“What if our schools could train students to be better lifelong learners and better adapters to change, by enabling them
to be better questioners?”
- Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas
“What if our schools could train students to be better lifelong learners and better adapters to change, by enabling them
to be better questioners?”
- Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas
From the P21 Framework to the ISTE Standards to the IMLS 21st century skills, all agree that students need to be prepared for innovative, multifaceted problem solving in a global context.
But How? How do educators prepare students for a global society in which they are empowered, creative, collaborative, and complex thinkers? Bransford, Brown & Cocking (2000) reminds us that foundational knowledge is required for transfer of ideas across disciplines and that the foundational knowledge must not be memorized, but rather, it must be understood. Additionally, the transfer of ideas in an active process that takes time and communication of thoughts. Furthermore, Berger (2014) notes that the amount of questions a child asks steeply declines after the age of 5, and while some of this is purely physiological paring of neurons, it is also due to teacher centric education systems that devalue curiosity and emphasize content for content's sake. |
The final piece of the puzzle: technology. Effective teaching in the 21st century occurs at the interface of technology, pedagogy and content (Mishra & Koehler, 2008; Mishra & The Deep-Play Research Group 2012). The key, however, is not to use technology for technology's sake, but rather to "use technology to do entirely new things that simply were not possible before," as Richard Culatta states in his 2013 TEDx Talk.
To interweave technology, pedagogy and content to create a learning environment in which students can construct meaning, transfer ideas, collaborate, innovate, and communicate with each other and with a global community requires the teaching of complex thinking and this is no small task, in fact it is a wicked problem. NOTE: The complete citation to any information contained within this page (where applicable) can be found on the References & Technology Resources page within this website. |
Teaching Complex ThinkingColleges and employers often seek people who can solve problems and think outside of the box. They seek people who are complex thinkers. So what exactly is complex thinking? Why is teaching complex thinking such a wicked problem?
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Our Thoughts & What Others Think...Teaching complex thinking is an extremely challenging problem because it has many facets. If we only listen to and read about the opinions that we agree with, it's not possible to see the problem from a different perspective let alone arrive at a solution. With a wicked problem such as teaching complex teaching, it's imperative to explore different opinions and perspectives and ask others (as well as ourselves), "What do you think?". There is definitely truth to the statement "two heads are better than one" when dealing with the wickedness of this problem.
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A Solution to a
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“Don't just teach your children to read... teach them to question what they read.
Teach them to question everything.”
- George Carlin (Comedian)