Walter Derzko wonders about efforts to "teach thinking skills" and
stimulate creative thinking processes.
A couple of comments:
(1) It seems to me fair to say that the traditional classroom differs in
fundamental ways from most of the rest of the institutionalized world.
It's one of the few places where what's going on is so circumscribed that
the question of the need for activities deliberately designed to "teach
thinking" would even come up. This is because (sadly) formal schooling is
concerned primarily with the mere transmission of mediated data. Given
the usual instructional materials and methods, about the only thought
process that students CAN USE is memory. Your hockey question is
atypical. Go through the final exams of most institutions from about
grade 4 up thru 16, and you'll find that at least 80% of the questions
simply ask, "How much can you remember?" It's a rare one that requires
students to categorize, infer, hypothesize, generalize, synthesize, etc.
The present state of affairs isn't going to end until educators realize
that far and away the richest, most dynamic, most vital and powerful
instructional resource available to them is immediate experience. At the
center of every school's curriculum should be the question, "What's going
on right here, right now?" I can't think of a single significant concept
in the hard or soft sciences or the humanities which couldn't be initially
introduced and explored within the physical boundaries of most schools.
Ask students to find out what happens when they flush the school's
toilets, or why certain offices are carpeted and others aren't, or why a
certain club is more prestigious than another club, or to determine the
philosophical assumptions underlying the grading system, and I guarantee
that there won't be a mental process they won't use. (A.N. Whitehead:
"The secondhandedness of the learned world is the secret of its
mediocrity.")
(2) At a more general level, problem solving, creativity, ingenuity,
invention, innovation, etc., and all the accompanying complex mental
processes they involve, hinge on the discovery of relationships between
two or more aspects of reality. Something that wasn't previously
perceived to be part of a system is suddenly recognized as an integral
part of that system (or sub or supra) system. This is why I believe it's
so important that the members of every entity, from a clique to a culture,
have an explicit, comprehensive, conceptually elaborated mental model of
all aspects of those entities within which they function or with which
they interact. Then, if there's an interest in corporate memory, or pay
for performance, or absolutely anything else, one can "go down the list"
of system components asking, over and over, "How might THIS relate?" or<
"If we do this, how might that react?" The exploration of probable,
possible, and preferable relationships will both exercise every thought
process, and provide the basic tool for describing, analyzing, or
anticipating change.
-- Marion GMBrady@aol.com