In Search of Reasoning

Today, I was forced to suffer through one of those new teacher induction seminars that are all the rage (and required) in Massachusetts. These seminars are theoretically designed to give all new hires at an individual school both a common background and set of skills to help them survive their first few years of teaching. New hires are required to attend, regardless of whether it is their first year teaching or 10th year teaching. In my case, I fall between the pea-green deer-in-headlights stage that comprises the first two to three years of teaching and the true veteran stage at which teaching becomes a legitimate profession. As I am in my fourth year of teaching, I have already discovered numerous strategies and techniques I like to use and have developed an awareness of what I need to master to become a highly skilled practitioner of the academic arts. Generally, I try to appreciate mandatory yet less than intellectually rigorous professional development courses. In this example, the course content were those skills that I would expect any reasonable teacher preparation program to offer its students during their first year of study. Activators, Sequencing, Mastery Objectives ... that sort of mundane thing.

In trying to (buzzword alert) differentiate the course material for myself, I stumbled upon an observation during a discussion of Mastery Objectives that, for me, shed some insight into my ongoing search for reasoning and critical thought in U.S. secondary education. In this era of high stakes testing, mandatory standards, and curriculum frameworks, it appears that our students have widely lost the ability to think critically. Teachers, worrying about their own professional assessments and maintaining status as a "highly qualified professional," have become focused on placing knowledge and skills* at the hands of students. Numerous software packages have been developed to give students ample opportunity for practicing fundamentals required for passing any of the plethora of standardized tests with which our elected officials are currently infatuated.

It seems self-evident that teaching of critical thinking and Socratic method have been neutered in the name of standards. However, I've been searching for what that means to me and what I can do about it in my classroom. While discussing Mastery Objectives, it occurred to me that one specific area in which teaching critical thinking has been left behind is in the teaching of deductive and inductive reasoning.

I contend that in always laying out mastery objectives for students, we are deliberately denying them opportunities to practice and develop deductive reasoning skills. By telling them what they will know, we rob them of some of those "aha!" moments that appear when the child discovers they understand why what we are teaching them is important. Yet, we don't stop there. I might be able to accept focusing on one half of the reasoning dichotomy, but we continue down this path of denying reasoning when we specifically identify the steps, skills, and techniques that will lead students to their goal.

Recently, a 10th grade student asked me why I couldn't spell out for them, step-by-step, what was required of classmates and him to produce an independent study guide web page. He presented to me copies of an assignment I give to students in grade 6-8 that requires younger students to create an animation using Scratch to exact specifications. Although each high school student is given a course syllabus identifying each of the individual steps** that make up their long term project, he was unable to recognize that this level of structure is appropriate for students of his age.

Despite being given both the top-down view (mastery objective) in the form of a syllabus, and the incremental tasks required to complete an independent research / study project, this and many other students are neither able to induce how the individual pieces combine to solve the long-term goal nor deduce from the incremental objectives what they may combine to produce.

How often do students ask you questions that revolve around quantity? "How many words?" "How many pages?" "What did I miss?" I find it odd that these are the most common questions asked by theoretically more developed students (high school students), while younger students (middle school, grade 6-8), frequently please and thrill me with their realizations regarding the many possibilities presented by software like Scratch or MicroWorlds. I am thrilled when students ask me how they can solve a problem that I have yet to introduce to them because their innate curiosity and natural reasoning skills have not been suppressed.

There must be something institutional*** that is endemic to American educational systems that leads to older students being either unable or unwilling to abstract ideas we teach them. I propose that the indoctrination of mandatory standardized tests is a significant, if not primary, cause of this phenomenon.

What bothers me about this is that it is naturally in the best political and economic interest of America to teach students to think, rather than test whether they know. Certainly, knowledge is a foundation for thinking. But do we want our 15-18 year olds proving only that they know information that is likely to be quickly forgotten and almost certainly not going to lead to an America that produces the breakthroughs and inventions through which 20th century dominance was established? The age when great numbers of American workers are going to mass produce products that are sold world-wide has ended. Without revisiting why we teach students, American contributions of know-how and ingenuity may follow. What has constantly been dubbed education reform is, in reality, nothing more than an attempt to re-brand and repackage a form of education that was inspired by the industrial revolution.

It is essential that America recognize that the Information Revolution must inspire entirely original breeds of education.

*In this context, I argue that skills are little different than the knowledge we teach.
** For this project, students are asked to select a subject area and research topic of personal interest, expertise, or difficulty and create an in-depth, interactive study guide. Therefore, the incremental steps are those such as outline potential topics, perform research and properly cite sources, write a thesis statement, and create a web page. Students seem to want us, as teachers, to present them with the information so that they may repackage it for a "project."
***Along with hormones, propensity towards rebellion, sense of immortality, and a complete fascination with another person's body parts (Hey, I get it. I'm sure we all do)
****I thought there was a fourth foot-note. I guess I was wrong.