Why I Changed My Mind on Teaching Thinking Skills

In the fifth year of my teaching at Cleveland’s Glenville high school–it was the early 1960s–I had already introduced materials to my classes on what was then called “Negro history” (see here and here). I then began experimenting with the direct teaching of critical thinking skills.

I believed that such skills were crucial in negotiating one’s way through life and understanding history. I wanted my students to acquire and use these skills every day. So I began teaching my U.S. history courses with a two-week unit on thinking skills. My theory was that the students learning these skills at the very beginning of the semester would then apply them when I began teaching units on the American Revolution, Immigration, Sectionalism and the Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution.

In the two-week unit, I selected skills I believed were important for understanding the past such as: judging how reliable a source of information is, figuring out the difference between a fact and opinion, making hunches about what happened, and sorting evidence that would support or contradict each hunch, and distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information in reaching a conclusion.

For each of these skills, I chose a contemporary event–a criminal case in the local newspaper, a national scandal that was on television, and occurrences in the school–and wrote out a one-page story that would require each student to apply the particular skill we were discussing such as making an informed guess, collecting evidence to support their hunch, and reaching a judgment. I also gave the class additional sources they could use to support their conclusion.

Each 45-minute period–I was teaching five classes a day at the time–was filled with engaged students participating in flurries of discussion, debates over evidence, student questioning of each others’ conclusions, and similar excitement. I was elated by the apparent success of my critical thinking skills unit.

After the two weeks of direct instruction in skills, I plunged into the Coming of the American Revolution and subsequent history material. From time to time, over the course of the semester, I would ask questions that I felt would prompt use of those thinking skills we had worked on earlier in the year.

Blank stares greeted me with an occasional “Oh yeah” from some students. I designed homework that explicitly called for use of these thinking skills. Yet few students applied what I thought they had learned. I was thoroughly puzzled.

Which brings me to the concept of transfer. I had assumed that teaching these thinking skills directly at the very beginning of the semester would lead students to apply them when I began teaching subsequent history units. Yet the transfer was not happening. How come?

TRANSFER OF LEARNING

Transfer of learning appears to be a simple concept. What you learn in the family or learn in school  can be applied in different situations outside of the family and the classroom. Learning to get along with an older brother or sister, for example, helps in learning how to get along with others later in life. Learning math in middle school helps one in high school physics. Sadly enough, it doesn’t always work that way.

That two-week unit on specific critical thinking skills useful to understand history and use in daily life did not smoothly transfer to the rest of the units in history. The skills I believed that I had taught my students weeks earlier were missing in action for subsequent units on the American Revolution, Civil War, and Imperialism . Root canal work was easier than getting students to distinguish between a biased source and one less so or explain why certain statements were opinions, not facts. Where had I erred?

In time, I discovered from reading psychologists about the ins-and-outs of transfer of learning (see, for example, here). Teaching specific critical thinking skills and expecting students to apply what they learned to different situations depended upon many conditions that were, I learned later, missing in my lessons. Even the concept of teaching these skills isolated from the historical content–as I did–undermined the very goal I wanted to achieve (see CritThink).

Nonetheless, puzzled as I was by most students failing to apply what they had learned in the later history units, I still taught for the next few years that two week unit on critical thinking at the beginning of the semester, marching through the lessons, one skill after another. I repeated again and again this unit because the students were engaged, loved to apply what they learned to their daily lives, and I felt good at the end of the school day. An uncommon experience for a veteran teacher.

Even had a colleague I trusted then grabbed me by the shoulders and told me how foolish I was to think that my students would transfer the skills they learned in the two-week unit to subsequent history units, I would not have believed that colleague.  I would have continued with what I considered a “best practice” that, in reality, had become a “bad” habit.

And this is where the Kennedy Assassination unit that I and a group of colleagues taught to 15 classes in Cardozo high school in 1966 enters the picture. I and my co-teachers soon came to realize that the transfer of thinking skills were not in much evidence in the U.S. history units that we subsequently taught to our classes. Yes, it took me years—using introductory skill-based units at Glenville and Cardozo high schools– for that realization to sink in: thinking skills had to be taught within the historical content students were studying for them to apply those skills. I could not magically count on transfer of learning.

But it was in the crucible of my classroom (and others at Cardozo) that proved to me finally, that–separate units for thinking skills—-simply did not work. I had to change what I was doing. And I did.