Developing thinking skills in the young learners' classroom (Part 1)

Developing Thinking Skills in the Young Learners’ Classroom

by Herbert Puchta

Looking into a classroom Christopher isn’t easy to teach. He finds it very difficult to focus his attention for more than a few minutes. Even when he’s enthusiastic about something, he loses interest in it as soon as he is supposed to tackle a task that is only slightly more challenging than he can easily cope with. We are not talking difficult tasks at all – it’s just that he seems to want to avoid failure, and therefore quickly loses interest in whatever he is supposed to be doing.

In consequence, he doesn’t achieve the results he would like to achieve, and he gets frustrated. He’s also quite impulsive – he reacts without thinking, especially when he’s annoyed with one of his classmates. Then he can become quite angry, and even aggressive. When I try to talk to him afterwards, he apologises, but it seems that he doesn’t really understand that he gets himself and others into trouble by not thinking of what kind of consequences his behaviour might have.

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Sophia is the complete opposite. She’s calm and focused, and when she gets interested in something, there’s nothing that can stop her, not even when she doesn’t know how to do things. She’ll ask me questions, and she tries hard to understand my answers. If she doesn’t know how to solve a task immediately, she’s persistent and keeps trying. I can feel that she really wants to learn, and that she believes she can succeed in the task even if things get difficult.

So she’s one of the best learners in my class. Sophia’s also very popular with her classmates, both boys and girls. I think that’s to do with the fact that she’s a good listener.

She’s interested in others, asks them questions, and helps them when she notices that they need something. It’s good to have her in the class, as well, because she’s got a good sense of humour and surprises me and the other kids frequently with her creative ideas.

If you are a teacher of young learners, then you’ve most probably come across children like Christopher and Sophia. And you may have wondered what it is that makes them so different from one another.

An easy explanation would be that Sophia’s just much smarter than Christopher, and hence achieves better results. In consequence, she might be more motivated to learn and is also much more efficient in dealing with other people. Christopher on the other hand, one might think, is less talented. He doesn’t have what it takes to become a good learner. He lacks the skills that Sophia shows, so things for him just don’t go as smoothly as they do for her.

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What makes successful people?

Even extremely successful people are not successful because they were born geniuses; top entrepreneurs, artists, sports professionals and inventors are not usually born as peak performers. It seems that what sorts out successful people from the less successful ones is a high level of engagement, an interest in ‘getting it right’, patience and persistence. They seem to have the drive to keep trying in spite of failure, and they show a non-judgemental attitude towards their own mistakes – in other words their self-image doesn’t suffer when they don’t immediately find an answer to a problem. ‘This is not easy. I need to think so I can solve this problem,’ said Sophia when confronted with a challenging task. ‘But that’s fun. Thinking and finding answers to problems is fun.’

This is not to say that top performers might not have some natural talent that makes it easier for them to excel in whatever it is they are doing. But talent without persistence often leads to long-term failure or at least underachievement, whereas high levels of engagement and persistence can to a certain extent make up for a lack of talent, and over a longer period of time lead to positive learning experiences, a growing sense of achievement and … success!

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Thinking requires development The development of cognitive capabilities in many ways follows the same principles. Robert Fisher, a leading expert in developing children’s thinking skills, says that thinking is not a natural function like sleeping, walking and talking. Thinking, he stresses, needs to be developed, and people do not necessarily become wiser as they become older. Some children are lucky because they learn important thinking skills from their parents or other people. This works especially well when parents take the child seriously, engage them in meaningful conversations, inspire their imaginations, ask them questions that get them to think and so forth. Other children are less lucky as they do not have such a nurturing environment that fosters their cognitive development. However, both children from brain-friendly families and others who come from less supportive contexts, will profit significantly from a teaching methods that takes the development of their thinking skills seriously.

The philosopher Matthew Lipman noticed a lack of reasoning skills in many children, and started a movement to involve children in philosophy, an approach that has spread to many countries of the world. He used the following metaphor to stress the need to systematically develop a child’s thinking skills: when we compare a car mechanic with an average person who could never repair their own car, the difference is not that the car mechanic knows how to use tools such as a hammer, a screwdriver, pliers, or a wrench. Most average people know how to do that too, yet they would fail hopelessly if they were to try to repair their car engine. What’s different between them and the car mechanic is not the knowledge of how to use a hammer, a screwdriver or a wrench. What the car mechanic knows, and what average people don’t, is how to sequence the use of these tools in a way that leads to the planned outcome. The car mechanic knows what they are doing, and why they are doing it; and when what they are doing does not give them the planned outcome, they keep trying to come up with alternative strategies that are bound to lead to eventual success.

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Applying thinking skills The same is true of cognitive skills. So-called higher-order thinking skills – such as problem-solving – are not completely different skills from the lower-order ones, but are merely a combination of those basic skills used in a specific way. When we try to solve a problem, we first of all need to observe carefully what the ‘symptoms’ of the problem are. We need to use our senses in an accurate way to do that, focusing on what we can, for example, hear and see. We need to have the ability to focus our attention over a longer period of time, and we need to set ourselves a goal. We need creative skills and the ability to look at a problem from different perspectives, and we need to think carefully what outcomes a planned chain of actions might possibly result in. We need to come up with alternative strategies if what we are planning to do turns out to be the wrong strategy. When we have finally decided on what to do and how to go about it, we need to be able to evaluate what we have done and, if necessary, go back and undo what we’ve done or apply an alternative strategy.

When children get used to systematically applying their thinking skills, they will go through positive learning experiences, and they will gradually learn to enjoy more challenging tasks. As a result, their self-confidence will grow.

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