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TO THINK OR NOT TO THINK: THAT IS THE QUESTION

To Think Or Not To Think:

That Is The Question

Cultural Inquiry Study

Hannah J. Oberlander

EDUC 606

Spring 2015

Abstract

Year after year, teachers recognize that many of their students lack critical thinking skills or resist critical thinking within the classroom. I wanted to find out why this phenomenon was occurring and what I could do about it. Studies indicate that critical thinking can be learned and that the demanding school culture, emphasizing one right answer is a huge reason for students not displaying this ability in the classroom. Critical thinking is not a measurable objective that can be assessed on standardized tests, and thus teachers often skip over these skills in an effort to cover all of the tested material. My goal was to turn around that school cultural structure and bring attention to the process of thinking rather than the remembering of content. I took the students in my classroom and used them as a test case to see whether I could observe any improvement in their critical thinking skills over the course of a series of critical thinking lessons. Within these lessons, I eliminated the objective of finding the one correct answer and focused on the students’ effort in taking risks, asking questions, and attempting trial-and-error on their own quests for answers. My findings revealed that the lessons I conducted in my classroom did affect my students’ overall awareness of themselves as thinkers. Many of my students who had at first either lacked or resisted critical thinking, showed signs of using critical thinking in other academic experiences after these lessons. Critical thinking skills can be learned, and the results of teaching critical thinking skills are invaluable. Teachers who strive to rise above the school’s cultural mentality of “teaching to the test” by teaching critical thinking skills and protecting valuable time for students to use and explore these skills are doing their students a far more valuable service to their overall learning experience.

Vignette and Puzzlement

Pencils scratch the paper as students busily work through a math packet of mostly word problems with multiple-choice answers. The lesson has been taught. The models have been given. Paired practice time is over. The independent work time has begun. But within seconds, hands begin to shoot up into the air. As I run from one desk to another to answer the questions, many students say similar things:

“Miss O., you never showed us how to do this one,” one comments.

“I don’t know what I am supposed to do,” another one whines.

“I tried to solve this one, but the answer I got isn’t there,” a third complains.

“This is just too hard,” another student sighs in frustration.

Students want answers. They want the right answer--immediately. They want to be shown how to do something so that they can copy it. Struggle is not part of their learning process; trial-and-error is unheard of. Simply put, many of my students are unwilling to think on their own. They are asking me—their teacher—to think for them. I agree that modeling and teaching strategies are vital to student learning, but without students solving problems and critically thinking on their own, they will never move past memorizing the right way to get an answer. Our world needs thinkers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Why do so many of my students not know how to critically think? And if they do know how, why do the majority of them resist critical thinking in the classroom?

Background: Does a student’s culture affect their ability to critically think?

Paulo Freire (2000) states “knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry [that] human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (p. 244). Thus my inquiry began with my assessment of the students within my classroom. Through in-class observations and student-generated questions as well as project-based assessments, I learned that I had three different groups of students in my classroom: (1) those that critically think and often do when given the challenge, (2) those that sometimes critically think but need motivating prompts and guided support to do so, and (3) those that do not critically think because they either do not have the critical thinking ability to begin with, or theychoose not to think critically on their own.

These groups and subgroups were all evident in my fourth grade classroom of twenty-five students from various backgrounds, home lives, cultural traditions, and languages. Through a series of investigations over three weeks, that included in-class activities in which I could observe students responding to various challenges, I observed and made notes of what I discovered.

