Become a Better Thinker: Developing Critical and Creative Thinking

PREFACE

It was at university where I read about the work of Benjamin Bloom. He suggested that there were six quite different levels of thinking. The first four levels of lower order thinking dominate most classroom thinking. They stimulate and develop correct answer thinking or remembering. The last two levels, called higher order or multiple answer thinking, are now needed more than ever in our rapidly changing world that is flooded each day with new information.

About 20 years ago I went to my first International Conference on Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University in California. I was inspired to lead the charge in Australia. Geoff Wright, owner of Wrightbooks gave me the first start by publishing the first edition of Become a Better Thinker.

Now I thank Alicia Cohen, publisher and owner of Amba Press, for her encouragement and support in helping all student to think better for themselves. Even our government has this belief by making creative and critical thinking a priority in the Australian Curriculum.

It is still a fight to get better thinking in our classrooms. Teachers and students need better materials to actually make better student thinking a reality. Initial teacher education courses need to place more emphasis on topics covered in this book. These include metacognition, pattern recognition, brain functioning, question designing, and thinking styles.

I have tried to win the fight by presenting at over 50 conferences, by writing over 50 articles in teacher magazines, and by writing over 25 books on thinking with the help of 12 publishers and 4 translations. Things are changing but teachers need encouragement and practical resources. School leaders need better understanding of what thinking is all about. I hope this book will help all readers to carry on the fight for BETTER THINKING in our schools.

John Langrehr

2022

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCING THINKING

Pre-reading questions to ponder:

What is thinking?

Why don’t school programs teach students how to think to their full potential?

Can we find out how good thinkers think?

What are some basic thinking processes we use each day?

How is our brain similar to a computer?

WHAT DOES THINKING INVOLVE?

Thinking involves the mental processing of information that we sense, or that we have already stored in our memories. So, much of our thinking involves remembering or ‘pulling out’ stored information. We can improve remembering with plenty of practice or rehearsal, and with the use of some of the memory aids discussed in Chapter 10. To a certain extent, computers and smart phones have made this kind of thinking less important these days.

However, much of our thinking is more complex. It involves analytical, creative and critical thinking. These kinds of thinking require us to ask ourselves questions in order to form physical-neural-links between new and old stored information.

Thinking is vital in the 21st century.

SCHOOLS AND THINKING

Most school programs focus on teaching students content and methods to remember knowledge. They aim to develop the Content Intelligence of students for examination purposes. They emphasise the ‘What to think about’ much more than the ‘How to think about it’!

However, a good memory for prescribed facts and methods is no longer a guarantee for a successful life after school. And it is no longer a guarantee for creating a competitive and imaginative future generation for a nation. Therefore, many more school programs need to help all students to ask themselves better questions about the content they are taught. How many questions were you taught for distinguishing a fact from an opinion, a definite conclusion from an indefinite one, a relevant factor from an irrelevant one, or a good generalisation from a poor one?

These are just four of the 20 or so core, or basic, thinking processes that educators and academics have agreed that we use most days to analyse and judge information. How can we understand and critically read a newspaper, a report, a book, or listen to a comment or speech if we don’t have a good grasp of the entire range of core thinking processes? A list of these thinking processes is included in this chapter (see pages 5–7). How many can you use with any confidence?

METACOGNITION

At this point you might be asking, ‘How can I learn some good questions in order to have a grasp of the core thinking processes?’ The answer lies in the process of metacognition. Research of 170 studies over 50 years shows metacognition to be the most powerful factor for improving the thinking and learning ability of students.

Metacognition allows us to ‘get inside’ the minds of good thinkers in order to find out their feelings and the questions they ask themselves during a task. They share these things by carefully reflecting on them and then saying them out loud.

An example of the use of metacognition for identifying good questions for the process of problem solving is presented in Chapter 2.

THE BRAIN AND COMPUTERS

Our laptop or computers are very good at pattern recognition and probing. But before they can do such things they require a series of questions to be fed into them via programs and instructions. Then, and only then, can our computers rapidly ask themselves questions, created by computer programmers, to correct spelling, problem solve, do statistics, and so on. In other words, typing content or data into computers, without the appropriate processing questions to think about this content, is a waste of time.

And so it is with the super computer that we each own, namely our brain. There is good evidence that the brain is made up of three quite different general intelligences:

Tactical Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence

Content Intelligence.

These three interacting intelligences are stored in different parts of our brains. It has been suggested that our processing questions, that make up our Tactical Intelligence, are mainly stored in the hippocampus of the brain, and some areas of the frontal lobes. Positive, negative and neutral feelings, which make up our Emotional Intelligence, are stored in the amygdala of the brain. They are connected to the Content Intelligence, stored in the cortex, or crinkled grey matter of the brain, by thousands of connections. If these connections are cut we lose our feelings!

Of course, the human brain is different from a computer in that it has a degree of positive or negative feeling towards any content it is processing. These feelings make up our Emotional Intelligence. This most important intelligence limits our other intelligences and will be discussed further in Chapter 3.

When we have an extreme feeling about an experience, a person, a subject, and so on, we store not only the ‘content’ but also the positive, negative or neutral feeling we associate with it. We grow a physical link between the content and the feeling.

Another difference between the brain and a computer is the ability of the brain to create and store mental images or pictures of information in order to summarise and clarify it. We all have the ability to create our own unique picture of some common information depending on our interest and experience of the