Cognitive dissonance

I’ve been re-reading Engaging Ideas: the Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. As the title suggests, this book contains practical advice for improving writing and critical thinking in college classes. The suggestions are based on research and theories of composition.

What appeals to me is that Bean does not limit his discussions to composition classrooms, but gives examples from a variety of disciplines: physics, psychology, etc, making it a wonderful resource for me as a Spanish, linguistics, TESOL professor.

One of the pedagogical strategies that Bean recommends for promoting critical thinking is to create cognitive dissonance as a way of challenging students’ preconceived ideas(p. 29). This is a technique that I have been using for years in my classroom because it reflected many of the ways that I learned and grew as a student, but I did not realize had been studied by neuroscientists and found to be useful in challenging assumptions. One way of creating cognitive dissonance that I haven’t used before is a ‘decentering’ task in which students are asked to take up others’ views. I wonder how I might do that in TESOL and linguistics classes.

An area that I frequently struggle with in the classes that I teach, is getting students to revise and not just edit on final drafts. Two of Bean’s “fifteen suggestions for encouraging revision” (p. 35) especially spoke to me as things that I could easily incorporate into my classes to improve student revision of work. “5. Build talk time and writing center conferences into the writing process” (p. 36) and “12. Bring in examples of your own work in progress so that students can see how you go through the writing process yourself” (p. 37). How much talk time would be built in to classes after first drafts are returned? Does talk replace written comments?