Most – if not all of us – have encountered classrooms with
posters encouraging us to THINK or we may also have encountered teachers who
would use expressions such as “THINK before you answer.” I was lucky to have a
teacher who encouraged me to think meta-cognitively by proclaiming “THINK about
how you THINK.”
“In teaching for thinking, the concern is not how many
answers students know, but what they do when they do not know; the goal is not
merely to reproduce knowledge, but to create knowledge and grow in cognitive
abilities,” according to “Best Practices in Gifted Education” a 2007
publication released by the National Association for Gifted Children.
Improving our students’ thinking most certainly is a goal in
general education, but the field of gifted education has specifically researched
thinking styles attributed to gifted children and how best to foster or teach
thinking skills to gifted children.
B. M. Shore and L.S. Kanevsky in a 1993 article identified
seven possible differences or attributes as relates to cognition by gifted
children. They are:
·
Gifted children may be able to draw upon more
existing knowledge and use this knowledge more effectively
·
Gifted children more often and more efficiently engage
in metacognitive processes
·
Gifted children give the cognitively complex
parts of problem solving a greater commitment of time, allowing them to solve
and report problems
·
Gifted children show greater understanding of
problems especially in terms of commonalities and transfer (Personally, I will
add here that as a bilingual person, I find my thinking has greatly benefitted
by analyzing the similarities and differences between my native language of
German and my second language of English)
·
Gifted children utilize assumptions that they
will investigate systematically
·
Gifted children show greater flexibility in
choosing strategies and points of view
·
Gifted children are intrigued joyfully and
creatively when presented with complexity and challenge in their tasks
Over the years, the identification of gifted children has
given cognition greater emphasis. In 1993, R. J. Sternberg and E.L. Grigorenki
contributed to this process by dividing thinking into three general areas, best
illustrated by what they termed “mental self-government.”
·
Legislative function: This type of thinking
involves the idea of creating, imagining, and planning
·
Executive function: This type of thinking
facilitates implementation
·
Judicial function: This type of thinking
incorporates all thinking related to the process of evaluating
As far as fostering or nurturing a child’s thinking
processes, teachers may well be served that thinking can indeed be taught and
practiced. Particularly in the field of gifted education, but also in general
education, we have come to employ the idea of “higher order (or level)
thinking.” As teachers, we want our students to spend less time and work at the
knowledge and comprehension levels but rather in the higher order thinking
modes that Bloom’s taxonomy identifies with levels such as “application (of
knowledge), analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.”
More specifically, The NAGC Handbook of “Best Practices” outlines
several broad categories to be included in daily instruction to help foster a
child’s thinking: They are a) critical thinking; b) creative thinking; c)
problem finding; d) metacognition; e) domain-specific (i.e. mathematics) patterns
and forward thinking; f) correlational thinking; g) reflective inquiry; h)
questioning created for memory, divergence, convergence, aesthetics, and
ethics; i) inquiry and investigation; j) dialectical thinking skills; and k)
Socratic discussion.
In their 2005 publication entitled “Being gifted in school: An
introduction to development, guidance, and teaching.” L.J. Coleman and T.L.
Cross conclude that an “overwhelming majority of teaching methods reported in
the literature on gifted education are variations on creativity,
problem-solving themes. Their major characteristics involve suspension of
judgment, practice in generating responses, and opportunities for children to
consider how they think.”
At our gifted education school, Quest Academy in Palatine,
Illinois, we have for more than a decade designed our curriculum not primarily around
knowledge and comprehension, but rather conceptual understandings to which we refer
as Enduring Understandings. It is within those higher-level understandings that
we then also spend instructional time on specific academic knowledge and
comprehension.
