Maine Learning Technology Initiative

This webinar explored the underpinnings of critical thinking, asking three questions:

Is it developmental?
How do we know when we see it?
Can it be measured?

A website that provides perspective about the developmental aspect is Kids on the Net: Critical Thinking Skills for Web Literacy – An Analysis of What Kids Should Know about Cyberspace. This site explains the development of cognitive, emotional, moral, and psychological issues of different children’s age groups. Their resources show that learning critical thinking should address these issues in a developmental way, building skills step by step.

There are quite a few different models/definitions/attributes of critical thinking that attempt to make it possible to observe it in action. Every description depended on the discipline it came from, i.e. psychology, philosophy, educational theory, etc. Here are some of the exemplary websites:

Discussion and Model of Critical Thinking from Ed Psyc Interactive
Model of Information Seeking and Critical Thinking from Baltimore County Public Schools
Partnership for 21st Century Skills and Critical Thinking

How are we to deal with the issue of standardized testing and the teaching of critical thinking? In an ERIC abstract (ED312622) of “Literacy and Critical Thinking: The NAEP Literacy Studies and What We Are Not Teaching about ‘Higher Reasoning Skills,” by Craig Walton (1989,) the author states that the elements of synthesis or summary, analysis or problem solving, argumentation, and experimentation are skills that seem to be lacking in students. He sees a correlation of that lack with educators’ ignorance of those higher skills and how to teach them. That was quite an indictment, and worth challenging.

Socratic questioning is a way of helping students face the issue of critical thinking. The questioning can be used first by the teacher, and as the students start to become more aware of  how the questions help their thinking, the students can begin questioning each other and themselves. This website from Northern Illinois University Consortium for Problem-Based Learning provides the foundational precepts and a matrix of exemplary questions.

Web 2.0 has been called the Read/Write Web. That is because you become an active participant, not just a passive viewer – You interact with the information. How does this help critical thinking? By the fact that people make comments. All of the following websites provide examples of ways that teachers can provide students examples of commenting that they can see, critique and respond to.

Comments about places to stay:
http://www.tripadvisor.com/

A “safe” current event website that kids can practice making comments:
http://tweentribune.com/

International Movie DataBase – using movie reviews and forums as examples of critique:
http://www.imdb.com/

Going beyond the Wikipedia articles and looking at the discussion and history of the content:
http://www.wikipedia.org/

Responding to visual examples:
http://www.flickr.com/

Commenting both textually and visually:
http://voicethread.com/#home

Finally, any blog or wiki could be used to help kids learn and practice discourse and critique, as well as the Gallery, Discussion and Chat in Studywiz.

Measuring critical thinking can be a wicked problem, depending on what you are looking for. Perhaps you can develop small rubrics based on your deconstruction of pertinent elements of critical thinking. In that manner students could review or make comments based on individual aspects of critical thinking skills on which they are focused. Here is a higher education rubric for critical thinking that can be used as a reference for ideal goals. And here is another that has been used for higher education and business with a rationale as well. An accompanying document from Insight Assessment proposes that there are dispositions as well as skills involved in critical thinking and provides self-reflective questions.

Just to be provocative, here is a quote from a recent article to think about:

“DEMOCRATIC THINKING REQUIRES THE PURSUIT OF MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES
Much as Darwin’s theory of natural selection depends on genetic variation, any
theory of democracy depends on a multiplicity of ideas. It is the responsibility of
the citizenry, the media, and the schools to safeguard the expression of those
ideas. Schools have particular responsibilities in this regard. Healthy critical
analysis is one hallmark of a mature democracy, and educators have a responsi-
bility to create learning environments that help to realize these ideals. There are
many varied and powerful ways to teach children and young adults to engage
critically – to think about social policy issues, participate in authentic debate
over matters of importance, and understand that intelligent adults can have
different opinions. Indeed, democratic progress depends on these differences.”

“No Child Left Thinking: Democracy at Risk in Canadian Schools,” Joel Westheimer; CANADIAN EDUC ATION , Spring 2010; Canada Education Association; p 5-8

Thanks to everyone who attended this webinar, the last in the Writing Process Lens for this school year. In this session we talked about the last stage of the writing process, publishing. We discussed why we must give students a purpose for writing other than to complete an assignment and an audience for their writing other than the teacher. In our MLTI classrooms, with 1-to-1 computing, students have a vast array of choices of ways to display their work and share it with the public. I demonstrated some examples of ways students can use the software on their MLTI MacBooks for publishing and suggested some online opportunities as well. Click on the Webcasts – Archives tab at the top of this page to find the links for the recordings to review the discussion of Pages, Keynote, iPhoto, and ComicLife. Here are links to  web resources mentioned in the webinar:

