Writing as Critical Thought

A Few Thoughts on My First Reading of Engaging Ideas

1)  On page 4 of the text, Bean shares Brookfield's understanding of critical thinking as being composed of two central activities:  "identifying and challenging assumptions and exploring alternative ways of thinking and acting."   Bean continues, on the same page, that writing should not be primarily seen as a communication skill, but rather as the process and product of critical thought.  The most successful writing assignments are problem-oriented.  That is, following Dewey who saw problems as "naturally motivating," Bean quotes Meyers who argues that teachers should begin class with problems.  Because problems are naturally motivating, intriguing, and attractive to us, they can be used to ground our students' engagment in the subject at hand.  Writing becomes the tool of thinking through the problem.  Writing is a tool of thought. 

I really appreciate the two central activities that Brookfield identifies as the essence of critical thought.  In the philosophy classes that I teach both of these activities are the activities that we are engaged in.  To identify a problem as a problem demands that students come to terms with the fact that they are indeed walking around with assumptions about reality, assumptions that frame their understanding of the world.  Recognizing a problem as a problem usually requires that students come to understand their assumptions as assumptions, and then to ask the questions that will allow them to come to terms with what is the case, and what really is at issue. 

I am reminded here of the Socratic method which involves first getting a person to recognize that he or she does not fully understand what it is he or she claims to know, then bringing them to a point of confusion because confusion is a naturally uncomfortable place and if students are then given the tools to work out of this confusion, they will. 

This is where I see how writing plays an essential role.  For me, writing requires a much deeper level of engagement with the material than talking does, or even reading because writing means that I have to process something for myself in order to be able to put it on paper.  But here there are specific types of writing that are more helpful than others.  So in my classes, what I find is very helpful to the students is to give a very structured assignment based on a problem.  For example, the problem of knowledge.  Here the assignment would require the student to first explain what is the problem, what is at issue.  Then the student needs to reconstruct a particular argument given that strives to resolve the problem.  And finally, the student must consider whether this argument does and explain why or why not and offer his or her own resolution. 

But the difficult part of this is sometimes recognizing the problem because this means that a student has to awaken their own consciousness enough to be able to view her own assumptions of reality.  In chapter 2, Bean discusses the French word, "brouillon," to place in disorder or to scramble.  I found this discussion both interesting and helpful.  It has made me rethink the idea of the rough draft as not the plan or roadmap, but the place for the confusion, the place for recognizing and re-cognizing the problem.  I have found that my most successful teaching occurs when students become intellectually stimulated.  This problem approach that Bean writes about in these first two chapters appears to be a great method to engage students, especially in terms of "ill-structured problems," problems that don't algorithmically yield one single right answer, but that demand that a student process it herself and then make her own argument.

Finally, the suggestions on revision have also caused me to rethink my assignments, to incorporate more creative time in the writing process and to emphasize the process and not just the product.

Further Thoughts on Finishing Chapter 2

I will try not to be as windy as my previous post. I continue to be extremely impressed by John Bean and his work. I think he is right on regarding college students' view of knowledge as being about the acquisition of correct information. They see knowledge in absolutist terms--that there is a right and wrong answer and don't see how knowledge is "dialogic, contingent, ambiguous, and tentative" (22). I think it is this place developmentally where students are that makes critical thinking oriented writing assignments so hard.

What I am taking away is the crucial importance of designing writing assignments (both formal and informal) that give students practice in confronting problems and interesting questions. Part of the fault of my approach last semester is that we dived into a formal writing assignment on a problem. What might have made it worse is that I gave them the freedom to choose a problem. Probably, I should have given them different level of problems to encounter and write about before such a large assignment that they then got to choose a problem for. But again, I face one of the paradoxes of writing courses--we do not necessarily have "disciplinary" content unless I have students write about writing. Usually, teachers will engage students in a theme or some other content and teach writing skills as students write about these themes. Writing is a funny subject to teach.

So #1 moral: design problem/question oriented writing assignments that lead students into active inquiry about subjects that may have no easy answer.

I particularly like the quote on page 23: "Good writing assignments produce exactly this kind of discomfort: the need to join, in a reasoned way, a conversation of differing voices."  I also like his summary of the way his History colleague presented assignments: "In all cases, the writing assignment is the same: 'Present an argument that supports, rejects, or modifies the given thesis, and support your response with factual evidence'" (31). I can say that these kinds of writing assignments have been the staple of my English 1302 classes, but not necessarily for my 1301 classes which have started with more expressivist writing.

Moral #2: encourage revision
I actually have worked hard to encourage revision in my classes, but students still don't always revise much. I really like his 15 suggestions for encouraging revision. I just want to know how to "seize" my students with questions.

As I in the more immediate sense work on preparing for Summer I and in the not so distant sense prepare for Fall, I want to think about how I will revamp/revise my assignments.

1st Response to Engaging Ideas

I’ll admit that I haven’t finished chapters 1 and 2 yet, but I want to get an initial response done after starting my reading. I’ve read these chapters in the first edition, and I can say that I am very impressed with the 2^nd edition. I continue to be a “Bean disciple” practically hanging on every word he says. I saw him at a conference last March, and he is the model of an elderly statesman. Tall, lean, attentive, very articulate, but not in a didactic way. I also like seeing the way he has incorporated much new research and scholarship since the first edition.

