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In the task of helping students become critical thinkers, two impediments stand in the way. The first is a widespread misdiagnosis about why students fail to become critical thinkers in the first place, and the second is the Lack of a practical instructional strategy for teaching critical thinking skills in the classroom. Both of these problems can be remedied.
Teachers may believe that students with poor learning skills are those who have missed experiences in life, leaving them not ready to learn in school. The missing experiences that teachers speak of are usually missing "stimuli events," where young people have not had an opportunity to watch, listen, touch, smell, or taste certain things.
But the problem of poor learners is really less one of missing experiences than a need to change the nature of the experiences that poor learners do, in fact, have-like those encountered in school-into true learning experiences. To achieve this, teachers must change their instructional style from one in which lecture or direct instruction plays the lead instructional role to one that includes systematic Socratic questioning.
Where Does the Problem Begin?
The perception that a lack of experience is the root cause of students being poor learners stems from the belief that these young people have been deprived of the stimuli encountered during the tens of thousands of discrete events that make up childhood and adolescence that somehow converge to make one "smart." Indeed, to some extent this perspective resonates with our intuition. We intuitively accept that a low stimulus environment will almost inevitably create a poor-performing student.
Educators who accept the "missing experiences" diagnosis seek to remedy the situation by providing as many experiences as possible to students who are having difficulty. Teacher often state that poor-performing students need more "exposure": more field trips, more hands-on time, more working projects, more manipulables. In effect, according to many teachers, poor-performing students need to experience in school all they have missed in their home.
If missing experiences are at the heart of the failure to develop critical thinking skills, however, why do some youngsters manage to become exemplary students while coming from the same environments as their poorer-performing peers? If both critical and non-critical thinkers have lived in the same environment, why...