Critical thinking

In his eighth chapter, Bean presents ten strategies for designing critical thinking tasks. Several of these I already use regularly, such as #1 tasks linking course concepts to students’ personal experience or previously existing knowledge (p. 151) and #2 explanation of course concepts to a new learner (p. 152). These are supported by cognitive research and were approaches that I experienced as a student and have used in my classes. Linking new content to existing experiences or knowledge gives the new learning a context and more neural connections to draw on, therefore improving chances of recall. Also, the old adage that one way to learn something is by teaching it comes from many generations of people recognizing the usefulness of this approach; “by teaching, we learn” (Seneca).

Strategy #6 “template assignments” (p. 155) is something that I use in my foreign language classes because it can be helpful to have some of the grammar and argumentative structure already provided so that they can focus on their points, rather than worrying about constructing the sentence in the correct way. However, I had not considered using this in English language classes as a way to help students to focus on the content of their arguments and to phrase things in new and different ways. I especially liked one example that was given; “based on yesterday’s discussion, our class hasn’t resolved the question of __________. Several of my classmates argued that __________. I agree with them that __________. However, they are mistaken when they __________. In contrast, I argue that __________” (p. 155). I may ask students in my English language classes to use this as a self-reflection directly after a discussion or at the beginning of the next class meeting. I wonder if this could also be used as a scaffolded response to readings.