ACHIEVING HIGHER-ORDER THINKING –
A MODEL FOR CLASSROOM PRACTICE
By: Patrick Leighton, Ed.D.
May, 2011
Introduction: The Problem
As K-12 teachers, we hear it. Sizable improvements in student learning, and high quality learning, are demanded of us. It is much more of a challenge than most imagine. More of the same doesn’t seem to do much. How can we teach higher-order thinking, a.k.a. critical thinking or problem solving, consistently and purposefully? How do we teach such intellectual excellence to all students, with particular attention to the achievement gaps among students of different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds? A third requirement speaks to the reality of changing classroom practice: How do we assemble, build, and organize the components of a model that will not only succeed within the often sobering realties of today’s public schools but will grow and prosper on its own once the seed money to build it is gone?
This paper presents one possible set of answers to the challenge of improving intellectual learning in classrooms. It is from an insider’s perspective, from the classroom’s front desk. These answers enhance all of the many specific models of classroom practice, (e.g. Understanding by Design, Five E’s, Differentiated Instruction, etc.). The answers begin at the foundation, at a deep level of cognitive and developmental psychology, brain research, and even epistemology.
Some Puzzling History
The present concern with educational quality began in 1983, when the report "A Nation at Risk" called for quantum improvements in public education. Since then, with considerable effort, educators have only been able to manage incremental and uneven improvements in student learning, particularly when it comes to higher order thinking. Sizable improvement can be had with disproportionate resources and expertise, but they often plateau and shrivel once the budget, facilities, or star performers drop back to “normal.”
Yet there is a real puzzle therein. The last fifty years of education have produced many excellent classroom innovations, from cooperative learning to inquiry science to multiple intelligences to assessment rubrics, to name only a few. Many of these innovations are now embedded within the teaching profession. Each innovation is supported by research showing that it should have brought significant improvements in student learning to the bottom line. Yet only incremental effects on learning in the aggregate are evident over the years; hence the puzzle. Why haven’t the benefits of all the obviously valid innovations accumulated, much less synergized, to produce significant improvements, particularly in higher-order thinking? Blaming teachers as incompetent or uncaring is a ready explanation, yet it rings hollow. The vast majority of teachers are hard working and dedicated to their students’ learning. There are no more incompetent teachers than there are incompetent doctors, lawyers or office managers.
There must be some deep fault-line running through classroom practice for so much excellent innovation to be so barren, particularly in teaching higher order thinking. A hint as to what this might be is that most of the innovations in classroom practice have focused on instructional strategies (the how of learning) and assessment methods (the whether of learning). Certainly innovations in these two components of the teaching and learning process have been significant. They have been largely responsible for the incremental improvements in student performance mentioned earlier. But what of curriculum, the third component of classroom practice? Curriculum, not in the sense of instructional materials, texts, or programs, but as the description of what students are to know and be able to do as the result of learning, has been largely devoid of innovation. Curriculum theory, the engine of the classroom triumvirate, has barely progressed beyond the know-and-do paradigm that dates back to at least the mid-1900’s. The move towards national and state curriculums over the past 30 years and the more recent move by school districts to on-line documentation give the appearance of curriculum innovation, when in fact these curriculums are cut from the same cloth. The structure of know-and-do ossifies American K-12 education into an out-dated model of teaching and learning that, paradoxically, is incapable of delivering the kind of higher-order learning (i.e. “21st Century Skills”) that is described in so many of their prologues.
The know-and-do paradigm of curriculum is so pervasive as to be virtually invisible. When you look for how educators, from teachers to program officers at the National Science Foundation, categorize learning outcomes, either implicitly or explicitly, it is almost always the same paradigm. It is so deeply embedded that, like all true paradigms, its practitioners are rarely aware of their own thinking patterns and thus of alternative perspectives and the many benefits that could flow from a paradigm shift.
Perhaps solutions to our national puzzle of anemic educational progress are buried beneath this know-and-do paradigm. What if this pervasive curriculum paradigm is a non-starter when it comes to the large majority of youth learning higher-order thinking, a relatively new goal for education? Perhaps the weakness of the know-do paradigm negates the potential of the innovations in instruction and assessment. The possibility of finding such a deep-seated flaw is tempting enough to justify delving into curriculum theory, a foreign land for many educators.
Cognitive Science Gives Birth to a New Paradigm
The solution to the puzzle is deep within our assumptions about how to categorize what students should learn when the focus is on higher-order thinking. Curriculum models based in the cognitive, developmental and epistemological science of learning propose that the essence of higher order thinking is knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer is an operational definition of higher-order thinking that directly links to classroom practice. Can a student take something learned in one context and apply it to a seemingly unrelated matter at some later time? Can a student extract from a complex, “dirty” phenomenon an underlying, generic principle that could be used to answer questions about very different occurrences?
