is an especially important standard in regard both to reading and writing. There is a logic to anything I might ask students to read. Quite often the logic has to be discovered or inferred before the students can read with understanding. The logic of reading is linked to the structure of what is being read; one way to get at this structure is simply to ask "How many parts does this piece of writing have? How are the parts related to one another?" The same questions apply, of course, to what one writes. A key step in revision, it seems to me, is to ask oneself these same two questions, and then take steps to make sure that the answer (e.g. "Four parts: a statement, an elaboration, an example, and an illustration." or "Five parts: a thesis statement, three supporting arguments, and a restatement of the thesis.") is clear to the reader.

Significance, relevance, and plausiblity all seem to me to have to do with the question of value. It's possible to be clear, accurate, logical, and well-structured and still not say anything of particular insight or importance. How do we distinguish between good ideas and better ideas? Between tangential concerns and central concerns? Between interesting but unconvincing theories and solid critical thinking? How do we measure the significance and power of our thinking? The standards simply allow us to frame and highlight these kinds of questions.

Breadth and depth come last, in my mind, because they represent the end target, the goal. We would like to know that we are thinking deeply. None of us would probably prefer to be known as narrow, shallow thinkers, or, for that matter, narrow, shallow people. So how does one arrive at depth? I have a theory that one road to depth is through breadth: you test the depth of your thinking by comparing it to the thinking of others. It's the sideways move again: try to generate a wide range of alternatives, and then measure them against one another. Which one gets to the heart of the matter? What is the heart of the matter?

I find that having the standards visible at all times helps me to pull together threads of many different discussions and unite them under a couple of simple and yet powerful headings. When I give my students writing assignments, I will frequently tell them that the particular standard that is being highlighted in the assignment. ("Write a dialogue in which two people discuss conflicting points of view about one of the events, characters, or themes in Merchant of Venice. The dialogue should consist of at least 10 exchanges, and aim for clarity, depth, and balance." Or "Write at least ten sentences summarizing what you learned in today's class. Criterion: Clarity.")

Conclusion

This document is a work in progress. I have found it interesting and instructive to try to spell out some of the principles which guide my thinking as a CT teacher. If you have read this far and and have any comments, questions, or suggestions, I would be most happy to hear them. I would particularly appreciate feedback about places where I might not have been clear or where you find yourself wishing for more specific examples. I'd like to continue working on this document. (If the email link in this paragraph does not work on your browser, simply email to me at bschauble@punahou.edu). Thanks. (Summer 2005.)