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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I don't mean to say too much here, or to suggest that all of this can be accomplished in the classroom, but it's a good place to start. Whatever your personal beliefs may be, and whatever place you are in your own growth as a person and as a teacher, you must admit that there's a serious lack of thought in the world at large today. Why not begin to make the changes necessary in your classes to fill in this lack, even a bit. It's worth doing on all kinds of levels -- from the pedagogical to the personal, from the local to the global. Little changes go a long way as they ripple out.

“What's clear now, though, is that it's no longer about approach or method. It's about people.”

As you begin to make the change, though, please remember that grammar and word work will always be necessary. I'm not in any way promoting the idea that we all simply sit in circles and try to understand one another. Language learning will always be hard work and the nuts and bolts of language will always be the scaffolding we'll need to construct for our students and help them climb. While doing so, you'll also find that there's still is a place for happy party chatter and good fun in the classroom. I'm not suggesting that we all abandon the dialogue and the little task, the role-play and the happy game. What I'm suggesting is that those things are not enough. It really is time to go beyond all that. In doing so, you won't be alone.

Even if you're still all wrapped up in the Communicative Approach or just waking up from its influence, you'll open your eyes to find that the whole field is moving on without you. It's not just me who is going through a process of revolution and reinvention. It's the whole field, and not just our field. To steal a phrase from an earlier revolution, we're now experiencing the first waves of a paradigm shift that will no doubt continue until we truly understand what it is.

What's clear now, though, is that it's no longer about approach or method. It's about people -- and content and ideas -- but mostly about people. They're messy, they're human, they come with different learning styles and strategies, they're mostly untrained to think, and they're all growing both as language learners and as people. What we now know, most clearly, is that we don't know how best to teach everyone anything -- and more, that there is no single answer, no holy grail, no best method.

How do you deal with this? If I had the answer, I'd tell you, but what I've found is that using stimulating content-rich materials and asking thoughtful questions, thereby promoting higher-level thinking skills, is a very good place to start. This allows you to begin listening carefully as you take responses seriously, and by listening and taking responses seriously, you begin seeing your students as whole people. This allows you to further personalize material choices, ask more thoughtful questions, and get more thoughtful responses, as students begin to see you as a whole person as well. This implies a roomful of people, thinking and learning together -- which is something very different from the standard model of a roomful of students with the teacher as knowledge bearer or even facilitator -- and this is the revolution.

Still, you don't have to be going through your own process of revolution and reinvention to move in this direction. You can do so by making just a few simple changes in your classes that will begin to promote higher-level thinking. Try providing wait time of varying lengths before asking for a response. Try offering students the chance to think through and rehearse responses in their own language before asking them to do so in English. Begin examining and adapting your teaching materials, making sure there is plenty of content and enough good open-ended and thoughtful questions to get people thinking. Challenge your students with content that presents conflicting opinions. Give your students the opportunity to hear your own ideas and opinions and help them to understand how you arrived at these beliefs. Then always listen carefully and respectfully to their opinions -- but don't be afraid to question them, challenge them, and by this example, teach them that, as the American author Tillie Olson says, "real thought is hard work, but there's nothing more valuable and nothing whose consequences reach further." Think about that.

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Panelists: Marc | Chuck

Chuck Sandy, Chubu University

Co-author of two series from CUP, Passages and Connect

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