Archeem, an African-American student in my seventh-grade social studies class, thought otherwise. For my first six months in the classroom, Archeem (a pseudonym) and I were at loggerheads. He was not good at what Denise Pope-Clark calls “doing school."1 And I was not yet a skilled teacher. I assumed that by offering Archeem something beyond the superficiality of rote memorization and regurgitation, he would work hard, learn more, and enjoy school. Archeem and many of his classmates, on the other hand, figured that I was a newbie who should be challenged.
My first mistake? I figured that as a teacher, I got to dream up the background material for a script that would then unfold within the humane and educative conditions I had put in motion. New teachers often believe they get to write the script, set the stage, and raise the curtain. But students know something that only later becomes evident to the adult in the room: The play has already started. I was entering in Act III. In Acts I and II, the plot was established, the parts cast, the good guys and bad guys already chosen, the narrative arc long since determined.
Let me give an example about the difficult-to-break narratives already in place before a teacher even sets foot in the school building. Ask any group of children what happens when a substitute teacher comes to the classroom. More often than not, it’s mayhem. Children move the desks around, change their names, and inform the substitute teacher that their “real” teacher allows them to wander around the room whenever they want and to eat their lunch at 9:15 a.m. In short, they make the life of the substitute a temporary hell. Substitute teachers are clueless and have no idea how to teach, goes the script. Socrates himself could arrive in a fifth-grade classroom for a day. It wouldn’t matter. The play is already in motion.
Narratives, however, can be rewritten. It takes time, patience, and creativity. Back in my first year of teaching, I guessed (having read his school file) that in Archeem’s internalized narrative, school was mostly about humiliation. It was the teacher’s job to catch him out on not knowing things, and Archeem’s job to try to avoid those encounters. I imagined that he recognized the usefulness of acquiring some of the skills and knowledge being taught in school, but that in a larger sense, the connection between what went on in school and his life outside of school was tenuous at best. In those first few months of teaching, neither Archeem nor I knew this yet, but we were both going to find our way outside the dominant narrative of school. And I was going to learn a thing or two about teaching students to think critically about the world around them.
What Archeem Taught Me About Teaching Critical Thinking
After a week of classes in which we had discussed the civil rights movement, racism, and prejudice in America, all of my students were duly outraged at the injustices perpetrated against black people throughout history. Students couldn’t believe the folly of thinking that someone’s intelligence, skills, or rights could be judged by the color of his or her skin. They sat riveted by excerpts from Eyes on the Prize and speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. I quickly became aware that although the students would criticize a kind of racism that was already widely reviled in the United States and elsewhere, they failed to carry that critique or moral commitment to any other sphere. I witnessed African-American students calling Hispanic students “spic.” I saw Archeem and his friend yell “faggot” at a student who didn’t share their athletic prowess in dodge ball. When I asked students if they thought people were still pre-judged for superfluous reasons, they didn’t know.I knew something was not working, and I had an idea.
Two weeks earlier, various cities had been observing Gay Pride Week. It was highly controversial, even in New York, and certainly in New York City public schools (this was in the mid-1980s). Despite the explosive nature of the debate, our school principal had agreed to allow an “out” gay teacher to use the second-floor glass display case for posters and newspaper articles about gay pride. But four days after the teacher had spent a great deal of his own time on the display, someone or some group of students had smashed in the glass with a chair. The teacher and the principal decided to leave it that way for the time being.
I had a conversation with José, the school janitor. I asked if he would help me by arriving at the beginning of my next social studies class with a ladder and insist that he had to fix a ceiling light which inexplicably would require a power drill and his other noisiest possible tools. He agreed, and as soon as class had started and he began to work, there was no hearing what anyone was saying. I asked students to grab their chairs and to carry them downstairs to the large second-floor hallway where we set up in a circle around the display case with the smashed glass to continue our discussion about racism in America.
I continued to lead the discussion, waiting for what I was not sure would happen. But something happened, and it happened because of Archeem. He had been leaning back in his chair looking characteristically disinterested in the conversation when he suddenly rocked forward and raised his hand. I nodded to Archeem, not sure what would happen next.
“It’s like that,” Archeem said, pointing to the broken glass. All the students in the circle swung their heads straight to the center of the broken glass.
