Leigh in Azerbaijan

“Here be dragons and critical thinking.”  This has to go on my classroom wall this year.  Here Be Dragons, is a 40-minute video introduction to critical thinking by Brian Dunning. “Here be dragons” was used by cartographers for those sections of the map where explorers had not yet been.  I guess it was a reasonable assumption, given that dragons were an inner core of mythology.  They had to be somewhere, so were presumably just over the horizon of the known world, potentially ready to bring havoc to community and family. I like the slogan as it intimates that learning is exciting, a little scarey and will take some clever thinking to disentangle the dragons’ wily ways.  While I haven’t watched all the video I think you’ll find plenty to disagree with but that’s what critical thinking is all about. As teachers our highest goal might be to teach students how to learn, rather than of convincing them how intelligent we are.

Change always brings some degree of havoc as do new ways of teaching and learning.  New ways of teaching can perplex parents in particular as the methods may not correlate with their knowledge of what constitutes learning.

In Australia we’re fond of saying, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it!”  The thing is, it is broken!  Last week I was given some of my old report cards from Broken Hill Highschool.  They had been stored away at my parents’ home in Melbourne.  As an adult I’m used to discovering personal relics with some degree ofpride, but when I looked at the rather ordinary results I was left with a sense of fatalism.  It seemed nothing I did at the time could change them.  It was only at university that I learnt how to study, how to inquire and how to manage time.  Then again, managing time is still something that challenges me.  (In my defense I’ve achieved quite a few things that I’m proud of.)  Something that I can’t remember much at all, even at university, was collaborating with other students, which is an effective way of engaging with learning.

It’s a never-ending task working out how to provide good teaching to students. Relying on content is as easy as passing out the text books.

As an indication of what learning might look like today I include the following points.  They are similar to the methodology we use at our PYP school for the units of inquiry.  They don’t fit with traditional pedagogy. You can find them here.

Students use critical thinking skills to plan and conduct research, manage projects, solve problems, and make informed decisions using appropriate digital tools and resources. Students:

A. identify and define authentic problems and significant questions for investigation.

B. plan and manage activities to develop a solution or complete a project.

C. collect and analyze data to identify solutions and/or make informed decisions.

D. use multiple processes and diverse perspectives to explore alternative solutions.

Here is our Exhibition day, which is the end result of the above four points in our grade 5 classes.