Inquiry and Critical Thinking

Inquiry is a skill that prepares students for life and helps students become active learners. Many ESL teachers abide to traditional ways of teaching and the customary use of textbooks for fear of not covering the curriculum. This hinders the development of critical thinking, inquiry and meaningful learning. Reading techniques namely concentrating on fundamental concepts and discussing essential questions promote inquiry. They also do not take a lot of time and can be assigned as homework.

Via concentrating on fundamental concepts and discussing essential questions in reading texts students can develop the skills they need to find connections among concepts, assess their relevance, and then use them to inquire and think critically about a wide variety of concepts, principles, ideas, and questions.

Nosich (2005) defines a fundamental concept as one that establishes other concepts. Nosich describes fundamental concepts as ones that can be used to think about and reason through a large number of questions and causes. Keeping fundamental concepts central to reading instruction helps students see the big picture of the reading topic, make them interested to read more on the topic with open eyes and minds, an aspect that enhances critical thinking.

Essential questions

Another way to facilitate critical thinking and meaningful learning is to help your students use fundamental and powerful concepts to reason through essential questions of a course. An essential question of a course is a question that the course is trying to answer. How does literature enrich life? How are moral arguments justified? Essential questions help students identify the relevance of studying a particular discipline. Wiggins and McTighe (2011) define essential questions as those that:

Cause genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas of the core content.

Provoke deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding as well as more questions.

Require students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas, and justify their answers.

Stimulate vital ongoing rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, and prior lessons.

Spark meaningful connections with prior learning and personal experiences.

Naturally recur, creating opportunities for transfer to other situations, refer to “core ideas and inquiries within a discipline” and help “students effectively inquire and make sense of important but complicated ideas and knowledge.” (p. 73)

In educational psychology, two essential questions are how do students learn and how can I teach to support student learning? Assignments based on these questions could include analyzing lesson plans from different theoretical perspectives to determine if the lesson plan will facilitate learning, and analyzing case studies of classroom situations from multiple learning perspectives to solve problems.

In ethics an essential question can be how are moral claims justified? Assignments based on this essential question could include comparing how much weight is to be given to statistics, narrative, tradition, or logical reasoning in justifying a moral claim and then comparing that across several moral issues. We could ask our students to think through why statistics or narrative matter more in one case and not another. They would leave the class with the skills required to assess the different elements of a moral argument and the ability to explain how those elements can be used to justify a moral position.

If students memorize concepts but cannot think critically using those concepts, then the concepts are meaningless to the student and will soon be forgotten. Additionally, if students cannot determine which concepts within a course are fundamental and powerful as opposed to less important, their efforts to learn are undermined by a lack of focus. Students can leave your course with a strong grasp of course content, and the ability to think critically within the discipline if you 1) explicitly identify and teach them to understand deeply the fundamental and powerful concepts of the course, and 2) create tasks and assignments that require them to reason about essential questions of the discipline using those concepts like professionals in the field.

References:

Nosich, G. M. (2009). Learning to Think Things Through: A Guide to Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum (3rd Ed). Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

Wiggins, G & McTighe, J. (2011). Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High Quality Units. ASCD, Alexandria, VA.