Fifty Strategies to Boost Cognitive Engagement: Creating a Thinking Culture in the Classroom

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Rebecca Stobar. Dr. Stobaugh is an associate professor at Western Kentucky University and a fellow Solution Tree author, a former middle school principal and teacher. She's the author of six books on critical thinking, including her new book, 50 Strategies to Boost Cognitive Engagement, Creating a Thinking Culture in the Classroom, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:40] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:42] SPEAKER_02:

Rebecca, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:43] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks. Glad to be here.

[00:45] SPEAKER_02:

I wonder if we could first get into a fairly thorny issue that probably is settled in the minds of our listeners, but that parents might wonder about and that I feel like we should ask ourselves at the outset. about critical thinking. And that is, is it really true that critical thinking is a teachable skill? Because I think as kids, we probably all had teachers who didn't really think of critical thinking as something that they could empower their students to all do, like you have the bright kids who can do it, and everybody else probably can't. And hey, why don't we split them up into separate classes? You know, we had all these ideas in, you know, earlier decades, that maybe critical thinking was not actually a teachable skill.

[01:24]

But your work centers on Just that opposite assumption, right, that critical thinking is something that we can and should teach and assess. So what is that case? You know, what is the rationale that this actually is something that we can convey to students and develop in students?

[01:39] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. This is a teachable skill. I think one of the challenges teachers have sometimes is when we work with students on critical thinking, we maybe give them a task that is above their level of where we've practiced and students aren't successful. And then the teacher reverts to maybe some lower level memorizing or things, tasks like that. But the research tells us that students of all demographics can be successful with critical thinking when given the tools and the scaffolding to make sure they are able to do those kind of things. And the book outlines strategies at all different levels and some techniques and some tools to enable teachers to quickly grab those and utilize those to support student success.

[02:25] SPEAKER_02:

been thinking a lot about the potential misapplications of things like Bloom's taxonomy and the potential abuses of higher order questions that administrators sometimes cause. And I don't know if you're seeing this, Rebecca, but I'm seeing a mini epidemic in our profession of administrators getting the idea in their heads that higher order questions are good, lower order questions are bad. And by golly, when I get into your classroom, I better see higher order questions or something is wrong. And I better not see lower order questions or you're dooming your students to lives of failure. You know what I mean? Like, I feel like there's a big misconception there.

[02:59]

So help us out with that.

[03:01] SPEAKER_00:

So you're saying a couple of things, this lack of scaffolding. And I would also say when we get to higher levels of critical thinking, I have encountered this similarly with a school that I was working with that was in need in Kentucky. They were not successful, low performing. And so the district was going to do an audit and go through and look at what the teacher was saying. They were going to script the questions of what the teacher is saying. And as I was working with the school, I had a little bit of a confrontation with the principal because we discussed that and explained that it's not always what the teacher's saying.

[03:38]

It could be tasks. When you get to those higher levels on Bloom's Taxonomy, especially at the analyze, evaluate, and create level or on DOK levels of three or four, We notice that those tend to be not what the teacher is saying, but it's task oriented. So perhaps it might be on the PowerPoint or it could be a handout, but those kind of tasks require students to read them several times. There might be case study. There might be research that goes along with it. It's high in cognitive complexity and a teacher, it would not be a good thing for a teacher just to simply read that out and say, okay, go do that work.

[04:18]

Part of that thinking is parsing out that information, analyzing it and synthesizing that. And so it probably would not be just what the teacher would be saying that you would look at. And I want to add on a big misconception that I see with teachers. They get a hold of these charts with verbs, And they might pick a verb that's really sound sophisticated, like synthesizing. And they might say, synthesize this text. Well, students really don't even know what you're wanting them to do when you say that word.

[04:51]

And a lot of times what they're really wanting them to do is summarize. It's not really a high level skill. So they get a hold of verb charts and use them incorrectly because they don't really understand the Bloom's levels or the DOK levels. And that's one of the things in the book. I break down each of the Bloom's levels. And Anderson and Crathall, when they did a revision of that in 2001, they identified some cognitive structures within each one of those that help delineate the expectations of those at each level.

