Looking for patterns.... to Think Critically!

The coming years are more challenging and demanding for our children. We are raising a generation that will compete with robots, in ten or twenty years from now, almost in every working and career sector. Technology is everywhere. Clerks and many human resources will be replaced by robots sooner or later and this will lead to high competition and more demands for higher competencies of the applying candidates. Therefore, the lately rising voices to teach our students the 21st-century skills should be taken more seriously and every educator should spread this alarm and integrate this new paradigm in teaching. Skills such as communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking should not be the side dishes anymore but the main course that we teach anything else through. In schools that teach content and facts, we ended up having the same level of thinking for both grade 4 and grade 12 students with respect to the amount of knowledge that our 12th grader has but cannot apply.

Teaching our students to think critically had become the word-of-mouth lately in schools and everyone is looking for the right techniques and strategies to teach this important skill. A very logical hint to start this would be through linking the skill of critical thinking to the process of thinking that was explained by Piaget in his theory of how people learn “constructing the reality”. Piaget described the learning process and what happens in our mind, when we think about the things around us. He gave the name “schema” to all our previously gained experiences or knowledge which are organized in a certain way that might vary based on each person’s surrounded events and exposure. We can imagine the schema as if it is a drawer for many folders. Each folder with a different title (food, animals, people, furniture…etc). When a person is exposed to a new knowledge he/she will look for some patterns in the schema that can match this new learning. If this new knowledge is matching with the existing patterns of one folder then it will be saved there. This process is called assimilation as the new knowledge has patterns that match the existing knowledge. However, if the new knowledge has no patterns with any of the existing files, then usually a modification will happen to one of the files so the new information can fit in or a new file will be opened. This process is called accommodation.

The reason I explain all of the above is to highlight a very important process that our brain does unconsciously which is “looking for patterns”. And this is exactly where we should start from when we teach our students to think critically. Synthesizing the information is considered as a high level of Bloom’s taxonomy which is close to the top of Bloom’s pyramid. When we synthesize we relate what we see or learn to something that we had learned before. We link or connect it with a previously learned knowledge and again we are looking for patterns. This filing thing can also lead us to another strategy we use in our schools, and I am quite sure that each one of us had used it when we had to memorize a very long historical text or even scientific processes, which is the “concept mapping”. Organizing the information in tables, spider webs, cause and effect charts, or any other graphic organizer will lead us to link this new unfamiliar knowledge to make it more familiar. On the top of these two skills, the awareness is very crucial. Psychologists who had studied human cognitive development explained the importance of “metacognition” in thinking. This term stands for being aware of thinking “the cognition of cognition” or in another word” knowing that you know”. People with high metacognition are usually very aware and persistent to achieve or solve their problems. To improve this awareness, which is a necessity for thinking critically, we need to guide less and allow our students to reflect on their learning experience so they are more self-directed learners.