Notes from The Director

It is now December, 2007, and I have been reflecting on the last two years of my work with The National Center for Teaching Thinking. The last time I wrote comments on the state of the art of teaching thinking I stressed how what I had observed through my work on teaching thinking had indicated a real broadening of interest internationally on the subject. Now, two years later, I am feeling the same. The International Conference on Thinking (ICOT) was held in 2007, this time in Norrkoping, Sweden, and it attracted, once again, over 1000 participants worldwide. In fact, it was sold out! And I and my colleagues at NCTT have been traveling so much that I am beginning to think of my home as a secluded retreat where I can go to relax every now and then. But I have noticed some trends, so I want to comment on these.

My travels over the past few years have taken me to Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, New Zealand, Cyprus, Spain (Barcelona and the Canary Islands), Sweden, and Australia. Most of these have involved multiple visits to conduct long-term staff development programs, some running into a second year. I have also continued to engage in projects in the USA, one in San Antonio, Texas, another in Jacksonville, Florida, and shorter duration projects in Wilmington, North Carolina and Paramus, New Jersey. Christina Steffen, a certified NCTT trainer from Maplewood Richmond Heights High School in St. Louis, and Rebecca Reagan, a long-time colleague from Lubbock Texas, have joined me in some of these projects.

I also should mention that in this mix a new factor has been introduced – the new book that Art Costa, Barry Beyer, Rebecca Reagan, Bena Kallick, and I have co authored – Thinking-Based Learning. This book brings together the five of us to synthesize our work over the past 25 years in teaching thinking into a coherent and unified approach that we write about and demonstrate through classroom examples. This book advances the concept of “Skillful Thinking” as a combination of thinking skills, habits of mind, and our ability to direct our own thinking. This book was published in June of 2007 and we have melded themes from this book into the central conceptual framework for teaching thinking that we introduce in the staff-development projects we engage in. When I use the framework from TBL in my own workshops participants have told me that this pulls together for them what have seemed to be disparate strands in the field of teaching thinking previously.

There are two trends in the field that I now want to comment on in these notes and that grow out of my observations in the staff-development work that I have done. One has to do with K – 12 education and the other with teaching thinking in higher education.

In all of the K – 12 projects that we have engaged in over the past two years outside the USA the participants have, as many have in the past, welcomed what we have brought to our workshops: an emphasis on classroom practice based on the documented experience of classroom teachers who have successfully implemented direct instruction in skillful thinking infused into their content teaching. And the results have been the same: when the participants consistently implement what we show them in their own classrooms they find improvement in student thinking, in content understanding, and in the motivation to learn.

The interest that has stimulated these workshops has, by and large, been grassroots interest on the part of the teachers who have participated. And that is wonderful! But I have noticed something else that has added even more impetus to the work that I am doing in these projects. It is that Ministries of Education in many of these countries are now explicitly incorporating skillful thinking as a key competency or as an educational goal in their curriculum. Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, and the United Arab Emirates have gone this way. The degree to which this is articulated varies considerably in these different ministries and some of these statements need more refinement, but to me this is a giant leap forward in aligning education in these countries more with the needs of the children who will be educated. I extend my congratulations to the educational leadership in these countries for taking this important step!

The second observation has to do with higher education. We have done a certain amount of work in higher education over the years, but the dominant educational focus of NCTT has been in K – 12 education. During the past few years, however, this balance has shifted. We conducted three major long-term projects in higher education over the past few years, two at universities in Saudi Arabia and in the United Arab Emirates, and one at a community college in the USA.

These projects represent a major trend also: the recognition that more needs to be done in higher education to help students at this level develop their thinking skills further than is presently being done. Many colleges already flag skillful thinking, especially emphasizing critical thinking, as a key part of their mission. The response to this at these colleges has usually been for faculty to say “We are already doing that in our courses.” Those colleges that have found this response to be inadequate and have tried to do something more have, by and large, introduced a new course on critical thinking and required it of all students. But there is now a generally accepted view that such courses are also inadequate, and that if we really want to help students learn how to think critically about what they are learning, this must happen through a common across-the-curriculum framework that is implemented within the various content-oriented courses that students take, and not in a separate course or through conceptions of skillful thinking that are discipline-based.

The community colleges in the USA are the farthest along on this road to articulating what teaching critical thinking, and /or skillful thinking means in terms of specific rubrics that identify the specific skills of good critical thinkers. This, too, deserves celebration! But this all still stops short of answering the question that faculty then ask, “What can I do in my courses to implement these ideas?” Our work in higher education has concentrated on that question. We have used the same approach we use in K – 12 workshops, though this time drawing on examples from higher education. We emphasize those special teaching techniques that have been shown to be effective when teaching skillful thinking infused into content. And these workshops have been equally effective in bringing successful instruction in skillful thinking into college classrooms.

In retrospect I want to celebrate these projects! That they actually took place is something that was less likely 10 years ago in higher education. But I also want to congratulate the faculty who I have worked with who have worked hard to use what I have shown them to create wonderfully stimulating learning environments for their students – environments in which these students, like their K – 12 counterparts, have exhibited growth in their thinking abilities, their content learning, and their motivation to learn. As one of the faculty said, it is as if someone had lit up a lamp in the minds of their students! So while obviously more work needs to be done to help college and university faculty implement good thinking-based learning even in those institutions that have taken these dramatic steps, I applaud the direction that higher education is now moving!

So – this is my 25th year doing staff-development work in K – 12 and in higher education – and I remain committed to work with NCTT to take this work wherever in the world it is needed to help teachers and college faculty become effective – if not excellent – teachers of skillful thinking.

Robert Swartz
December, 2007