5 Ideas for Developing Real-World Thinking Skills
https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/5-ideas-for-developing-real-world-thinking-skills
IDEAS—Inquiry, Design, Evaluation, Argument, and Systems Analysis. Let’s unpack these processes:
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Inquiry is an investigative process that seeks out understandings and explanations—of observations, outcomes, concepts, and events. The process is driven by thoughtful questions that can be researched and explored in different ways—for example, by analyzing data or documents, generating models, or conducting experiments.
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Design is an iterative process that results in the development of a new product or process for addressing a need, solving a problem, or improving an existing product/process. It includes clarifying a problem or need, generating possible solutions, testing/evaluating solution options, and developing a plan for implementation.
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Evaluation involves selecting and applying appropriate criteria for assessing the quality, significance, or merit of something. Evaluation can be used to judge things like products (e.g., the strength of a bridge), outcomes (e.g., the accuracy of a stock market prediction), and processes (e.g., effectiveness of group work).
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Argumentation is a reasoning process for debating and supporting an idea or position. It involves making a claim and justifying it with reasons and evidence. It can also involve critiquing an argument by challenging its claim or the reasons or evidence given to support it.
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Systems Analysis is a process for understanding a system’s elements and how they interact. It includes analyzing the various elements in a system and predicting how changes to any part(s) of the system can have both short- and long-term consequences.
Teach Students to Think Through Problems — Not Google Them
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-09-09-teach-students-to-think-through-problems-not-google-them/
rather be transparently wrong than opaquely right. Part of the process of my teaching is to let students see my thought process when somebody asks me a question, rather than giving them the answer.
Here Are the Top 10 Job Skills for 2025
he two highest-ranked spots went to skills that didn’t appear at all on WEF’s previous list: 1) analytical thinking and innovation, and 2) active learning and learning strategies. Another skill cluster that didn’t make the previous list debuted at No. 5 — resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility.
“The pace of technology adoption is expected to remain unabated and may accelerate in some areas,” including the use of robots and artificial intelligence, the report said. Most businesses — 84 percent — plan to accelerate the digitalization of work processes and the use of digital tools, such as video conferencing,
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active learning and learning strategies
- Complex problem-solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility
- Creativity, originality, and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Reasoning, problem-solving, and ideation
- Emotional intelligence
- Technology design and programming
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compare to 2015
https://www.slideshare.net/aidemoreto/gamification-and-byox-in-academic-libraries-low-end-practical-approach
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-01-22-educators-share-how-video-games-can-help-kids-build-sel-skills/
social-emotional learning (SEL) skills
the intersection of teacher education, learning technologies and game-based learning. He thinks educators shouldn’t ignore video games if they want students to be media-literate, because they are the “storytelling medium of the 21st century.”
gaming can help build other SEL skills, such as empathy.
Video games are good for teaching kids problem-solving and ethical decision-making
Some experts have expressed concern about how video games affect children. According to the Washington Post, the World Health Organization has recognized “gaming disorder”—characterized as a lasting addiction to video games—as a condition. Yet, not all experts agree that “game addiction” should be pathologized.
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more on video games in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=video+games
How AR and VR are Being Used to Teach SEL
SEL social emotional learning
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-05-29-how-ar-and-vr-are-being-used-to-teach-sel
In his book, “Experience on Demand,” Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, writes, “No medium, of course can fully capture the subjective experience of another person, but by richly evoking a real-seeming, first-person experience, virtual reality does seem to promise to offer new, empathy-enhancing qualities.” Bailenson contrasts experiencing virtual reality with reading news accounts and watching documentaries. Those latter activities, he writes, require “a lot of imaginative work,” whereas virtual reality can “convey the feeling” of, say, a refugee camp’s environment, and the “smallness of the living quarters, the size of the camp.”
Caldwell—who used Google Expeditions to deliver a virtual reality experience set in the Holocaust—says that when his students first put on the goggles, they viewed them as a novelty. But within a minute or two, the students became quiet, absorbed in what they were seeing; they realized the “reality of the horror of what was in front of them.” Questions ensued.
Ron Berger, the Chief Academic Officer of EL Education, points to another factor schools should consider. He thinks virtual reality can be a powerful way to introduce kids to situations that require empathy or adopting different perspectives. However, he thinks no one tool or experience will bring results unless it is “nested in a broader framework of a vision and goals and relationships.”