“Like what?” I asked, hoping I was masking my nervous anticipation of his response.
“Racism is like when you hate someone just because of something about them that you don’t even know nothing about."2 Silence followed. Here was this 13-year-old African-American boy somehow, indirectly, standing up for gay people, and perhaps more importantly, identifying a contemporary example of prejudice and connecting it to a widely agreed moral standard that called prejudice wrong.
The other students nodded, and a discussion ensued about the connection between different kinds of prejudice:
“What Archeem said made me realize all the different ways human beings diss each other.”
“Do you think the way southern white people felt about black people was like how some of us think about gay people?”
“No, it’s not the same — being gay isn’t natural.”
“Isn’t that what they said about blacks being free?”
“No, it’s not the same because gay people are disgusting!” [laughter].
We hadn’t reached a progressive teacher’s nirvana by any means, but the conversation had started. For the rest of that week and the next, students researched civil-rights-era documents from the 1950s and 1960s. They read historical opinions about whether blacks should have the same social and political rights as whites, and they compared those opinions with contemporary positions (in newspaper articles and legislation) about gay rights. In classes that followed, students continued to refer back to the conversation Archeem had sparked. Two of them wrote a note to the teacher who had created the gay pride display apologizing on behalf of “whomever was too chicken to apologize for themselves.”
It became evident to both me and my students that teaching about slavery (racism is bad) or teaching about World War II (Hitler was evil) was too easy. The historical lessons were fine. But the more important message didn’t stick: History doesn’t stand still, and we can never be complacent about the rights and responsibilities of citizens. If schools are to be instrumental in helping young people engage with the world around them and work to improve it, then the lessons in school have to teach more than a calcified version of past events. Schools need to offer lessons that encourage new interpretations and that lend themselves to contemporary problems.
It is relatively common for good teachers to demonstrate to students the potential tyranny of opinion over facts in landmark historical controversies (e.g., the idea that people whose skin is black are not as intelligent or deserving of rights as those whose skin is white). Less clear, however, is whether such lessons give students the analytical skills they need to critically analyze contemporary problems and injustices — the kinds of skills they need in order to be thinking and engaged democratic citizens.
School Reformers' Assault on Teachers' Abilities to Teach Thinking
I have written a great deal about school reformers’ obsession with testing, standards, and accountability as well as about growing public mistrust of the teaching profession. Both trends result in a relentless drive for uniform teaching and assessment practices. As this myopic focus on standardizing curriculum (making everything the same) limits teachers’ abilities to draw on their and their students’ passions and interests, students lose opportunities to explore the kinds of idiosyncratic topics and questions that demonstrate the richness of inquiry itself and that reflect the kind of diversity of ideas that thinking in any democratic society requires. In too many schools, critical thinking is getting crushed by preparation for standardized tests.Independent schools have not been immune to these trends. Even in some of the most selective independent schools that once prided the immense creative and intellectual power of their teaching force, teachers are being asked by administrators to devote their planning efforts to standardizing the curriculum. These are schools in which a majority of the teachers have doctorate degrees or previous careers related to subject areas of special interest that they so freely and passionately incorporated into individualized teaching approaches. These are schools in which students used to benefit from the creative and intellectual contributions that highly professional individual teachers made in a myriad of ways. Scarce resources (both time and money) are also squandered on teacher-stifling new technology such as so-called “curricular mapping” software (Rubicon’s Atlas program, for example) in efforts to further regiment a formerly creative and free-flowing process. Teachers are being asked to make themselves interchangeable. That’s an awful idea for education for a large variety of reasons, but one of the sadder results of this assault on the profession has been the curtailment of teachers’ freedom to develop students’ abilities to think.
Although most educators (myself included) acknowledge that some standardization with regard to curricular frameworks intended to guide instruction are useful, once standardization becomes the guiding principle for school reform, the benefits are outweighed by the costs. As Frederick Calder, executive director of the New York State Association of Independent Schools, noted many years ago, this kind of standardization “destroys curricular autonomy, negates the whole point of the Socratic method, and smothers original thought, all antithetical to everything independent education stands for.” John Holt may have been the most prescient forecaster of this phenomenon. In his classic 1964 text, How Children Fail, he wrote that the most significant outcome of the drive for “so-called higher standards in schools is that the children are too busy to think.”
