Fifth Class

Finally, we have approached the topic of how to give writing assignments that encourage students to think. I have been conscious over my short time teaching of whether or not I am asking/encouraging students to use critical thinking skills and to use higher order thinking. It is hard as a new teacher to employ these ideals as I spend a lot of time just conveying the content and I spend a lot of time mastering the content that I am teaching as sometimes it is the first time I am teaching something. Knowing something and teaching something are so incredibly different that as a new teacher I find myself putting a lot of time and effort into just designing and delivering the content of a course.

But, I have made small attempts to start to incorporate critical thinking into my content by occasionally taking a few moments in lecture to ask 'why' questions. Sometimes this works and we have a nice discussion where several students participate and other times I hear crickets.

I've also, just recently, tried to incorporate short cases into class and this is something on Bean's list of ten strategies for designing critical thinking tasks (Bean Ch7). Case teaching methodology is huge and wonderful and I certainly aspire to fully use it someday. But, for now, I borrowed the story part of case teaching and the open ended question style of case teaching to give my students a 'design your own experiment' assignment. Instead of just stating the problem or instructing them to : design an experiment to test enyzmatic activity in over-the-counter digestive supplements, I gave them a real life problem to solve. A story about a friend with symptoms that included dialog, some key observations, and an open ending. It was a huge success. Students really go into it. They submitted rough drafts of their background and protocols and got feedback before they carried out their experiments. They were required to gather data and information on the supplements and make a decision (some even withheld judgement and called for more data like good critical thinkers!) on whether or not a supplement was appropriate for their friend.

I like some of Bean's other suggestions like abstract writing and data-provided assignments. I've always wanted to give an assignment where I provide everything but the abstract and have students learn to write one. My fear is that inevitably if I give this assignment out of class, students will use google to find the paper. So, I have been wanting to generate something original as an exercise in abstract writing. After reading Bean, I could be very ambitious and do more than just the abstract--I could provide data and work on writing other parts of a paper. I'd like to spend some time soon preparing such an assignment.