Berger says virtual reality experiences have to be accompanied by work beforehand and follow-up afterwards. Kids, he says, need to be reflective and think critically.
immersion experiences like virtual reality should be “embedded in positive” adult and peer relationships. He adds that ideally, there’s also a resulting action where kids do something productive with the information they’ve learned, to help their own growth and to help others. He mentions an example where students interviewed local immigrants and refugees, then wrote the stories they heard. They published the stories in a book, and the profits went to legal fees for local refugees.
saving virtual reality for “very special experiences,” keeping it “relatively short” and not getting students dizzy or disoriented. A report Bailenson co-authored for Common Sense Media highlights the research that has—and has not—explored the effects of virtual reality on children. It states that the “potentially negative outcomes of VR include impacts on children’s sensory systems and vision, aggression, and unhealthy amounts of escapism and distraction from the physical world.”
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The Brain Science Is In: Students’ Emotional Needs Matter
What the neuro-, cognitive, and behavioral research says about social-emotional learning
Teachers, like parents, have always understood that children’s learning and growth do not occur in a vacuum, but instead at the messy intersection of academic, social, and emotional development.
four specific insights:
• Malleability: Genes are not destiny. Our developing brains are largely shaped by our environments and relationships—a process that continues into adulthood.
• Context: Family, relationships, and lived experiences shape the physiological structure of our brains over time. Healthy amounts of challenge and adversity promote growth, but toxic stress takes a toll on the connections between the hemispheres of our brain.
• Continuum: While we’ve become familiar with the exponential development of the brain for young children, it continues throughout life. The explosion of brain growth into adolescence and early adulthood, in particular, requires putting serious work into much more intentional approaches to supporting that development than is common today.
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more on VR and empathy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/11/18/immersive-journalism/
more on SEL social emotional learning
https://www.middleweb.com/34563/4-tips-for-teaching-students-sel-skills/
Teaching Critical Thinking: Some Practical Points
By: Linda B. Nilson, PhD
http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/teaching-critical-thinking-practical-points/
Critical thinking scholars also agree that questions are central to students acquiring critical thinking skills. We must ask students challenging, open-ended questions that demand genuine inquiry, analysis, or assessment—questions like these:
- What is your interpretation/analysis of this passage/data/argument?
- What are your reasons for favoring that interpretation/analysis? What is your evidence?
- How well does your interpretation/analysis handle the complexities of the passage/data/argument?
- What is another interpretation/analysis of the passage/data/argument? Any others?
- What are the implications of each interpretation/analysis?
- Let’s look at all the interpretations/analyses and evaluate them. How strong is the evidence for each one?
- How honestly and impartially are you representing the other interpretations/analyses? Do you have a vested interest in one interpretation/analysis over another?
- What additional information would help us to narrow down our interpretations/analyses?
Some teaching methods naturally promote inquiry, analysis, and assessment, and all of them are student-active (Abrami et al., 2008). Class discussion may be the strongest, and it includes the debriefings of complex cases, simulations, and role plays. However, debates, structured controversy, targeted journaling, inquiry-guided labs, and POGIL-type worksheets (https://pogil.org/) are also effective.
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more on critical thinking in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=critical+thinking
Excellent examples of questions to foster critical thinking skills
The 5 Step Model to Teach Students Critical Thinking Skills
http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2014/05/the-5-step-model-to-teach-students.html
1- Determine learning objectives
This is the initial phase where you need to identify the behaviours you want your students to exhibit and work on encapsulating these behaviours in an overarching higher order thinking schema.
2-Teach through questioning
The importance of integrating questions into instruction is uncontested. Thought-provoking questions help students explore learning from different perspectives. The art of posing well-formulated questions is regaled by a set of techniques, some of which are included in this wonderful poster: Questions A Critical Thinker Asks.
3-Practice before you assess
This is where hands-on learning activities are called for. To consolidate their understandings and therefore increase the retention rate of information taught, students need to utilize all components of active learning such as simulation, experimentations,rehearsing…etc
4- Review, refine, and improve
Students’ feedback that you can garner either formally or informally constitute the backbone of your teaching procedure. It provides you with insights into areas that students need help with and also informs your teaching objectives and methodology. There are a variety of tools you can use to collect feedback from your students, check out the 8 Practical tools to easily gather students feedback.
5- Provide feedback and assessment of learning
As you need students feedback to help you inform your teaching methodology, students too need your feedback. They need to learn how they are learning and assess their overall achievement. One way to do this is to provide them with grading rubrics for self-assessment. Here are some other resources to help you provide better feedback to your students: