Thinking Critically About Classrooms

If you've been glancing at what I've been reading at all, you'll see I've been reflecting on the most recent offering of Roland Case and Garfield Gini-Newman from the Critical Thinking Consortium- titled Creating Thinking Classrooms.

I was lucky enough this past week to spend a day with Roland Case at our administrators' annual retreat, where we explored ways and reasons to shift traditional lesson structures and provide more differentiated, inclusive, engaging ways to help our students learn to problem-solve and to think critically.  Roland really put us through our paces-  challenging us to personally experience some of the lessons he's used with students in classrooms, and to think about ways to ask really good questions of our students-  the type of questions that help them to reflect, synthesize, make connections-  really learn to be learners, and not just learn to provide right answers.

In his book, Roland states that "many existing practices and the proposals for new practices will succeed only if they embody powerful principles of effective teaching and learning."  Case argues that the key areas to address are to:
-  engage students
-  sustain inquiry
-  nurture self-regulated learners
-  create assessment-rich learning
-  enhance learning through digital technology.

When I reflect on these principles through the lens of inclusion, I can't find one thing on the list that isn't a critical piece of planning for our more complex students.  It's certainly the list I hope teachers are thinking about when planning things for my own children at their school.

I had an opportunity to chat with one of our district's learning services teachers about a student who is really struggling with the math curriculum this year.  He was concerned not only about her progress with mathematics, but about the fact that, even in a heavily adapted environment, the material was still out of reach for her a lot of the time, and that she had left class that day in tears.

We brainstormed a little about ways that the current day's lesson could be adapted for next time, and I think we have a plan for the next little bit-  but we were both aware that something more radically different than just tweaked assignments is needed for this student to have success.

That conversation led me back to some of the activities that we worked through with Roland.  In particular, we worked on a line graph assignment where we were asked to set our own parameters for the axis, and then draw a line which told a story where we travelled a distance over time.  Some of us got going right away, most of us needed his example to get started, a few of us needed a bit of coaching from a peer or from Roland personally.  All of us had to really think about what we were doing, and then reflect on our choices critically in order to see if the story our partner was suggesting  was accurate.  I personally thought I had it, drew a line quickly, then scribbled a bunch of changes while talking to my partner and finally, went back to where I started as I talked it through and my understanding deepened.  If it had been a worksheet, or less open ended, I would have ended with the first drawing, and missed the best part of my thinking.

So...back to the challenge of supporting the young lady in her math class.  If I think about her experience in terms of Roland's principles, the path becomes clearer for me.  At the moment, she's engaged.  That's where her frustration is coming from.  She desperately wants to be successful, but is not yet able to sustain her inquiry because we're asking questions she's not confidently or comfortably able to explore.  We need to reframe things in an open-ended way to allow her to enter the conversation from the place she's currently at.  We can only expect her to self-regulate if she has the capacity and confidence to tackle the tasks we offer her.  What kind of assessment can we possibly complete if we're giving her work we already know she can't do before we ask it of her.  We were using calculators for that particular lesson, but we have so many other options as well -  virtual manipulatives (have you peeked at the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives????  Google NLVM if you haven't seen it-  transformed my math classroom, but more on that another day....)-  we could show some video tutorials, or record some examples for her to follow-  all of these are options-  but what's landed as the question for me this week is, "How would Roland do it?" 

I've just been given access to the myriad of resources in the Critical Thinking Consortium's website (http://tc2.ca/). That's where I'm going to start.  I plan to head back to the teacher and see if, together, we can build an open-ended frame for some of the concepts he's planning on tackling in the next little while.  There's no doubt in my mind that what will support this student will support all of the students in this classroom.  If his experience with this type of supported task is anything like mine was last week, the approach will gain momentum quickly.  It feels good to think about things deeply and feel better at it when the assignment's done.    It just makes sense to find things we can all explore together.  A classroom is a community-  and after all, THEY'RE ALL OUR KIDS.