Teaching Students to Think

In the latest issue of Educational Leadership, Robert Sternberg tackles the issue of teaching students to think. The acronym for his model is WICS, or wisdom, intelligence, and creativity synthesized.

Excerpt:

"As an example, in social studies, we might assess understanding of the American Civil War by asking such questions as (1) Compare and contrast the Civil War and the American Revolution (analytical); (2) What might the United States be like today if the Civil War had not taken place (creative)? (3) How has the Civil War affected, even indirectly, the kinds of rights that people have today (practical)? and (4) Are wars ever justified (wisdom)?

In English, we might assess understanding of a novel such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by asking (1) How was the childhood of Tom Sawyer similar to and different from your own childhood (analytical)? (2) Write an alternate ending to the story (creative); (3) What techniques did Tom Sawyer use to persuade his friends to whitewash Aunt Polly's fence (practical)? and (4) Is it ever justified to use such techniques of persuasion to make people do things they do not really want to do (wisdom)?"

Another good idea: opportunities for practical problem solving (e.g. asking a professor for a letter of recommendation when he did not remember you or moving a large bed up a winding staircase).

Sternberg closes by mentioning the results of his study of failed leaders:

"They tend to commit several serious cognitive fallacies. They are (1) unrealistically optimistic, believing that anything they do will turn out well because they are so brilliant; (2) egocentric, believing that the world revolves around them; (3) falsely omniscient, failing to learn from experience because they believe they know everything; (4) falsely omnipotent, believing that they are all-powerful by virtue of their superior skills or education; (5) falsely invulnerable, believing they can get away with almost anything because they are so clever; and (6) ethically disengaged, believing that ethical principles apply only to lesser mortals. In my view, much of what is wrong in the world today stems from people who are simultaneously smart and foolish."

Harvard's Visible Thinking Project is a program to model active thinking and problem solving strategies; for a model of critical thinking through literature, there's an additional article from the National Paideia Center, Thinking is Literacy, Literacy is Thinking.

Just because a teacher or parent is a good critical thinker, doesn't mean they can teach it to all children though. Some children will have developmental obstacles making it harder for them to "get it." In the paper below, children age 6-13 had trouble activating their right rostral prefrontal cortex for analogical problems. They had a higher error rate and they were more likely to use left semantic association areas to arrive at answers.



This is not an invariable developmental limitation though; in our work with young gifted students, the capacity for analogical thinking can be particularly strong...no doubt adding to their frustrations when some of their good friends don't get what they're thinking...

Fluid Reasoning in Children and Adults pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

Music, Your Brain, and Attention

In this latest research from Stanford, music can be seen to give quite a workout for the brain. Attention and working memory areas have to work hard, with the right hemisphere working much harder than the left. When test subjects listened to a baroque symphony, the ventral network would detect salient features of music (early transition below, or "macro-organization" features of music, while the dorsal frontal-parietal network was more continually activated to keep the listening process going.

Interesting. For many students (and non-students too), music is activating and seems to help with attention and as well as getting tasks done. We know many time-blind people who become more time-aware with music, but because our brains change with what we do with it, the work of listening might really help us with the ease of listening in the long rung, too. So maybe instead of saying, "Stop listening to your music, and do your homework!", it may be better for us to say, "Start listening to your music, so you can do your homework!"

Ansel Adams on music and the training of his mind:

"The world of music was an immediate contrast to my undisciplined life and unsuccessful performance in school...My scatter-brained existence was gradually being tuned to accuracy and musical expression. The change from a hyperactive Sloppy Joe was not overnight, but was sufficiently abrupt to make some startled people ask, "What happened?"

Music Perception and fmri pdf
Science Daily: Music Moves the Brain to Pay Attention

Spatial / Motor Expertise - Gifted Surgery

We are back. And there's nothing like witnessing your daughter's successful surgery to be reminded of the importance of spatial and motor expertise. Our surgeons at UCLA did an absolutely phenomenal job and we want to make sure conventional education doesn't snuff out the futures of those spatially-talented young people who will be tomorrow's surgical heroes.

The initial procedure was very difficult and had to leverage resources and meticulous attention to detail. The reconstructive surgeon had to use a great deal of ingenuity and spatial / motor experience - how things manipulated, rotated, and used in different ways. Not anything one could simply get from a book.

Talking to the residents afterward, we had chance to hear how difficult it was to learn surgical expertise even from a master - mainly because some of the most critical pieces of information are neither visual or verbal...they're in "the hands".

Even when a spatial/ motor expert and novice watch the same procedure, the expert will learn more than the novice (see the fMRI activation patterns below for novice and expert dancers). The rich get richer and the poor remain poor.



All the more reason, we should take notice when students demonstrate flashes of motor / spatial genius, promise in activities that require building or working with their hands, and yes, even high scores on those visual-spatial psychometric subtests. Several studies have demonstrated a correlation between surgical skills and performance on the embedded figures test and tests of spatial relations, mental rotation, etc..

Spatial expertise does tend to run in families, so if dad and / or mom can recognize it, that is a major obstacle overcome. Also "spatial kids" are notoriously late bloomers in the classroom because more brain power is devoted to spatial relationships than to words. But it's also important to realize that we need to find enough time and opportunities for these kids to "do" - to make, take apart, and build things with their hands, and to learn from more skilled teachers whenever they can. Spatial education usually takes place out of school; and if parents or teachers aren't spatial themselves, they might not think of it for one of their spatial diamonds-in-the rough.

Interestingly, technology has some promise of helping teachers and students bridge the gap of spatial learning; simulators are now being designed to combine virtual reality experiences with haptic feedback so that students can learn by doing and feeling, although not when the stakes are always high.

Spatial Abilities in Laparoscopic Surgery / in Applied Spatial Cognition
Motor Expertise fmri pdf
NEJM -- Teaching Surgical Skills -- Changes in the Wind
Identifying Gifted Students with Spatial Strengths pdf
Neural Correlates of Expert Skills pdf
Effect of Visual-Spatial Ability on Learning Surgical Skills abstract
Surgery Haptic Simulators
Eide Neurolearningblog: Gamers and Visual-Spatial Expertise: Hands of a Surgeon?