Why Ask Why?

If you have little kids or you teach little kids, you have answered tens of millions “Why?” questions.  Often I get frustrated around the 4th or 5th question.  But let me tell you, these little ones are geniuses and we should learn from them.

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Little kids are programmed to explore and understand the world around them.  If something doesn’t make sense, they need to ask, “Why do we do it this way?”  And then they need to continue to ask that question until the answer connects with something else they know.  It’s brilliant.  So why do we stop doing this as we get older?  Adults are the simple answer.  At some point we convey to children that asking that “Why?” question frustrates those around you.  And we could not be doing a greater disservice to our next generation.

This tiny question leads to greater understanding of the world around us.  It makes connections from the unknown to the known, it challenges the status quo, it explore possibilities, and it forces us to evaluate preconceived understandings and biases.  That’s a lot of power for one little word.

It’s that last part that I like to focus on in education.  Challenging preconceived understandings and biases can open up a world of understanding for students.  Webster's Dictionary defines Metacognition in three ways:

1. higher-order thinking that enables understanding, analysis, and control of one’s cognitive processes, especially when engaged in learning.
2. thinking about one's own mental processes
3. awareness and understanding one's thinking and cognitive processes;thinking about thinking

When we encourage our students to ask “Why?” as it applies to their own thinking, the connection between academic knowledge, world understanding, and internal motivation goes deeper.   Elliot Aronson’s work on Cognitive Dissonance theorizes, “Creating and resolving cognitive dissonance can have a powerful impact on students' motivation for learning.”

Designing lessons and learning opportunities with this in mind is crucial for our next generation of students.  I know that in my classroom I was often tempted to cut the reflection part of a lesson because of time or in the interest of covering more material.  I was doing a major disservice to my students.  Simply “covering” material does not help to deepen understanding.  Committing time to reflection, and not just at the end of the lesson or unit, is the most important component of your lesson plan.  Ask your students, “Why did you do it this way?”  And then ask them, “Why?” again.  And maybe again.  And then watch their thinking deepen.

I have two little ones at home.  Instead of reading all the articles out there about how to stop kids from asking a million questions, I’m going to embrace the ones that talk about loving this stage.  I tend to agree that it is not that kids lose interest in the world around them or that their intrinsic motivation dies out naturally.  I think that the adults in their world discourage them from exploration.  Let’s work together to stop that cycle.

The 4C's: Critical Thinking

If you have been reading published articles on education and the workforce, you might have noticed a common thread.  Everyone seems to agree that our students need to develop critical thinking skills and strategies.  Schools are promoting critical thinking and are trying to find ways to teach it, but the workforce says that the employees they are hiring do not demonstrate the ability to think critically.  So where is the gap?  I believe that one of the biggest challenges is in defining it.  We, the larger community, haven’t come up with a general consensus of what critical thinking is, what it looks like when we see it, or how to measure it in a way that promotes growth.

Dictionary.com defines it as:

“the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion”

EdLeader21, drawing from the P21 definition, defines it with behaviors:

Critical thinkers:

• Collect, assess and analyze relevant information.
• Reason effectively.
• Use systems thinking.
• Make sound judgments and decisions.
• Identify, define and solve authentic problems and essential questions.
• Reflect critically on learning experiences, processes and solutions.

The Critical Thinking Community uses this definition:  

“Critical thinking is that mode of thinking — about any subject, content, or problem — in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it.”

So why are we having such a difficult time wrapping our teaching/learning around this seemingly central and obvious concept?  

I believe it is because of the way we experienced school, both as learners and as teachers, for a majority of our lives.  Our experiences engrained a process where the teacher learns the material, the teacher prepares the material, and the student experiences the materials presented.  The reward for this process, grades, is determined by how well the student repeats back the material they were supposed to have learned.  

Take this example.  Let’s say I needed to go from my house to the grocery store.  I punch the destination into my GPS and I get all the step-by-step directions delivered to me.  On my way I find out that there has been an accident on the main road of the route..  I have a choice to make.  Do I wait on the side of the road until my obstacle is cleared so that I can take the prescribed path?  Or do I turn and try my luck on a different route?  I make a turn and my GPS recalculates and I safely reach my destination.  Now, I might be a couple of minutes later than my original destination time and I didn’t use the fastest route.  According to our traditional school method, I would be docked points for not following the directions.  My answer didn’t match the answer key.

So one classroom strategy might be the Google Maps approach to lesson design.  You could provide the learner 3 different options, all of which take them from their starting point and get them to their destination.  This give the student choice and allows them to see that there is not just one path.  It’s a step in the right direction and gives the teacher some control over learning paths.  We might even take another step and ask the student to reflect on why he or she chose the path they did.  Reflecting on thinking!

But this still misses some key elements from the definitions above.  Students are still, mostly, given a prescribed pathway from beginning to end.  It leaves no room for innovative problem solving, and little room to make decisions along the path.  And it is these decisions, and then reflecting on the outcome of those decisions, that gets to the heart of critical thinking.  

The problem is that this process is messy and it is not linear and it cannot be controlled on a calendar.  So this makes me think that teaching critical thinking skills doesn’t necessarily start in the classroom.  But rather, it starts in our profession.  This problem demands that all of us examine how we design schools, classrooms, curricula, and lessons to identify  how we are allowing our students the chance to think critically.  We must learn for ourselves how to think differently about education.  We must be critical thinkers and ask ourselves why we do things the way we do.  And then we can begin the task of refining the process of growth in this area.