ELT News Think Tank

Panelists: Marc | Chuck
Date: March 2003
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Topic: "How can I encourage my students to use higher level thinking skills?"

Chuck Sandy

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My own teaching began to change a few years ago when I first learned about the value of wait time from Michael Rost and Marc Helgesen. It had never occurred to me allow students mental preparation time, on their own, not only to think about how to answer a question or respond to a text, but more to work out what they wanted to say or how they felt. I started by offering 10-30 seconds of silence before asking for responses, and worked up to giving them a couple of minutes, making sure everyone had scrap paper and dictionaries handy. From there, I even began encouraging students to work out their responses in their native language and to try those ideas out on a partner first in that language before doing it again in English. Just these small changes over the years have drastically changed the way I teach and the way people in my classes learn, while doing much to promote deeper thought. Everyone has a chance to be vocal, and more, everyone has a chance to think.

“My most recent step has been to mostly abandon textbooks all together -- except for the syllabus framework they provide”

Starting to work in this way, however, led me to rethink classroom materials and texts. I even finally arrived at the conclusion that some of the books I worked on early in my career actually were guilty of the charges against them -- that they encouraged little more than happy party chatter as language output. My first step was to rework them, trying to get in and at more open-ended questions, more why-questions, more content, more controversy. My next step was to write textbooks that do that. My most recent step has been to mostly abandon textbooks all together -- except for the syllabus framework they provide -- and shift to content-rich thematic materials, most often pulled off the Web.

As I work mostly with university students, what's true for almost all of them is that they're still working out for themselves what their opinions are and who they are. What's true in many cases, too, is that they've never been in a setting where they've been asked to arrive at an opinion and then seriously listened to as they present it. This is not a cultural issue, for the same is true of many students in Western universities. It's the age that's the issue, this time of life when opinions and ideas and personalities are especially fluid. For this reason, it's especially delightful to encourage this process of idea formation while facilitating its growth.

At the same time, though, much care needs to be taken to ensure that personalities are nurtured, people protected, and no one allowed to dominate or be cruel to anyone else. This of course is much easier to say than do, but working to create a warm, caring learning environment where people feel comfortable about taking personal risks, as well as language risks, is absolutely necessary to any attempt to promote higher-level thinking in the classroom.

Even with such a classroom environment established, you'll still need to carefully teach students how to think and what that entails. You'll also need to get your students to start finding their own information on a topic and bring it to class so that you can work together to evaluate it for accuracy and reliability. Your students will need to be taught how to compare ideas, how to synthesize information, and of course, they'll need the language necessary to express opinions, agree and disagree with others, interrupt politely, support an idea, and much more. It's much more than a lot, but you do it one step at a time, following the old model of presentation and practice, providing a lot of scaffolding, while making sure to fill the course with content worth talking about.

I apologize if I sound here like someone who's got it all figured out, because I certainly don't. I'm in the midst of a personal revolution and process of reinvention in my teaching and in my life. This probably has a lot to do with my own realization that I very often lacked critical thought as a younger adult, as well as with my urge to remedy some of the wrong I've done -- both in class and out -- due to careless logic, rigid ideas, and lower-level, even hormonal thinking. It also has to do with what I see as an urgent need in this world for all of us to work to take each other seriously, to think things through, to understand what our ideas and beliefs are -- as well as where they came from --- and to be able to present those thoughts through ideas and beliefs to others in gentle yet rational ways.

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Panelists: Marc | Chuck

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