Thursday, September 13, 2018

Challenging Thinking

In Trick Question from Seth’s Blog, Seth Godin shares,

“… if you can ask someone a question that causes them to think about something unexamined, that challenges them to explore new ways of seeing the world or making connections, you’ve actually caused a change to happen.”

I’ve always been good at memorization but not very good at critical thinking. I always felt like my teachers did not help me learn to think critically and instead wanted me to remember facts and figures. I excelled at that and it wasn’t until I was in college before I realized that others were way ahead of me in the thinking game.

I spent my four years of college, not just learning, but learning how others study and learn. I really struggled and for the first time in my life, learning was hard.

I decided that when I became a teacher, I was not going to have my students face the same results.

Even today, I have to make myself focus on the whys and the hows rather than just the what questions. My husband is a great person to help me with this because he always questions things he reads or hears. I tend to take things at face value and sometimes as fact which I shouldn’t. Then he asks me how I know what is given is true and why do I feel this way. This is what my teachers should have been asking me!

Just repeating what they have learned is not going to help students be successful in life. They need to learn why they should do things and the importance of what they are learning. They need to learn how to reason and solve problems. If they can’t solve problems, they are always going to be dependent on others.

How do you get students to think critically? Please share.

Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash






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