TEHT....: Thinking

Teaching English, How To.....
Essential Ideas


Question: How do English teachers help students learn to think?


From the book: Probably the most frequent criticism of students I have heard over the years is that "our children can't think." I took the trouble to look up the word "think" in the American Heritage Dictionary and I found a number of key words used to define thinking: formulate, reason, decide, judge, believe, expect, remember, visualize, invent, concentrate and consider. As you can see from this definition, "thinking" is not easily defined and is a complex activity.


Fields in which English teachers help students learn to think include instruction in writing and in literature.


When they write, students must organize their thoughts on paper for others to read. When students write, they are discovering what they are thinking and they are shaping their thinking. As E.M. Forster is quoted as saying, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"


Students learn to think when they relate the literature they read to their own experience and compare one literary work to another. Students learn to think critically when they analyze and question what they read. In my classes, students raised questions by previewing the literary work, and discussions focused on the students' questions that the students tried to answer. Their questions included questions of fact, interpretation and criticism. This approach contrasts sharply with the usual approach of the teachers' asking questions to which they already know the answers and the students' relying on the teachers for the answers.


Organizing thoughts in writing and raising and answering questions in literature are two activities that help students learn to think.