Critical Thinking - how to teach it.
Before we get into how to teach critical thinking it may be useful to tell you that this is the third blog in this series. The first looked at Knowledge Issues in ToK, the second is a starter lesson activity connecting knowledge issues and ToK Concepts. The third post proposes The ToK Mindset. You may want to jump back & read those posts to contextualise this one.
Critical Thinking - a jumping off point.
OK, I'm not going to be able to cover the whole of how to teach critical thinking in one blog post, but it's an essential topic to start to cover on these pages. Firstly, critical thinking is one of the Aims of ToK (3rd bullet point on Pg 7 in the current ToK Guide). Secondly, all of the aims implicitly rely on the student's ability to think critically. Thirdly, it's at the heart of The ToK Mindset - which is the foundation to improving grades in ToK.
The ToK Mindset is 4 domains of understanding which underpin success in ToK. These 4 domains are a good starting point for defining the type of critical thinking required by ToK students.
Reflection is not distraction.
When IB brought in the current version of the Extended Essay they gave 17% of the total marks available to Reflection. Concerned about the subjectivity of this criteria I asked the workshop leader how he recommend we teach 'Reflection', he skirted around the issue. I asked him the same question a few more times (yes, I'm THAT workshop participant), he told me that teaching reflection wasn't part of the workshop, and gave me a few other fob offs. IB hadn't defined how Reflection was to be taught in the DP, therefore I decided that I needed to define the process for my team of DP teachers.
Much of the literature places self reflection as the first stage of developing critical thinking skills. There are many different strategies for developing Self reflection, just a few are:
Journalling (keeping a ToK journal is a popular activity in many ToK classrooms).
Think - Pair- Share.
Two Stars and wish.
Reflection Breaks during the lesson.
Visible Thinking. Routines.
It's not my place to tell you which method of reflection you should use, whatever methods work best for you and your students is the way you should go. The function of this blog is to look at the role of reflection in developing critical thinking skills.
Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle.
David Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle (aka "Kolb's Learning Cycle") is based on gestalt psychology. The Learning Cycle has been demonstrated to be significantly effective under empirical testing. It has been widely used for over 30 years in inquiry and constructivist models. MY EE workshop leader (mentioned earlier) should have directed me towards Kolb's Learning Cycle. This is the basic model that I use to plan ToK Lessons. It is an effective structure for developing critical thinking skills because it builds self reflection. (You can find out more about the cycle from David's own website: Learningfromexperience.com)
Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle can be used as an effective framework for planning ToK lessons which improve personal self reflection, and therefore improve critical thinking skills.
Kolb's Learning Cycle in ToK Lessons.
We can place the 4 stages of the learning cycle into a 'typical' ToK Lesson:
Concrete Learning.
This is the challenge that we start the lesson with. It could be a Knowledge Question drawn from the syllabus, or related question we've drawn up ourselves. We give the students a concrete experience to use to start to explore this question eg: a drama activity, a card sort, analysing text, building a model from newspaper etc.
Reflective Observation
During this period we ask the students to reflect upon the processes used to solve the challenge set at the beginning of the lesson. This reflection can be both individual and group reflection. It is usually very effective when it is integral to the original challenge. For example if the original challenge is holding a round table debate the adjudicators of the debate can lead on the reflective observation. The last stage of this observation is to identify some learning principles which we will take into the next stage of learning.
Abstract Conceptualisation
This is the 'teacher inventiveness' stage. We need to find a way to show the students how the learning from the first two stages applies in the abstract and conceptual ToK World. This could take the form of modelling an application of findings from the first stage in the ToK World. Alternatively it could be done by providing the students with a heavily scaffolded task.
Active Experimentation
This is the stage when the students take the real world experience (of stage 1), and apply it in the ToK World. This is the stage when we set the "ToK World task", which is more likely to be a knowledge question from the ToK Guide. The students take the principles arising from the reflection in stage 2 and apply them in this stage.
We have to teach students to translate real world experience into the ToK World.
Kolb's Learning Cycle helps students to move from "the Real World" to "the ToK World". This is a key step on the way to developing The ToK Mindset. If Kolb's Learning Cycle is used repeatedly as the underlying model for ToK lessons more students will be able to successfully transition their knowledge from the real world to the ToK World.
In the coming months I will post lessons that follow the structure of Kolb's Learning Theory. At this stage you can see the lesson linked here on Art & History which uses the learning cycle as its framework. A video on teaching skills in ToK (a wider perspective) can be found here.
If you would like me to develop specific materials for a particular topic/AoK/theme/purpose please don't hesitate to contact me at Daniel@TokToday.com.
Daniel,
Lisbon, August 2022