A while ago I attended a conference held on a Caribbean island. On a visit to the only sizable village, someone asked a local resident about the island's population size. The answer was, “Two something.... I think it's thousands.”
It's good to know that other people's heads are full of fuzzy facts, because mine certainly is. Moreover, when fuzzy facts are what you have, you can often learn more from them by thinking. For instance, considering the sizable village, a population of two hundred would be too small. Two tens of thousands is not a phrase people would use. Two hundred thousand would be too large for the island. So two thousand it must have been.
This example illustrates one kind of thinking-centered learning. Anyone who has played Trivial Pursuit will recognize the phenomenon: You can often answer fact-based questions that you don't have answers for by extrapolating from what you know.
If we can learn more facts by thinking about what we know, we can also know more facts by thinking about them as we learn them. Suppose, for instance, you have to memorize the names and dates of the U.S. presidents. Research shows that a much more efficient way than sheer repetition is to build imagistic associations, classifying the names and dates into patterns and making links to other historical events. In general, the best way to build memories is to elaborate a web of connections by aggressive thinking.
Along with many other contemporary educators, I believe that education needs to accomplish far more than transmitting a fund of knowledge. Besides helping with facts, thinking-centered learning fosters understanding. A clear demonstration comes from research on “self-explanation” conducted by Michelene Chi and her colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center. When students read a text or examine worked-out problems, they may simply try to keep in mind what they see, or they may try to explain it to themselves as they go along, answering questions such as “Why did the author say that?” or “How does this step follow from the previous one?” Chi's findings show that students who engage in self-explanation—either spontaneously or because they are prompted to—are much more able to solve later problems that require understanding.
- emphasis on self-explanation;
- teaching students techniques for memorizing and for learning with understanding;
- classroom discussion around thought-demanding questions;
- peer teaching, where students must think through a topic carefully in order to teach it to other students;
- collaborative learning, where students share responsibility for learning something and must organize themselves and the topic to do it well;
- problem-based learning, where students study content by seeking out the information needed to solve problems;
- project-based learning, where students gain content knowledge through complex, often socially meaningful projects;
- engagement in “understanding performances,” which ask students to think with what they know in order to demonstrate and build their understanding;
- infusion of critical and creative thinking into subject matter instruction, where students analyze, critique, defend, ask what-if questions, and explore alternative points of view;
- use of authentic problems that have real-world significance and a messy open-ended character.
Such classroom tactics are common knowledge and probably sound like common sense, so one might assume that they are common practice. Unfortunately, this is not the case. For instance, Ernest Boyer in High School reported a study probing how often students are asked questions that invite them to respond thoughtfully, rather than just deliver a fact or display a skill. My fuzzy memory tells me the amount of time spent: “One something. I think it's percent.” It seems all too plausible, but I go and look it up. One percent is correct.
Does this low score mean that teachers are not aware of the potential payoffs of thinking-centered learning? No, because many teachers—and students—often make the entirely intelligent decision not to invest too much in cognitively demanding learning. The payoffs are long-term, but in most schools the costs of such an investment are immediate and discouraging: greater effort required, greater risk of failure, concern about accountability testing, fear of parental backlash, insufficient preparation time and support structure for adopting new teaching methods, and so on. To generalize, most schools are organizationally and culturally antagonistic to thinking-centered learning.
Although the way is fraught with difficulties, there is reason for hope in our growing technical know-how. A further reason for optimism lies in the connection between thinking and learning highlighted here. It provides grounds for an alliance between more conservative educators concerned with facts and skills and more liberal educators concerned with learning for understanding and thinking. Thinking-centered learning serves both agendas. To be sure, the character of the learning activities would vary with the emphasis. Still, any sort of thinking-centered learning is likely to help students more than mindless learning. So perhaps a coalition of conservative and liberal forces could nudge educational practice forward under the banner of thinking-centered learning. They might even announce, “We're with each other on this—100 something. I think it's percent.”