Group One: Frequent Critical Thinkers

Of the twenty-five students, five could critically think based on how they interacted with inquiry activities, problem solving, thinking discussions, questions, and responses in all subject areas. I was curious about these five students to see if perhaps their background and culture affected their ability to critically think in the classroom. Were there any characteristics that were similar among these students that set them a part from the other members of our class? Of these five, three of them are in our county’s “gifted program” and have been tracked and labeled as such. Two are girls, and three are boys. Of these five students, four are bilingual. Of those four students, one speaks Arabic; one speaks Spanish; one speaks Amharic; and one speaks Mandarin. They are all reading above grade level and scored between 438 and 513 on the third grade reading SOL test. All five of these students scored between 453 and 578 on the third grade math SOL. One of these students is a twin with no other siblings; two of the students are the youngest in their families of only two children; one is the second oldest of five children; and one is the oldest of two children. Thus, they all have siblings at home. Their strengths included working independently, being self-motivated and interested in what they were learning, and were willing to assist others who may not have readily understood what to do. However, none of these five students took initiative and were not overly eager to dominate conversations nor did they volunteer to lead unless no one else stepped up. What stood out to me the most about this group of students is that they already came having an understanding of the “new” material that was to be taught, so when “new” information was covered, they were reviewing it—allowing them to have the freedom and the mental space to take the next steps with the concept and to critically thinking about it.

Group Two: Somewhat Frequent Critical Thinkers

Of the twenty-five students, eleven students sometimes do critically think, but they often need motivating prompts and guided support to accomplish deeper thinking tasks. My initial investigation centered on my interest to learn why these students did not actively engage their minds to think on this deeper level naturally. From there, my intended goal was to discover how I could help these students recognize when they were critically thinking and to encourage them to do this higher-level thinking more often and on their own—without prompting, modeling, or guiding. I knew that social interactions and cultural influences affected critical thinking, and so I was eager to collect data to identify what was holding them back from accessing this ability to think more often, and how I could ignite this ability so that they utilized it more often on their own initiative. Two of these eleven students were bilingual—one spoke Hindi and the other spoke Kurdish. Five of these eleven students were girls, and six were boys. Two of these students were labeled and tracked as “gifted” at our school. One of these students had an IEP for speech. Four of the eleven students were reading above grade level; two of the eleven students were reading on grade level; and five of these eleven were reading below grade level. These eleven students scored between a 421 and 600 on their third grade reading SOL. These eleven scored between a 379 and a 600 on their third grade math SOL. Most of the students in this group come from upper middle class families. This group displayed the most diversity in academic levels. Most of the vibrant and verbal students were among this group. The most dominant personalities and most eager to volunteer were in this group. The most confident students came from this group as well.

Group Three: Infrequent Critical Thinkers

The third group of students had a total of nine students out of the twenty-five fourth graders in my class. Six of these nine students were girls, and the other three were boys. One of the students had an IEP for Speech, one had an IEP for an emotional disability, and another was in the process of being tested for learning disabilities. None of these students were labeled as “gifted.” Two of these students were bilingual—one spoke Arabic and the other spoke Spanish. Eight of the nine students were reading below grade level, and the other was reading on grade level. Many of these students had a sense of wanting to “please” in school, but rarely seemed excited or interested in learning for themselves. The majority of these students liked to “help” me in the classroom and felt a sense of pride when they could do classroom jobs rather than a “schoolwork” accomplishment. Many of them—from a classroom survey—felt negative about their learning and “their grades.” These nine students scored between a 347 and a 469 on their third grade reading SOL and between a 393 and 537 on their third grade math SOL.

Findings and Methods

What I found compelling about this data was the fact that the first group of students who critically thought on their own the most frequently were mostly bilingual, and none of them had scored a perfect 600 on either the third grade Math or Reading SOL test. Another interesting observation to me was the fact that most of these students were more reserved than others in the class and did not dominate discussions nor did they volunteer as often as others to participate in activities. The second group of students who sometimes critically thought was the most perplexing to me as I studied my data, because very few patterns existed between the students who fell within this group. The academic abilities of the third group—those who did not critically think or chose not too—was definitely the lowest in both reading and mathematical ability. The test scores showed this as well as IEP “labeling” of the students who, by law, were required to receive additional academic support.