I guess in this post I want to share where I am with critical thinking in my writing class. I see now that I have used short critical thinking assignments in my Freshman Comp I class for years called “Process Journals” where students write about their writing experience. But I see now that these are open-ended questions that ask students to consider many of the different problems connected to writing: based on what reader’s value, what should we strive to do as writers? What is the connection between speaking and writing? How do you go about getting started on a writing project? My more formal writing assignments, though, have not been so critical thinking oriented but more geared toward learning the writing process and conventions of essay form, development, and the integration of other people’s ideas in writing. The assumption is that I am teaching students practices of approaching writing tasks and strategies for meeting the common requirements of writing tasks that students will take with them and build upon in other classes. Research has shown that these assumptions are not well founded...

I’m facing two deep questions or problems:

1)   What should Freshman Comp I be about? I’ve been reading Anne Beaufort’s College Writing and Beyond, and it brings up the grim realities about freshman comp that for most students the “skills” taught in the class don’t transfer and that most students don’t get or see the larger rhetorical goals we strive to achieve when attempt to create authentic writing tasks. It is always “school” writing, and students don’t get the larger concepts about communication in this setting. Smit and others have argued for the end of composition courses in favor of discipline specific freshmen seminars that would incorporate writing. Students need to write about a subject, and so often comp teachers lasso in subject matter that they have no real expertise in, so it is inexperts writing to inexperts (the blind leading the blind). I see now why so many of my colleagues hold on to Comp II as a literature-based class because literature is our field and we can make the writing in there discipline specific. But then, how many of our students become literature majors?

So my first bigger question is what to make the content of my course to be about? A writing about writing movement has taken hold in comp studies in recent years, and perhaps I need to jump more on board with it. If I am to use critical thinking in my course to get students more engaged and learning more, then what exactly is the content of my course and how then do I use critical thinking writing tasks to promote this learning and engagement?

2)   My second quandary has to do with creating developmentally appropriate writing tasks. Where is the sweet spot for my students? I purposefully redesigned the second half of my Freshman Comp I class based upon my earlier reading of our Bean text, and I quite honestly had horrible results. As I have found in the past with other critical tasks I have designed, I have a few students who dig deeply into the task and accomplish everything I would have hoped for from wrestling with the problem and difficulty that the task presents. But, as happened this semester, I have far too many students who practically fall off a cliff. No matter what sorts of scaffolding I provide, they appear out of their league.

So I’m confronted with how to design the kinds of assignments that are difficult enough to push them to grow, but there is a kind of downhill nature about them—students can feel like there is a path for them to follow and accomplish the task and they can glide down it. I know those two aspects of the assignment seem contradictory, but I want the assignment to be do-able for them, yet challenging. In our context, it also must have a quality of being expandable so that stronger students actually can be challenged.

I’ll close by bringing up something Tripp Pressley mentioned on Thursday at the P-16 meeting at Travis Elementary. He has been involved with K-12 education for years, and involved with these efforts to integrate higher ed and K-12 to promote better college readiness in our students coming in to college. What he said he has seen and learned from his 2 ½ years working with Pathways groups from four different disciplines is that what our young students lack is not so much disciplinary knowledge or skills, but they are weak in the area of cognitive skills: the ability to read critically, to formulate inferences and generate logical conclusions based upon available information. There are more cognitive skills, but I see that the difficulty my students had in confronting a question with no easy answer and then the complex literacy task of investigating this problem was too much for them. It was like I had asked them to run a mile when they had not even been jogging lately.

The conclusion arrived at by this P-16 group, and it may shape my rethinking, is how to design my writing curriculum to develop these cognitive skills. Here are the College and Career Readiness Standards and you can section called “Cross-Disciplinary Standards” p. a59

http://www.thecb.state.tx.us/files/dmfile/CCRS081009FINALUTRevisions.pdf

These cross-disciplinary standards are really pretty darn good as I look at them again. Check them out.

Made it :)  Nice to see you today Lennie!

Welcome to the San Antonio College Critical Thinking and Writing Group

This website will be the collaborative space where members of this professional development group will discuss and collaborate while reading John C. Bean's book Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrated Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom.

Our work together exploring this book will involve four periods of discussion where each member is asked to post to this blog and dialogue with other members. The following prompts will start the discussion during each of these discussion periods.

Discussion Period 1: May 21-31
Topic--After reading Parts 1 and 2, discuss your understanding of what defines "critical thinking." What do you think of Bean's definition? Also, discuss what particular struggles you have had with assigning writing with your students and what particular goals for your own teaching practice you would like to get from reading this book.

Discussion Period 2: June 18 -30
Topic--In the last post, you identified a particular "something" you were hoping to get from the book. Discuss what you are learning from your reading of the book that stands out to you and that seems to be the most meaningful to you in terms of what you were hoping to get from reading the book.

Discussion Period 3: July 21-31
Topic--For this post, I want you to talk about the particular assignment that you will create or revise based upon what you have learned from this book. Describe the assignment and how you will design it and use it in the classroom.

Discussion Period 4: Aug. 15-31
Topic--For this last post, you will share your actual assignment and discuss how it came out. You can also talk about your biggest take away from working with this book and where you would like to continue to grow in your use of writing to promote critical thinking and active learning.