EduCon Reflection 2: Thinking About Thinking
The middle conversation of my EduCon experience was right up my alley. Jennifer Orr conducted a session on Thinking About Thinking, which encouraged us to think about the processes that we all use while thinking and how we can encourage our students to observe and develop those processes. There is so much content in the World History curriculum that I’ve decided to de-emphasize a lot of it. It’s so much to absorb in a short time, and I’d rather help the students assemble a toolbox that they can use in future courses and experiences. Some of those tools will be content-related, but a lot of the really transferrable tools will be driven by process.
Jennifer’s presentation used the four thinking patterns identified by Derek Cabrera as a starting point. I’m still researching and processing the work. To a certain extent, trying to boil all of the thinking we do down to four patterns seems a little too pat. But I also think that there’s a value in showing how flexible a few basic tools can be. Whether these four are the four I would focus on . . . well, that’s why EduCon is the start of a conversation, not the end of one.
The first pattern was based on identity, or Distinction. A lot of what we do when we think is put things in categories. This is day; that is night. This is up; that is down. This is a good idea; this is not a good idea. This pattern can be the basis for a simple but useful brainstorming exercise. Ask students to identify what a thing is, and what it is not. Our second semester began a few days after the conference, and I wanted my students to talk about what they felt a rewarding educational experience would be. So I put a four-quadrant grid on the board. I labeled the top row “What are good ways to learn?†and “What are not good ways to learn?†The bottom row had the questions “What’s a good way to show/use what you’ve learned?†and “What isn’t a good way to show what you’ve learned?†It gave the students a chance to voice their opinions and safely say what they didn’t like. I’m still trying to implement the suggestions and get the students to take ownership of the things that they said were good ways, and make sure that they take those things seriously. But it helped me to organize my thoughts.
As I was listening to Jennifer, the thing that jumped right into my head was that this is a very Western way of thinking about thinking. When I read Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, one of the first things that the author pointed out was that Zen denies the importance of the laws of identity and contradiction. The universe is a whole; day and night blend together like the white and black halves of the yin-yang symbol. Saying that “this is this†and “this is not that†forces us to cut up the world and break the threads that connect everything together, and Zen encourages its practitioners to move beyond this approach and give up the project of separating themselves from the rest of the universe. So right off the bat, I’m not sure if this is as universal as I think Cabrera is making it out to be. But the resistance that Zen gets from many people also indicates that these patterns are very much ingrained in many thinkers around the world.
From saying what things are, our minds often move to connecting those things to other things. This is where the other patterns come to play. We start to see things as parts of a whole, or Systems. We see how different things are connected one another, or form Relationships such as cause-and-effect. And we start to look at things from different Perspectives in order to get additional insights. They form ways of seeing the world as a system or a system of systems, with parts that interact to form a whole. It never quite gets to the gestalt stage that a lot of Eastern thinking (or continental philosophy like Heidegger) does, but it does build up the complexity of our thought. It was a little difficult for me to see the three other patterns as fully distinct; they seemed more like different angles on the same idea, but that might just be me resisting the idea that you can make hard and fast distinctions.
Once we had the basic idea of the patterns, Jennifer asked us to try to apply them in small group discussions about the concept of school choice – a topic that she was pretty sure most of us in the room had opinions about. I enjoyed the conversations that developed here, especially when one of the other teachers in the group decided to draw in the SLA student who was helping out with the technical matters in the room. I want to save that part of the conversation for my overall impressions reflection, though. (There I go, categorizing again.)
One thing I did notice about my own process is that I wanted to make a decision about which of the many senses of “school choice†we were talking about, because any one of them could have been fodder for an hour-long conversation. Were we talking about students choosing schools, or schools choosing students? Were we talking about the freedom of schools to choose their approach to education, or the responsibility of the government to fund any possible approach that someone wanted to try? If private schools were a part of the school choice conversation, how would we incorporate cost? Part of this is the Western philosopher in me that likes precision in my terms. Part of it is a habit that my mother observed a long time ago – I could never just play a pickup game of baseball, I had to try to design the stadium first. Problem is, if you spend too much time on setting up the ground rules, you wind up getting called home for dinner before you can throw the first pitch
But that’s one place that having some clear thoughts about thinking can help. When it seems like the person you’re talking to is having an entirely different conversation than the one you think you’re trying to have, it can be a good thing to quickly reflect on how you’ve gotten to where you are and what alternate paths someone might take. Then you can decide whether to try to redirect things back to the way you were heading, or to throw out the map and see where the new direction might lead. Knowing how you got where you are can help you figure out where you’re going.
Hey, I’m a history teacher. What else did you expect me to say?
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.