From these three groups, I solicited student feedback through a series of in-class questionnaires to discover whether I could note any patterns among these students that could bring to light why they were or were not critically thinking in class. These questionnaires included questions about their after-school activities, their day-care situations, their parents involvement in their academics, their diligence to practice music or sports, household chore responsibilities, family culture around meals, religious activities, and their own interactions with their parents. I gathered information from these questionnaires about their parents’ influence on how much pressure their felt about their grades, tests, confidence, independence, and homework completion. These questionnaires enabled me to collect data about students’ feelings about teacher-generated questions, student-generated questions, feelings about particular subjects, projects, friendships, collaboration activities, and word problems. I learned a great deal about my students and am grateful that these questionnaires helped me better understand who my students were and where they were coming from. However, as I sorted through the data and looked for meaningful trends, I found that the group of students who tended to critically think and the groups who tended not to had no direct similarities. I began ruling out my original hypothesis: that students’ cultures affected their ability or choice to critically think in the classroom.

Cultural Questions

3.1.How might my beliefs be contributing to the puzzling situation?

I began linking these observations to my own life story as a thinker and began to realize that within one family that shares a culture, one child may show signs of critically thinking and another one may not at all. I am a female teacher, and I know that when I was growing up, I struggled significantly with understanding what word problems in math were asking me to do. I also had a difficult time explaining my reasons if I had to write them out. I loved talking and enjoyed giving reasons on a verbal level in all of my subjects, but my thoughts rarely went deeper than just my own creativity and imagination. I had trouble with logic and understanding how to analyze and evaluate based on certain criterion rather than my own opinion based on emotion. My brother, on the other hand, excelled at critical thinking, and it appeared to be almost natural for him—even though he was three years younger than me. Thinking was fun to him whereas thinking was hard and challenging for me. I just wanted the right answer—and I did not enjoy “working” to solve a problem through trial and error. I wanted someone to tell me what the answer was so that I could memorize it and appear successful for the test. It wasn’t until late high school and early college that I came to understand how to critically think for myself and learn to find a sense of triumph in “working” to find the right answer through multiple attempts of mental gymnastics.

My puzzlement was based on how I could help my own students in an area that I had a personal connection to, and I recognized that I was inspired to investigate this as I did not want my own students to “suffer” the way that I had regarding not having the ability, the stamina, nor the motivation to critical think on my own without the assistance of someone to guide me and to “think for me.” My brother and I were both homeschooled by my mother. We both had the same pressure on us to perform to very high expectations as to our academic abilities. Yet, my brother was the poster child of a natural critical thinker, and I was the portrait of the “not so smart” sister.

I did not enjoy learning until later, because as a young girl I would rather play and do my own thing—which consisted mainly of make-believe, imaginative stories with dress up clothes or dolls. On the other hand, my brother’s play involved experimenting with models blocks, water, plants, rocks, machines, etc. I remember that he had an old microscope in his bedroom, and he loved looking at those slides (and even breaking a few slides) trying to figure out what little animal(s) was under the lens. He liked to make messes and to ask questions. He was hungry to learn facts. I was quieter and enjoyed playing alone with my own “stories” that I found comfort in that were similar to my own life or to historical events that I pictured in my head. My brother would attempt to come into my stories and try to play with me, but I always felt frustrated because he could not meet me on my “play-level.” Instead, he would want to apply some piece of his new knowledge to our play; and in my mind, he would “ruin” what I was doing—for instance, he would wreck my beautifully manicured dollhouse with the dropping of a nuclear bomb that he had read about.

Because of my personal experiences with critical thinking, I found it comforting to merge these beliefs about my own upbringing with the inconsistencies of the cultural data I had collected about the student groups in my classroom. I started to wonder whether critical thinking was a natural or learned ability. My brother seemed to grasp critical thinking skills at an early age, whereas I did not master that abilityon my ownuntil I had reached adulthood. Was he perhaps “born” with the ability? Was I myself perhaps an inhibitor to my acceptance that all students have the ability to critically think, because for so many years I believed I could not? Did culture, home life, and upbringing really have anything to do with whether or not a child could critically think? And beyond these questions, what could have prevented me, as a young child, from critically thinking?

I realized that I could be teaching the students the way that I had learned as a young student. As a child, I had assumed I was learning something if I was able to memorize it and regurgitate it on a test. Many of my creative projects and activities were focused on helping students memorize information to be successful and not quite how to think about the material critically. The culture I bring to the table is a force that has been preventing my own students from truly learning to think on their own.