Guest post by: R.E. Myers, Ed.D.

The best way to help gifted and talented students (and other learners as well) develop advanced creative and critical thinking skills is to encourage them to solve problems that arise naturally in their lives. Each school day—each hour in the classroom—holds innumerable opportunities for teachers to foster critical thinking. A teacher does not have to search for puzzling, thought-provoking situations because life itself is, to a large extent, made up of them.

Developing Advanced Thinking Skills Through Inquiry

Let me illustrate this with a story that was told to me by a friend of mine who is a classroom teacher. John Nevers teaches sixth-grade students in a midwestern school. One afternoon following a brief snowstorm, Mr. Nevers was driving his car along a country road when he noticed something unusual. Two of the three houses that were close together on the left side of the road had roofs that were covered with snow, but the one in the middle had a roof that was bare.

Mr. Nevers mentioned his observation to his class the next morning because the students were often able to come up with explanations that had eluded him. The class had been engaged in experimentation that was suggested in the science textbook, and had therefore done some thinking about how to investigate the cause of events. In addition, on two or three occasions Mr. Nevers had made them aware of the importance of looking for variables that might help explain observed phenomena.

They quickly offered a number of fairly reasonable explanations for the bare roof, among which were:

1. Trees surrounding the house might have prevented the snow from falling on the roof.
2. Heat from within the house might have caused the snow to melt, especially if the house had poor insulation.
3. Someone might have swept the snow off the roof.
4. The snow might have slid off the roof if the roof were quite steep.
5. A wind might have blown the snow off if the house were in a place where the wind could reach it but not the other two houses.
6. Kids might have climbed on top of the house and used up all the snow in a snowball fight.
7. The people who owned the house might have put something over the roof so that snow would slide off.
8. The roof might be made of special material that makes snow melt or won’t let it stick.
9. Someone might have squirted the roof with water. (The students didn’t speculate about the temperature of the air during the squirting.)
10. The sun might have caused the snow to melt on one roof and not on the others if it were not protected from the sun and the other two were in shadows.
11. Snow on nearby tree branches might have melted and then dripped on the roof, causing the snow on the roof to melt.

As a result of this hypothesis-making session, Mr. Nevers became alert to opportunities that would encourage his pupils to analyze information and attempt to see relationships between elements and processes. He had them inquiring into the reasons for icicles melting at one corner of the tall school building and nowhere else on the school grounds; they investigated the reasons for the trees being more brilliant during some autumns than others; and, when a boy became conscious of the difference in the amount of hair on the top of his head as compared to that on his hands and arms, Mr. Nevers asked the class to try to discover possible causes for the uneven distribution of hair on the human body.

Throughout the rest of the school year, Mr. Nevers encouraged his pupils to inquire boldly into events that puzzled them, but he didn’t just urge them to inquire and question. He gave them a set of concepts for dealing intellectually with their experiences.

Important Inquiry Concepts

Here are the concepts he taught, and re-taught, during the school year:

• Causation: Cause manifests a relation of “necessity.” Cause and effect and cause and consequence are related by temporal succession, but temporal succession does not constitute causation.

   

• Change: Change is any difference in position, form, or quality and is always relative to something, some measure, or some standard.

   

• Development: Development refers to any change that has a continuous direction and culminates in a phase that is qualitatively new.

   

• Progress: This concept is properly thought of as a development favorably evaluated from the standpoint of human interest.

   

• Fact: A fact refers to a thing done, an action, event, or deed.

   

• Frame of Reference: A frame of reference is a set of principles that guide one in the selection of a problem, the organization of materials, and the evaluation of findings.

   

The world is full of puzzling experiences, as we are all too aware. By taking those experiences and making them the basis for real-life inquiry, teachers can promote self-directed thinking in ways that no textbook can.

About This Blog Entry's Guest Author
R. E. Myers, Ed.D, began his career in education as an elementary teacher in Santa Cruz County, CA. While pursuing his doctorate, he become a graduate student of the late Dr. E. Paul Torrance. That association led to a variety of experiences in the field of creative thinking. His newest book, Motivational Writing Lessons: Clever, Humorous, and Altogether Creative Lessons, is is available from Prufrock Press.