Thank you Nancy for your comment and sharing of the importance of the five characteristics in our Classroom 10 work. Reading her comment to the last post makes it difficult to believe that any of the five characteristics would not be included in every lesson. She speaks to each of them; Habits of Mind, active learning, thinking skills, rigor, and key concepts and content as critical components of a lesson and learning embedded in Classroom 10. She is very convincing and I again feel fortunate to be able to learn from her and include her as a member of our leadership team.
The one characteristic of these five that has resulted in discussion is thinking skills. There are some on the administrative team that question whether there should be a thinking skill identified in each lesson. From her comment you can see that Nancy believes that there would be one. Why do you think there are others that might disagree? When might a lesson not have a thinking skill as a component? Please know that the importance of teaching thinking skills is not being questioned just the inclusion of one in each lesson.
I would encourage you to reflect on this conversation about thinking skills and enter into the discussion. You can share your thoughts in a comment to this post and also with any of the ELT members. It would be good if one of the administrators that are questioning the inclusion would share their thinking so that we can have that information as we continue to reflect on this question. I am looking forward to the continued conversation. I am also wondering if there is a right or wrong answer. Whatever emerges from the conversation will influence our Classroom 10 journey and become part of the Tahoma way as we prepare young people for success in post high school learning and work.
3 comments:
Not being a member of the ELT or part of the discussion, I may not understand exactly what you're asking, Mike, but hey, I'll give it a try!
You wrote, "There are some on the administrative team that question whether there should be a thinking skill identified in each lesson. From her comment you can see that Nancy believes that there would be one. Why do you think there are others that might disagree?"
Well, many educators are currently immersed in the research around differentiation, and possibly limiting the focus of a lesson to a single, identifiable thinking skill may seem to stifle indivdual approaches for students to apply their unique thinking to the task at hand.
(or maybe I have no idea what the ELT is considering because I was not part of the discussion. lol
Possibly a more useful component to include in lesson design may be that students are expected to articulate the thinking skill they used to complete their work?
Jonathan
I think it's important to remember that, just because we might not be directly teaching the strategy for a thinking skill (including the steps and the use of the graphic organizer, etc.) in a given lesson, that doesn't mean that we are not using a thinking skill as a lens to focus the learning. If we can accept that every lesson will go beyond simply recording and recalling information, then we naturally accept that we will be including a thinking skill. The components of Rigor, Active Learning Strategies, and Thinking Skills naturally overlap. When we plan our lessons, we think about the content and what we want the students to do with it, how we will engage them in processing it and/or creating with it. Will they be comparing and contrasting? Sequencing events? Identifying a main idea or a point of view? Synthesizing ideas to create something new?
When we plan our instruction and decide how to focus students' thinking, we can also plan to name and label the thinking skills students are using in the lesson.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I also think it's tremendously important to remember how thinking skills and habits of mind bring authenticity to students' work, even in those instances when they don't have an authentic audience for what they produce.
Children and young adults may not always understand why it's important for them to learn the distributive property in math (or Shakespeare's plays, or the Boston Tea Party, or the elements of art, or the layers of the atmosphere, or insert-your-content-here), but they intrinsically understand that the Habits of Mind and thinking skills are important for their success in life.
I've never heard a student ask "Why do I need to be a responsible risk taker?" or "When am I ever going to use Decision Making in the real world?"
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