[05:25]

And when you look at those and in the book, I break down with examples of student products or questions that could be each level. I think teachers gain a deeper understanding. And once they gain a deeper understanding, they don't tend to misapply those taxonomies. So at a surface level, just looking at the words, remember, understand, analyze. teachers often use that incorrectly because they don't have a deeper understanding. And so that's what I do a lot of times with districts is come in and help them really deeply dive into that to understand what is it required at each one of those levels.

[06:03] SPEAKER_02:

Well, that sounds expensive. And I got this thing off of Pinterest that tells me everything I need to know. So, you know, I think there's this temptation to just kind of download something off the Internet and say, well, I've got the verbs. I want to do higher order. So I'm going to use the higher order verbs. And I feel like that foundational understanding, like teachers, you know, get the sense pretty quickly that they need that if they're going to use this effectively.

[06:26]

I'm not convinced yet that administrators are all on board with understanding that. So I wonder if we want to go back to kind of the starting point of your vision for a cognitively engaging classroom, a thinking based classroom, because I feel like in a lot of places, Bloom's taxonomy has kind of become a goal in itself, a buzzword in itself. And like, all right, let's just climb that ladder together. push for higher order questions because it's good and we forgot why and we forgot what it's supposed to look like and how it works, but we know we need to get there. Let's climb back down the ladder for a minute and talk about your vision of a cognitively engaging and thinking-based classroom.

[07:02] SPEAKER_00:

Well, one thing I say a lot is whoever is the worker is the learner. And when we look at classrooms, who is working? A lot of times we go into classrooms, the teacher is talking, doing a lot of talking in front of that. And we know that research indicates this is also true in many of the classrooms across the U.S. Even though things have changed, we see a lot of teacher talk.

[07:26]

In fact, I've seen teachers recently give students a stopwatch and say, I have eight minutes on what I'm going to share with you and then we're going to be doing work. So instead of, we all often stopwatch the students, but we don't stopwatch ourselves and watch how much are we talking about. So I think in a thinking classroom, the students are being probed. They are engaged in the learning. And it's not just a ping pong match between the teacher and the student, but it is more of those small discussions. We have a lot of group discussions with those coming out to a whole group.

[08:03]

And we're drawing conclusions and inferences. There's always value for the lower level skills. We don't want to forget that there are some things that we need to know. But I think the world has changed. When I grew up, being smart meant you could answer Jeopardy questions and you could name isolated facts about some international city and know who the leader was. That's not very impressive today.

[08:31]

I can, within seconds, use my phone to get that basic information. So I think what we're saying is we identify some key points in the curriculum. What do we really want students to know? And how can we build on that understanding? How can we make sure we're moving beyond just a basic remembering facts and understanding to analyzing and evaluate that information? And with every concept, we might not work all the way up to create.

[08:57]

That's another misconception I have with teachers. They think that if I teach something, It's always appropriate to go all the way up the blooms level with that content. Perhaps not, perhaps not. It could depend on the grade level, what's expected of that particular grade level, and certain concepts are more appropriate at certain levels. So understanding that teachers should think about that as they do instructional planning as what is appropriate and plan for that. But always going back to thinking about as far as cognitive engagement, who is the worker in that classroom?

[09:34]

Our work as teachers is in the planning piece. And that's the reason for the book that I wrote is I've written others and teachers kept on saying to me, We need some tools. We need some tools. Give us something. And so each section of the book is outlined to Bloom's taxonomy, starting at the understand level with strategies at each one of those levels and different examples from each of the content areas. to help support their understanding of what that would look like in different content areas and at different levels, K-12.

[10:06] SPEAKER_02:

I think the idea of whoever is doing the most work is doing the most learning is so true. And it's one that we need to remember as administrators that if we are giving feedback to teachers, we need to be careful that we're not just kind of mentally replanning the lesson, you know, as if we were going to teach it, but actually engage teachers in reflection and thinking about their own work that they've already done. And I appreciate your statement that much of the work of teaching does happen at the planning stage. As administrators, we like to write down what we see and hear. And the planning, that could have been weeks or months ago. And it's pretty hard for us to get a sense of what that looked like.

