As a public school superintendent, I believe the best way to prepare students for college and careers is to focus on providing instructional programs and opportunities that help them become good thinkers. To do this teachers, and virtually everyone else in a community, should assume the mantle of becoming a “cognitive coach” to students. Whether you are a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, older sibling, or a community member at large, we all have an important role to play in the developing good thinkers among our youth.
The best way for you to become a cognitive coach is to seek out and engage school children and adolescents in meaningful conversations. The objective here is to get kids talking about what they think, what they feel, and what they believe whenever and wherever you may find them. It may be in a classroom. It may be at the grocery store. It may be at a basketball game. It doesn’t matter where as long as you engage students in an topical conversation and, hopefully, even a debate. Mainly, you want to encourage students to voice their opinion about things. Get them to take a position on -this thing, or that thing,- and ask them to support their position with evidence. Curiously enough, the simple process of engaging students in real life conversations and debates will serve to reinforce what they have learned in the classroom, and help them create their own knowledge about a subject or topic. Learning indicates that a student has been exposed to material, understands the material, and can recall the information. Knowledge, on the other hand, goes beyond recall and includes information processing, application to other situations, consideration of meaning, and contrasting with other concepts. Naturally, the topic of conversation you engage in with one of your learners will vary from student to student, and in the level of complexity based on child’s age and developmental level. But even a kindergartener has an opinion about things that are going on in his or her life. Engaging in conversation with any members of your learning community in ways that gets at what they have learned and what they know will help them develop higher order reasoning skills. The goal here is to assist students in integrating their knowledge and experience through day-to-day discussions with adults. A student’s mental synthesis process occurs when a respected adult asks a question, particularly a question that requires reflection. In education, we call this process -scaffolding.- I think all adults in a community have a responsibility to help children build the mental scaffolds I’m talking about here, where one concept formation builds upon another, with the ultimate goal of producing independent thinkers.
TIPS ON ENGAGING IN MEANINGFUL CONVERSATIONS WITH STUDENTS: