Thinking Foundation Blog

It is my Dad’s birthday today and this morning I was reflecting back on how I often had more going on in my head than I could express to him in words. I remember, sometimes in frustration, my Dad asking me questions that I could not verbally answer, and not because I didn’t have something to say. I was thinking big thoughts, but I couldn’t find the way to let out the jumble of ideas. This is what happens when you are learning language as I was, or a second language as our ELL students are across this country.

No doubt I was inspired to these reflections knowing I was going to introduce you to a new documentary film trailer from the City of New Rochelle Public Schools, just a few miles out of New York City. We are launching this trailer now as a step toward a full-length film because it challenges all of us deeply to consider some essential, time-critical questions:

How do we help students articulate what they are thinking as they are learning a new language?

How do we teach ELL students with a focus on “higher order thinking” as they are learning and being tested on complex academic language and concepts?

If you were moved by the Minds of Mississippi documentary trailer still found on our home page… this piece will move you to a new place in your heart and mind as film maker Keith DeCristo continues the work of surfacing what matters most in education today.

What matters here? Hispanic children, from the largest “minority” population and the highest percentage of second language learners in this country, MUST NOT be given watered down content for years on end as they learn a second language. This will only place these kids on a remedial, cognitive side track … leading to high drop out rates just a few years down the line. The teachers and administrators interviewed in this film show us that, yes we can and must explicitly focus on high order thinking development as we teach a rigorous curriculum grounded in deep academic language growth... using Thinking Maps as a pathway integrated with a strong literacy approach. Thought and Language. It is not either-or. The stakes for these children and our nation are just too high, now and into the future.

So how can we develop both high quality thinking and rigorous content learning?
The New Rochelle educators and students in this film are showing us the way beyond the tipping point: We MUST do both.

Watch the film trailer online here at the Thinking Foundation website.

Thinking IS the foundation for learning.

David

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I was leafing through the ASCD San Antonio Conference program and it looks like we are finally in the 21st century! It seems like every other presentation title includes a link to 21st Century Flat Changing World of Globally Connected Learning! Ok, I am playing the fiddle on the 21st century bandwagon like everyone else—and it is a conference theme. But even as we bring in new technologies, and new teaching and learning strategies, our educational community is still half blind as we look around for assessment tools that reflect what we know about from brain research, thinking skills development, and disciplinary learning.

Last year Kim Williams and I wrote a journal article for the ASCD-Plymouth State University New Hampshire Journal of Education and here is the link www.thinkingfoundation.org/david. Kim gave our article a great starting point by going back a few centuries and then into the future … to an invention that gave us the metaphor for what happens when Thinking Maps are used in “21st century classrooms” for formative (and summative!) assessment:

Among his other revolutionary accomplishments, Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals to allow us to see things more clearly—that which is right before our eyes as well as that which typically requires closer inspection—with the same tool. The most effective, revolutionary tools are elegant in their simplicity, leading to complex applications. Thinking Maps, as a fundamental language of cognitive patterns, have shown promise to become a revolutionary model for transforming educational assessment. This set of visual tools allows us as teachers the capacity to see student content learning and thinking processes through the same bifocal lens—viewing the content at the surface and the cognition more in depth. Our cognitive age requires that our assessment tools keep pace with our new understanding about how the brain learns and processes information. In this writing we offer tools for educators and learners to determine not only “what” is learned but also “how” it is learned.

On Monday, March 8, Kim and I will systematically present student work that reflects how we can move students to a high level of fluency with Thinking Maps so that teachers may assess and students may self-assess the discipline specific concepts being developed while at the same time seeing the development of thinking processes. Read more on the ASCD presentation.

Of course, in Texas, as in most other states, one of THE most important needs is captured in this question:

How do we assess ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS on their content learning as they are on a developmental path toward fluent language use in a second language?
What happens when one’s language abilities prevent students from fully expressing their best thinking?????

So we will address what Dr. Stefanie Holzman wrote about in her chapter of Student Success with Thinking Maps, and explicitly brings forward in this interview at Roosevelt Elementary School in Long Beach, CA…

… if you want to assess their content learning… leave it in a map!

SPREAD THE WORD to colleagues about our presentation and we hope to see some of you there!

…thinking IS the foundation for learning…

David

ASCD PRESENTATION information:

Title:
Bifocal Assessment:
Combining Teaching and Learning with Thinking Maps
David Hyerle, Ed.D. and Kimberly Williams, Ph.D.

Session # 3201

When:
12:15 – 1:15 pm Monday, March 8
Where: Henry Gonzalez Convention Center, Second Level
ROOM 217, C Room Capacity is 190

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