[10:41]

But so much of what happens in the classroom depends on that. So much depends on good planning. These are not the kinds of questions that we can think up on the fly, is what I've heard from other experts on higher order questioning and things like that, that really the planning is critical. And I wanted to ask next, if we could, about the relationship between those different levels of content, because I've already made fun of the idea, you know, that everything should be a higher order question and that there's no place for lower order questions. What role does the teacher's instructional purpose play in determining how high the order a question to ask because I feel like that's something that you know if we're going to recognize that it shouldn't just always be higher order questions it shouldn't also just be if an administrator shows up ask a higher order question so where does that role of the teacher's purpose for the lesson come in

[11:35] SPEAKER_00:

I'm a standards girl, so I'm going to go back to that. You know, what do your standards say? Where are you supposed to achieve? What is the level you're going for? You know, we look at the standards and we need to plan back. We need to build that understanding.

[11:50]

Then we would ratchet it up as it makes sense. That's how people learn. It's a learning progression. I think that's very important and looking at the standards that can guide that discussion of where on Bloom's level do we need to be with this. Understanding on Bloom's level, the cognitive dimensions under understanding, there's actually more under that than any other level. Because building that understanding is a key piece for higher level skills.

[12:17]

The problem that I see sometimes in classrooms is we leave a lot of things at the remember and understand. We don't get beyond, but yet the standards and the state expectations on national assessments often aren't there. You know, they're not just asking you to summarize information. They're asking them to break apart, analyze, find in a math problem. What's the information that's not relevant to the task? When I was a principal, we had a math team.

[12:46]

They were great teachers, but I didn't saw the scores. They were very low. So the first thing I did was visit all these classrooms to see what was going on in the math classrooms. Good teachers. But I noticed that a lot of our questions were like 2x equals 10. And then the state assessment had things about gardening.

[13:06]

And then you're building a garden. And there are all these things about tulips and daffodils. And you want to plant all this stuff. And that's not what we were seeing in our classes. And so the math department did a great job of coming together and saying, OK, we need to practice those apply level skills. We need to have them do problems with 2x equals 10.

[13:28]

But we also have responsibility to make sure we're doing those word problems. And I think sometimes that's a problem is we have assessments, state assessments or national assessments that are tested at a higher level of critical thinking than what classroom assessments are and that gap. causes issues. Students get nervous. They've not seen those kind of things. They're not prepared for that, and we need to reverse that.

[13:54]

We want our classroom assessments to mimic those and maybe even drive just a little bit higher so that they always, if they thought about a concept at a higher level, they can always ratchet down and do something easier. But if they haven't been challenged to analyze something and they get that on a critical assessment, there's a high probability that they won't be prepared for that.

[14:16] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and I think that's especially vexing for us when we look at some of these assessment items and realize that some of these very complex higher order skills are being assessed through multiple choice questions in a lot of cases. Like I look at some of my kids' reading comprehension work that they bring home, and the question will ask for very sophisticated cognitive work at, say, a second or third grade level. And the question format is multiple choice. And I think that goes against our natural kind of indoctrination as educators that multiple choice is just recall. You know, we don't adequately prepare kids for that choice. reality that they're going to have to understand something complex, do something cognitively complex with it, and then bring that back to, you know, like in our, I think back to our experience as kids probably was that multiple choice questions was like, what year did the civil war start?

[15:09]

They were very fact oriented and that format can really throw us off. And I know a lot of your professional work, a lot of your research focuses on assessing critical thinking. So I wonder if we could just go through the different levels of Bloom's and talk about what assessing critical thinking looks like, because I feel like that's an essential first step if we're going to know that we are actually teaching critical thinking. I know you have a number of different books around assessing critical thinking, but at a basic level, how do we start to do that?

[15:36] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, remembering is parroting back. I think of that as a copy machine. You are saying exactly what somebody else has told you, whether that's through a book or what the teacher said, you're parroting back. There's not a lot of change in what you've said versus how you got the information. Understanding is a second level of Bloom's taxonomy. It requires some kind of mental shift within your mind.