Renewing a Thinking Curriculum
Conveying the importance of a rich educational experience beyond test scores to students, parents, policy makers, and the public is not an insurmountable task. A majority of us have had teachers who made an enormous positive impact on our lives by teaching us the richness of inquiry, and most parents believe that teaching is about more than regurgitation of facts on tests. It is neither naïve nor overly ambitious to ask parents, administrators, and politicians alike to acknowledge that in a democratic society educators have a responsibility to create learning environments that teach students how to critically analyze multiple perspectives and develop the passion for participation in the kind of dialogue on which a healthy democracy relies.Much as Darwin’s theory of natural selection depends on genetic variation, any theory of democracy depends on a multiplicity of ideas and on a citizenry able to think about competing perspectives on societal improvement. But only those teachers who are free to work as professionals, exploiting their own interests and passions, have any chance of achieving these goals. I have studied a number of school programs — from middle school through high school — that effectively teach students to think and they share a number of characteristics.
First, teachers encourage students to ask questions rather than absorb pat answers. There is a saying with which many teachers are familiar: Everyone likes to teach critical thinking, but nobody wants a classroom full of critical thinkers. Despite our fears of student questions, we have to embrace a climate of questioning. The result is a richer teaching and learning environment for both students and teachers.
Second, teachers engage students with controversial issues, providing them with the kinds of competing narratives they need to think about subject matter in substantive ways. In other words, they employ multiple perspectives and viewpoints on important contemporary issues in the service of critical analysis. One of the simplest forms of this kind of critical analysis is to read a section of a school textbook with students and then ask students who wrote it. The idea that a person or group of people actually wrote a textbook reminds us that the words are not sacrosanct but rather represent the views and perspectives of a particular time and place.
Third, and related to the point above, teaching students to think both deeply and broadly eschews the kind of memorization and regurgitation that conveys only one interpretation of historical and contemporary events. Classroom practices that accomplish this effectively teach students to recognize that “facts” are less stable than is commonly assumed. Note that this does not — as critics might sometimes imply — mean that there is no such thing as facts. We all accept certain facts. But education is not only about specific facts; it is also about how those facts are selected and put together into a narrative and about who benefits from that narrative. Yes, we teach mathematical facts, formulas, and statistics, but we also must teach how to employ those formulas and statistics in the service of answering questions that we formulate through the lens of our own experiences.
Fourth, teaching strategies that teach students how to think root instruction in local contexts, working within the students’ own specific surroundings and circumstances, because it is not possible to teach democratic forms of thinking without providing an environment to think about.
Finally, many of these goals can be accomplished by engaging students in community projects that offer opportunities to engage in thoughtful real-world provocations about their beliefs. In other words, ways of teaching thinking ask students to interrogate what they learn in class with what they learn in their communities and vice versa.
How Archeem and I Briefly Changed the Narrative of Schooling
My experience with Archeem and his classmates taught me something about the complexity of teaching critical thinking when it comes to matters of contemporary concern. The experiment was not without its detractors. I received two complaints from parents who said they did not want their children discussing gay rights in school. I was willing to weather those complaints, and luckily my principal was similarly undeterred. I had stumbled on one possible, albeit idiosyncratic, way to teach critical thinking.But that was not the only lesson I drew from this experience. From that day on, not exclusively, but regularly, Archeem’s attitude toward both school and me changed. There were no miracles, but Archeem seemed to have grown a little bit taller. He began to raise his hand. He participated in discussions. I told other teachers about what Archeem had said and they asked him about it, too. When a school assembly included a neighborhood community organizer talking about public housing, Archeem asked me how you get a job like that, working with people in the neighborhood.
Aiming toward a thinking curriculum — one which embraced controversy, multiple perspectives, and uncertainty — seemed in some small way to change the teacher-student relationship at the same time. I no longer fit the role of the teacher trying to catch Archeem not knowing things. As you can tell from my recollections, Archeem became more than a thorn in my novice teacher’s side. Together, we had changed the narrative. Teaching students how to think will always remain a pedagogical challenge full of messy unknowns, risks, and compromises. But in many ways, messy unknowns, risks, and compromises represent teaching at its richest and most fulfilling.
Notes
1. Denise Pope-Clark, Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.2. Quotations here are derived from journals I kept in those days.