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 Rationale for Using ThinkTrix in the Classroom
A Rationale for ThinkTrix
Dr. Frank Lyman
Regarding “higher level thinking” in the classroom, consider the proposition that there are at least four possible approaches to oral and written inquiry into content.
The first, and most overused, is the teacher asking questions and the students responding. At best this is a Socratic interchange. At worst it is an inequitable and low-level connversation between a few students and the teacher.
A second, currently in-vogue approach is a long list of “prompts”, or questions, designed to be similar to test questions. These may have some recognition value on assessment day, but have no metacognitive value and are often inaccessible and/or inane.
A third method, favored by some idealists, is to allow most or all questions to come from the students spontaneously. This curiosity-driven, student ownership strategy may work when the content is relevant, intriguing, or problematic; but requires uninterrupted think time and can exclude many students (Leave them behind?).
A fourth, and potentially more effective strategy, is one in which students and teacher craft questions from a basic knowledge of how the mind works. ThinkTrix empowers teachers and students to easily cue basic and mutually understood “mind actions.” This allows for shared metacognition, every-student-response, higher levels of thinking, and meaningful discourse. This approach is criticized from the left as being too structured (preordained), and from the right as being too unstructured (unpreordained). For meaningful, motivating classroom discourse there is this middle way. I encourage us to try it, along with wait time, cooperative interaction, intriguing content, and cognitive mapping. |
