> From: "Forbes, Ted" <ForbesT@Darden.Gbus.Virginia.EDU>
> Date: Fri, 22 Sep 95 09:27:00 EDT
>
> Mariann Jelinek suggests:
>
> >>>Ivan's right; we can find lots of "good reasons" why people cease to
> question. I'd add that such inquiry is hard work; that it requires
> acknowledging that we don't know it all (tough!); and truly accepting our
> own ignorance is a profoundly trusting thing to do, trusting that we'll
> figure it out, in a world full of inducements to paranoia (like virtually
> every newspaper's conspiracy theory of whatevr). For myself, as a
> subversive of all that certainty by profession (university professor), I
> find the task of reinstating the spirit of questioning, inquiry and
> learning far more apropos. When I succeed in encouraging my students to
> question, I am delighted! <<<
I would also add that the factors I listed on my previous message
lead us to become very passive. We develop some kind of mental lazyness!
> This well phrased observation triggered for me some thoughts.
>
> We see one of our institutional goals as facilitating the development and
> growth of critical thinking skills in our students. This is an
> interesting challenge because, IMHO, most MBA students view their two
> years as an opportunity to acquire "tools" that will help them master the
> "science" of business. They show up expecting that an MBA is all about
> discounting cash flows, performing regression analysis, and pricing
> options with the Black-Scholes model, certain that these are the skills
> they will need to succeed in business. They are unwitting (or unknowing)
> disciples of Taylorism, believing that management can be reduced to a
> "scientific" process. However, there are those of us (and certainly not
> all of us) here on the faculty that, like Mariann Jelinek, are convinced
> that long term success is not about finding answers, but about learning
> how to frame and then ask the right questions. And this is what the "art"
> of management is all about. I suggest to my students that management is a
> yin/yang thing - with science and art needing to be in balance.
One question I would like to ask is aren't we (or most of us) in
the academic world also disciples of Taylorism and Adam Smith? We accept
a "clear" division of labor in our classrooms that indicates in many
different ways that "we know" and the students don't. This limits the
learning process because the communication is mostly restricted to a one
format!
> Stephen Brookfield has a recent book out called "Developing Critical
> Thinking" in which he suggests that (among many other profoundly
> intriguing ideas) critical thinking is all about understanding one's own
> assumptions, as well as the assumptions of others, and then considering
> them both individually and collectively to derive insight. He further
> suggests that the reaction to initially confronting this examination of
> assumptions is often to draw away, and to express hostility to the
> individual who has asked one to confront those assumptions. When we ask
> our students to examine their own thinking at this level, their reaction
> is often rather adversarial. They didn't come here to do that, they came
> here to learn "stuff."
I attended a three-day seminar by Stephen Brookfield at Columbia
University some years back. It was great to learn to look at our own
belliefs and values and question them! We generally come out this exercise
stronger than before questioning our own assumptions!
> So why the resistance to asking questions in the first place? Could it be
> that our most critical job as educators or as manager/coaches is to first
> frame (or reframe) the set of expectations? Why do we seem to view risk,
> uncertainty and ambiguity as an enemy to be conquered rather than a friend
> to be embraced? What if we turned that archetype on its head? Our
> students love finance or quantitative analysis or the other "scientific"
> disciplines because, while the tools may be difficult to learn, the end
> result of the process is to find a number that represents the "answer."
> Most of the businesses with which I work reward people for finding the
> "answer" to problems, rather than framing problem solving as inquiry about
> the cause (sounds like systems thinking, eh?) Suppose we were to actually
> reward people for finding questions?
A lot of factors have influenced that attitude about the objective
measures as opposed to the subjective analysis and appreciation. We tend
to even force objective measures on highky subjective processes, and think
tha we make rational decisions to improve the process. For example, most
teachers evaluations forms have chnged very little among universities in
the US. We also, at least in the U.S., are textbook bounded in most of
our classes. THis creates an illusion of a finite world that does not
exits, and that we "know now" after completing the 23 chapters of a book.
> I have a colleague here who (we use the case method pedagogy, and class
> participation counts for 50% of the final grade) has recently launched a
> new idea where several students are selected to "listen" in a given class
> and report on their observations of the learning process. Students report
> that "I was amazed by the difference I could see. By not thinking about
> how to get into the discussion, I could see where it was all going."
> Dialogue? At least a first step.
>
> But I digress ... perhaps people cease to question because there is no
> reward for it, because it is "harder" than finding answers, and because we
> haven't framed the "question of questioning" correctly in the first place.
Ted, I agree in that most cases used today in our business course
have fallen in the "structured way -the right one- of writing a case."
So, there is very analytical skills required to do these cases. Robert
Sternberg has an interesting paper on this(Teaching Critical Thinking,
Part 1: Are we making critical mistakes?, Phi Delta Kappan, Nov. 1985).
Ivan
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"Las naciones marchan hacia el termino de su grandeza, con
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