Ch. 7 QtC's

Ever since taking Educational Psychology 210, when we discussed how to encourage critical thinking among your students, I have been planning a lesson, constructivist in nature, which I want to teach one day in my high school English classroom. This activity will best work for upperclass high school students. Much of the period will be spent with me teaching false information yet presenting it as fact, giving extreme opinions and expecting the students to agree with them, and making broad statements and then quickly brushing past them without explaining. The key will be in not varying from my teaching style so that the students do not suspect that I am giving completely wrong information.  The goal is to see if any students stop me, question the veracity of the material, or simply begin to critically think for themselves. If no student picks up on the idea, I will distribute an assessment to see what is going on in their minds: I will ask them to write a question about anything I said on a sheet of paper and turn it in anonymously.  Finally, I will reveal that everything the students learned today was completely wrong. I will hit it home hard that critical thinking is vital, both now and especially in high school.  All the time one is surrounded with opinions of family, friends or community, and is bombarded with [often contradictory] pieces of information. 

In line with the Ormrod text highlighting knowledge construction, this activity would provide opportunities for firsthand observation and experimentation, as the students themselves are the variables in the experiment. Secondly, I will present experts’ perspectives by joining the class in figuring out the true facts of every false statement or information I gave. This encourages conceptual understanding because all the knowledge we uncover will now be a part of a meaningful memory to the students. One of my passions is encouraging classroom dialogue, and so this activity is no different.  I will be genuinely pleased if a student speaks up and stops me in my tracks. Also, after the truth is revealed, I want to check in with each individual student and see how importantly they now view critical thinking. The lesson itself could be described both as an authentic activity, for its meaning-making capabilities, and as an exercise in scaffolding for its nature in encouraging—in fact requiring—the students to ask how and why questions. Finally, the lesson will create a community of learners, for the collaborative effort and unique way of pushing the students out of their comfortable idea of the classroom will ideally create bonds both between student-teacher and student-student relationships.