Higher Level Thinking

This week, I had some cool breakthroughs in the classroom. This week we read about questions that promote higher level thinking. What was refreshing was that most of my students already ask those types of questions. Upon reading about higher level thinking, you would expect that the higher achieving students to ask the critical thinking questions. However, this is mostly not the case. I have found that the majority of the deeper questions come from average or weaker students. Most of my higher level students simply would like to know an answer so that they can memorize it, write it down on a test, and move on. My other students often would like to know how something works or how it relates to their own lives. I asked some students about this last year, and they told me that it is easier from them to create a relatable story about a concept in order to remember it. I will also say that this is a generalization, and there are definitely exceptions to this in my classroom.

To this end, I try to use as many local examples for things as I possibly can. It is important to have photos or to be able to take students outside so that they are able to actually experience topics or concepts themselves. The other week, students learned about ecological footprints. With this, the students learned that each person in the world on average should have 2.2 hectares of arable land to live off of (resource wise). When a student inevitably asks what a hectare is, I take them all outside and have 4 students mark out a 100 by 100 meter hectare plot. Students see how large just one is, and get excited about the prospect of having two and a quarter of those plots. However, when I tell them that they must live off of that land for any resources they need, they realize how small that land is. I then have them reference a calculator they have already taken (the class average is 10-14 hectares per person of resources used) and ask them to imagine how much resources each of them actually uses. The students draw many important conclusions from just staking out how large a single hectare is.