INTELECTUAL RISK TAKING IN CLASSROOMS

‘How can a herd of elephants be transported from one country to another?’ I asked my 4th graders.

Why should we transport them? Came a prompt reply. Let them be where they are born to be.

Use a truck, replied another.

Ship! A ship is the best means of transporting an elephant. Said another.

Why not an aeroplane? Asked another. Most others laughed, and I shouted “keep quiet”. My voice trembled, hands shivered, eyes furious.

Pin drop silence in the class…

A few seconds later…same class… same students…my second question…

Should we keep animals in zoos?

No one answered.

I repeated the question.

Still, no one answered.

It got me pondering when I sat down to write my reflective journal that evening. Why? What went wrong?

It required no brainstorming. The answer was plain. Clear like the clearest stream. “ A safe atmosphere is one of the prerequisites to Thinking hard”. Have you thought about it? Critical thinking- which is so much stressed by all prominent educators, academicians, political leaders and business tycoons- has no place in a fearful atmosphere. If you want your children to be engaged, let them feel they are safe to make mistakes, let them know there are no wrong answers, let them believe that you value their ideas even if some of their classmates laugh at it. Every child is a critical thinker in a safe learning atmosphere. Let me put it in the simplest words I can: encourage intellectual risk-taking in your classes, you are a creator and designer of fine minds (TEACHER) not a disciplinarian primarily. ?

“The quality of student thinking is directly proportional to quality of the questions they are asked.”

Think about it. Questions are the poles/branches on to which ‘thinking’ is tethered. The more thought provoking the question is, the harder will the thinking of the students be. Unfortunately, very many times in the classrooms questions are framed keeping in mind just one purpose: have students learnt (byhearted) the content transacted? This only caters to the bottom of Blooms taxonomy. It’s a teacher’s responsibility (I would say) to frame questions that would enable them to apply, analyse, synthesize and create.

Let me elaborate. Suppose you are teaching a short story to grade 3 students wherein the major character’s name is Ramu and one of the minor character’s name is Raju.. After teaching the lesson, if you ask a student, ‘ what did Ramu tell Raju?’ kind of a question you can only get a fixed answer. But if you ask the same student, ‘What would you have done if you were in place of Ramu?’ You would instantly get a creative response, perhaps much beyond your own imagination.

To cut it short: creative thinking and critical thinking are skills that need to be taught in school.