[16:01]

There is a change. It is your own. You own that information in a different way. I could summarize the information. I might transfer the information into a picture form or paraphrase it. I might give examples of the information that are not in the text.

[16:18]

I am doing at an understand level, my own thinking. I have something to base it on, but I'm building upon what has been provided for me in some ways. The third level is apply level. It is more of a procedural skill. A lot of math concepts are almost all situated in the apply level. I teach you one, two steps, one, two, and three, and you're repeating it.

[16:41]

However, we do find some of those skills in other content areas. For example, in English, when they teach them a way to write a five paragraph essay or how to structure a paragraph, there's a procedure on things that you would do that would be very much similar. Or maybe in a social studies class, I teach you how to analyze a political cartoon. And so I break down, these are the questions that you would answer after each one. So when you're repeating a procedure, that would be more on the apply level. Analyze, I think of that as more like a microscope.

[17:14]

We're digging it out. Often there's irrelevant information and it's a larger body of text. So if I gave you a paragraph that's not analyzed, I might have a larger body of information. I might have several case studies. I think of this as an analyzed question a student would not raise their hand within 20 seconds to be able to answer. If a hand goes up and you think it's analyzed, you probably have a low-level question.

[17:42]

So at an analyzed level, I need to read through it. I'm going to read the prompt. I might read it several times. I might need to go through the information and highlight what's relevant in a math problem. I might have a wordy math problem with things that are irrelevant, kind of like my daffodils and tulips example earlier. There might be all of that in there where I have to figure out which numbers that I would need to apply and what mathematical operations would work.

[18:07]

in this particular situation. Evaluating, we're critiquing information. We're looking at our logical inferences drawn from what this is. Is it accurate? The issue of fake news and all that. How are we looking at websites and determining if they are good websites for us to review or a journal article or any other information?

[18:28]

It's also judging the quality of something. So I might say, you know, here are three different essays which would you give an A to as meeting all the criteria on the rubric? So they could be judging it against a rubric or some kind of checklist, self-evaluation, peer evaluation that often falls in the evaluate level. And finally, on the create level, you are brainstorming new ideas to an issue, a problem. You're coming up with something That while some ideas might be out there, you are innovating in some way. You're coming up with a new idea that would be slightly different.

[19:09]

And in this kind of thing and create level, often it's more projects. It will be the same for an assignment. You might have very different examples, very different products that would meet the criteria on the rubric, but yet be acceptable. For example, I might say. I want President Washington, George Washington, to run against Trump in this next campaign. And you're the campaign advisor and you must help George Washington be able to beat Trump in the next campaign.

[19:38]

What would it take? What would you need? What would be your plan of action? So there might be different plans of action that still might be still great and wonderful, but they might look very different. So different products, I'm judging the quality of that and producing something at the end. So that's kind of the layout of the structure of Bloom's Taxonomy in a succinct way.

[20:00] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I know you've written, again, five other books about this if people want to dive in more on the assessment question. In terms of the task that students are asked to do, I appreciate your comment about creating projects. Often when we're at those very highest levels, it's about actually putting together a product that demonstrates that understanding of And you mentioned earlier that for math, a lot of what we're asking students to do is, did you say at the understand level or the analyze level? Take us back to the math problems.

[20:31] SPEAKER_00:

Well, at the apply level, it would be questions like 2x equals 10. You know, your basic numbers where you're showing them how to do it and they're replicating that. Sometimes the word problems in math could be at the analyze level. I've seen also math being done at the evaluate level where there's a complex problem and they have to figure out which solution arrived at the answer in the best way using the most sophisticated math processes. So they're looking at student work and they're judging student work. So that could be at the evaluate level.

[21:04]

And of course, at the CREATE level, they would be using the math to maybe solve a problem that would be unique to the classroom or the school. Often problem-based learning, project-based learning works very well hand-in-hand with a CREATE level task. Very authentic, real-world learning.

[21:22] SPEAKER_02:

So the book is 50 Strategies to Boost Cognitive Engagement, Creating a Thinking Culture in the Classroom. Dr. Rebecca Stobar, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[21:32] SPEAKER_00:

Loved it.

[21:33] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.