Web Publishing

• KidPub
• MidLink Magazine
• Write Source
• WriteFix
• Teen Ink

Print Publications

• Stone Soup
• Cicada Magazine
• Creative Kids

Fan Fiction

• Top Ten Fan Fiction Web Sites
• Harry Potter Fan Fiction

Jim Moulton’s blog post on Publishing Student Writing

Some resources contributed by participants:

• Lulu for self-publishing
• The Best Book on Northern Brown Snakes – a Lulu example created by a 2nd grade class
• Star Wars – fan fiction site
• Invasion Comic – an example of a publication created in Comic Life by middle school students
• MagCloud – another site for self-publishing
• Vermont’s Young Writers Project

Thoughts about assessment:

• Establish criteria before starting the writing project
• Checklists and rubrics
  • PBL Checklist creator
  • Rubistar
• Writing portfolios – look for evidence of improvement and growth
• Self-assessments and peer assessments – to self-assess effectively students must care about their work

Thanks once again to all the participants in this series of webinars. I know I have learned a lot from the participants and I hope we will continue to learn from each other.

Made on an iPad by Ann Marie Quirion Hutton

One of the most exciting changes brought about by the advent of technology in our classrooms is the abundance of tools for publishing student writing. As a veteran teacher, I remember the days (and it doesn’t seem so long ago) when I struggled to find ways students could share their writing with someone other than me. Publishing gives students a purpose and a real audience for their writing and when students write for a reason other than to get a grade, they write better.

This week’s webinar, Publishing and Assessing, will take a look through the writing process lens at how to help students finalize their work and share it. Our MLTI MacBooks have many applications that can help students illustrate and display their writing in professional-looking products that can be printed or shared digitally. We’ll begin by exploring the many templates available in Pages and then move on to look at other iWork and iLife applications students can use to turn their writing into multimedia products.

Of course, the internet offers many opportunities for student publishing and we’ll discuss how teachers can help students publish for a real-world audience using the many web tools that are available. We’ll also take a look at sites that accept student writing for publication.

We began a discussion a few months ago about how to assess student writing. We’ve talked about formative assessment and how feedback can help students with revision and we will expand that topic this week to include some assessments that look at a writing piece as a whole. As always, your ideas, experiences, and resources will be an important part of this webinar so please come prepared to share.

Please join us this Thursday at 3:15 or 7:15 pm. Click on the WebCasts tab at the top of this page for information about accessing this webinar and for a link to the registration page.

Thanks to everyone who attended Thursday’s webinars and special thanks to Julie Canniff, Sara Needleman, and Lisa Hogan for their contributions to the conversation about giving and getting feedback. Below are some links and notes related to topics we discussed.

The Effect of Feedback on Learning

• Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black, Inside the Black Box
• Kappan article, “Working Inside the Black Box.” The full text of this article is available as a PDF through MARVEL. Authenticate to MARVEL first and then click here.
• Susan Brookhart, How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students

Evaluative vs. Descriptive Feedback

• Product descriptors and rubrics (highlight for descriptive feedback)
• For copies of documents that Julie and Sara shared, contact me and I will forward your request to them.
• Anne Davies – Assessment for Learning

Establish Criteria

• 6+1 Traits of Writing
• Look at examplars
• Have students contribute to building a rubric (Jill Spencer says, “Also, I’ve found that taking time to reflect with questions like…Why is it important to use criteria? Why is quality work important? These questions begin to help students see the purpose for their efforts.”
• Rubistar

Teaching students to give feedback

• Laurie Walsh’s document, How do you comment on a classmate’s writing? (Thanks, Laurie!)
• Give kids sentence starters based on your criteria or model like 6+1 Traits
• Create a culture where kids care about their work and agree on criteria that is not personal but that really describes high-quality work.

Ways to give feedback digitally

• NoteShare – Voice Memo
• Pages (and other word processing programs) – use callouts in different colors
• Use markup and annotation tools in Preview for PDFs.
• Some Studywiz activities are good for feedback.
• Lisa Hogan suggests using callouts to have students self-assess. They use callouts to point to evidence that they have met the criteria for high-quality work.

Online programs that give students feedback

• MyAccess
• Criterion®
• Class Blogs
• Online writing sites where students can submit writing

Recordings of the webinar will be available in a few days on the Webcasts Archive page of this blog. Please join me again on February 25 when we will talk about drafting, revising and editing.

Image by Terry Hart licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.