Cognitive-based models suggest a know-understand-do paradigm. The understand dimension refers to the transferable knowledge that students generalize from one context and then apply to another. A student’s understanding of such knowledge is gauged by the degree to which he can transfer it for flexible problem solving, critical thinking or reasoned decision making. Cognitive science tells us that such transferable concepts are fundamentally different from the factual knowledge that we gain through memory. The dictionary definition of a transferable concept could be memorized, but would hardly enable problem solving or critical thinking based on that concept. Unlike the known facts that change constantly, transferable, conceptual knowledge is timeless and universal.
Perhaps the solution to the puzzle begins with a three-dimensional curriculum paradigm in which learning outcomes are defined in terms of transferable concepts, topic information, and skills – the know-understand-do paradigm. The transferable concepts are, by definition, those ideas that are timeless, universal, and generic to many different questions about many different contexts and topics. They are the “big ideas” of a subject. In operational terms, the many different strategies of higher order thinking (application, analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, etc.) are different strategies for combining transferable concepts with specific topical information to answer a question. So already the paradigm shift has produced something long sought: an operational definition of higher-order thinking (“21st century skills”) that is useful to a classroom teacher.
The know- part of the know-do paradigm must be split into two dimensions: know the facts, understand the concepts. Students have of course been taught concepts in the past, but as more content to be learned alongside facts. The power of the difference is largely lost. If a curriculum is to be designed that enhances higher-order thinking, then the dichotomy between transferable concept and topic should be part of the fabric of the entire teaching and learning endeavor, from curriculum documents to the teacher’s thinking to classroom practice. For teachers to teach higher order thinking, they must be clear in every lesson and unit of study about which concept(s) they are teaching in combination with which topics/contexts. The skill dimension of the curriculum largely addresses how a student will go about creating a product that demonstrably combines the concept(s) with the topic(s) in a particular lesson.
One indication of the promise of this 3-D paradigm would be if it contrasted markedly with present practice. Indeed it does. Present educational practice specifies learning outcomes using two categories: content knowledge (declarative knowledge) and process skills (procedural knowledge). Every subject area has its long-term wars between advocates of these opposing sides, each side seeing it as a zero-sum game: more of one means less of the other. Within a three dimensional model the arguments between the content and process camps are moot. Both sides are necessary as part of the three-dimensional nature of the intellectual transfer of knowledge. The synergy of the three produces large learning efficiencies in each.
Moving from a two-dimensional curriculum world to a three-dimensional one is as profound as it is in geometry, with enormous ramifications inside the classroom and throughout the organizational layers surrounding it. Such profound change is what is needed to move education towards the goal of routinely teaching and learning higher order thinking. Such a change, as well as its implementation, costs little to nothing. It would greatly enhance all present efforts to improve teaching and learning. Higher-order thinking could be objectively assessed. It would suggest novel solutions to knotty problems, provide explanations for past patterns and predictions for future actions. But changing how people think is the most difficult change of all. Shifting paradigms is a challenge.
A Concept Structure is the Linchpin to 3-D Education
The linchpin to a 3-D model of education is the transferable concepts. Here is where a great deal of cognitive science becomes useful, first, to distinguish between bona fide transferable concepts and such ideas as themes, and then to objectively define such transferable concepts using generalizations or enduring understandings– neither an easy task. Every subject area has unique concepts, with only a few overlaps among them. More important, not all concepts are created equal. The concepts within a subject area also differ. These differences can be described and even codified using the patterns of cognitive development of children. Such a cognitively and developmentally based concept structure, or taxonomy of concepts, can be built for each subject area. These concept structures are sparse and robust, with many possible pathways to greater complexity, abstractness and subtlety. They can guide K-12 curriculum development and classroom practice focused on higher order thinking.
What a 3-D Classroom Might Look Like
Within a 3-D classroom the teacher’s goal is to have students learn the concept(s), with the proof being their ability to transfer them to a wide variety of topics and contexts. The specific information about each topic or context is also important, but is learned as part of the greater challenge of answering a question that requires application of conceptual knowledge. A teacher wants her students to practice transferring their conceptual knowledge, so a wide variety of topics and contexts becomes very useful, as does a wide variety of different skills in making the connections. Lesson planning thus accommodates and capitalizes on students’ different backgrounds, interests, and skill levels, not to mention ditto for the teacher herself, as well as the school and community. These differences can be reflected in the choice of topic as well as skill for individual students, while all students can capitalize on each other’s learning through the common concept. On the other hand, different topics are most efficiently learned when they are related to each other through the conceptual framework, creating a natural tendency towards interdisciplinary planning and content mastery. The differences among students become an asset to the entire classroom. Erasing the achievement gaps among different categories of students depends upon such differentiated instruction and honoring the differences among students, while keeping a steady focus on everyone’s ability to transfer a common set of concepts to a wide variety of particular questions.
But all of this is a fantasy unless it can be implemented in the reality of public classrooms today. There needs to be a realistic mechanism for teachers to implement a 3-D curriculum paradigm in their classrooms, and the mechanism must be self-sustaining.
The Teacher’s Curriculum Library is Born of a Need
Of the three questions posed at the beginning of this paper, the final question is one of practicality and sustainability: How can a model not only succeed within the often sobering realties of today’s public schools, but also grow on its own once the seed money is gone?
Today’s teachers do not have the tools required to establish a clear conceptual syllabus and manipulate instructional materials fluidly, in almost real-time. They do not have the time to find and prepare the amount of classroom materials and resources needed to effectively match lessons with students’ many different and changing interests and needs, much less do so within a concept structure. Matching needs with available resources is an information processing problem, and information technology applied to the teaching profession provides some solutions. Teaching is the quintessential knowledge industry and could benefit greatly from modern information technology. The ideal methods of organizing, cataloguing and accessing knowledge for the purposes of learning are through databases, and databases built according to educational criteria that fit the purposes of teaching and learning.
Practical implementation of a 3-D paradigm requires a networked computer database of lessons and materials that are catalogued according to the three dimensions: transferable concept, topical information, and skill. Other major educational criteria, such as grade level or time duration, produce a cataloging system that is finely tuned to both student and teacher needs. Down‑loading lessons chosen according to trees of options, a teacher can focus the curriculum on a concept while accommodating her lessons to any manner of student groupings, needs, interests and skill levels. The focus stays sharp on knowledge transfer, on higher-order thinking. Teachers can effectively and efficiently address mandated content coverage as well as gender and ethnic issues, interdisciplinary planning, heterogeneous grouping, community and parent interests, and many other influences and preferences, all while keeping a steady gaze on the concept(s) and on the students’ ability to address a wide variety of questions using that concept(s). Thus was the beginning need that spawned the Teacher’s Curriculum Library Cooperative.
How Would a Curriculum Cooperative be Organized to Accomplish its Goal?
The longevity and wide-spread adoption of such a curriculum cooperative depend upon it being vast and continuously expanding. The networked database is a two-way street, with uploading as easy as downloading, growing on the contributions of teachers. As a micro-publishing opportunity for teachers’ creative lesson planning and design, the database is a low-threshold, real-time medium for resource sharing, cyber-mentoring, and point-of-need professional development. Yet the very structure of the database is predicated on implementing the 3-D vision of science education that is described in national attempts to improve science education. Using the database requires a focus on each of the three dimensions and a professional decision on each downloaded lesson on how these three dimensions are intended to play out in the student’s mind.
Such a vision is ephemeral without a compelling incentive, beyond professional kudos, for teachers to contribute to the database. That incentive is the individual sales of their lessons and the royalties from schools that download their lessons as part of a site license. Teacher authors may also become cyber-mentors, and as such receive commissions on the work they do counseling teachers as well as on site licenses purchased by them. But the professional courtesy of sharing lessons with needy colleagues is an important part of teaching. Teachers may “purchase” on-going access to the Coop by submitting their own lessons.
The Curriculum Cooperative is precisely that: a not-for-profit worker’s cooperative that distributes any profits to all its members (those educators who contribute lessons). Thus it sustains itself on a revenue stream taken from the substantial funds that schools spend on instructional materials and siphoning it to precisely those teacher-leaders who develop and share lessons that are effective at teaching higher-order thinking.
3-D Education Can Make a Difference
A 3-D paradigm of know-understand-do can produce significant increases in the percentage of students capable of critical thinking, problem solving and considered decision making. For students to be successful in the new millennium they must be able to transfer and apply their knowledge to new situations and contexts. A 3-D curriculum focuses on precisely those concepts that are transferable and on the ability to transfer them. The pent-up potential of the many innovations in classroom instruction and assessment will begin to flow in quantity as curriculum, the third aspect of classroom practice, is refashioned. Thus re-fashioning curriculum theory for the 21st Century should not only bring substantial improvements on its own merits, but it should also bring along with it substantial improvements due to the increased effects of streamlining and meshing instructional and assessment innovations.
A Curriculum Cooperative organization and database is a practical tool for teachers to accommodate to the differences among students and thus reduce the achievement gaps among them. It allows teachers to be creative with their lesson planning at a scale that has never before been possible. Innovative, experienced teachers will be the first to welcome such a database. The incentive to share as well as profit from professional expertise will eventually attract the main cohort of the profession, particularly the large influx of new teachers expected over the next decade. Let’s do it.
