Dr. Ed Meyer Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

Please read Part 1 for some introductory info on Dr. Meyer. Here is a new piece he wrote just for my readers (you!)…

There is general agreement that the purpose of going to school is to prepare youngsters to contribute to society and to be successful adults. Success in the workplace and in life requires the ability to think critically. Unfortunately, K-12 education in the United States is not producing critical thinkers. The underlying problem is a shift away from challenging the students to think for themselves and a shift toward loading the students with content while giving them a non-thinking protocol to follow to get the desired response.

There are many reasons for this shift, but I believe that the primary one is simply that struggling in school has a negative connotation. In general, teachers don’t want their students to struggle, school administrators don’t want students to struggle, parents don’t want their students to struggle, and the students themselves don’t want to struggle. However, without struggle there is no development. In fact, without struggle, the brain atrophies.

Research on the human brain tells us that a toddler has about 100 trillion neural connections and as the child grows and interacts with the world, the brain strengthens the connections that are used frequently, while pruning away the ones that aren’t. If the neural connections associated with critical thinking are not used, they will atrophy. The result will be adults who have trouble thinking for themselves. Instead of coming up with their own ideas, they robotically adopt the ideas of others. Instead of considering options involving relationships, financial decisions, and career choices, they want to be told what to do because that’s how they were trained by the K-12 educational system; if you don’t know what to do, you raise your hand, and the teacher tells you.

To nurture the development and maintenance of the neural connections involved with critical thinking, K-12 students must be given opportunities to think critically; to invest time trying to reach a new level of understanding, and to have an “AHA!” moment.

When the goal of a class session is developing the students’ critical thinking skills, the teacher adopts the role of a coach instead of a source of information. The coach provides a challenging mental workout and encourages the students to keep working at it to reach a new level of understanding. The students are not following any rules, protocols, or instructions. They are exploring, they are wandering around in their own mind palace. They are trying to come up with their own ideas. In doing so they are developing their critical thinking skills.

On the other hand, when the goal of a class session is to transfer knowledge, the teacher is an authority. The students are supposed to listen attentively and perhaps take notes. Later, the students will take a test to determine if they remember what they have been told.

When the goal of a session is to develop critical thinking skills, the students might be trying to solve a challenging logic puzzle. When the students are not heading straight to the answer, it is detrimental to their development if they get any hints that steer them toward the solution. They must be left alone to think for themselves. This is difficult to do for most humans.

When compassionate, empathetic adults see a youngster having difficulty, it is natural for them to want to help. In some cases, this is the right thing to do. When the goal is to develop the thinking skills of the students, however, it is crucial to let the students try to figure it out for themselves, so they won’t have to rely on someone to tell them what to do.

Trying to figure out the way forward and trying things that don’t work is an important part of developing problem solving skills. This makes the development of thinking skills seem inefficient, but this is only if the goal is to get the answer as fast as possible. If the goal is to develop the students’ thinking skills, they must be allowed to think. Guidance often undermines their development. After all, as soon as they get direction, they are not thinking for themselves (like wolves) – instead they are doing what they are told (like sheep).

As a university professor, I see many students that have lost the ability to think for themselves. When they get a problem that they have not been trained how to solve, they raise their hands and say, “I don’t know how to do this,” as if they have never been presented with a problem that they do not know how to do. I usually reply something like, “I know you don’t know how to do it; that’s why I gave it to you” (but the specific response depends on the student). I also get, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” In this case, I ask the students to give it some more thought. They can push back a bit at this, saying, “How do you expect us to get the answer; you’re the teacher; that’s your job.” I also get, “You’re just setting us up for failure!” These students have already been set up for failure in the real world, as they will not know what to do when confronted with a problem that they have not been trained to solve in their schooling. This is understandable because the majority of their entire K-12 education involved feeding them information plus remembering rules and protocols for getting answers to specific problems that were given them by a teacher.

One strategy to add the development of critical thinking skills to the curriculum is simply to clearly differentiate between a class session that is designed for remembering facts and a class session that is designed for developing their minds.

One way to do this is to have a class called something like, “Critical Thinking Development,” or “General Problem Solving.” In such a class, the teacher will take on the role of a coach, provide a challenging mental workout and allow the students to struggle. When the students understand the goal of the session is not to get the answer as quickly as possible, they “take their shoes off” and have a delightful walk to explore the solution space. They won’t ask for help, they will enjoy the struggle, and, with good coaching, they should not have any stress or anxiety.

They are ready to develop, not learn. They adapt quickly and will “get with the program.” The transformation over a single semester can be remarkable. Students who were perfunctory at the beginning of the semester are showing active engagement by the end of the semester. In addition to the development of critical thinking and problem solving skills the students have developed their communication and collaboration skills, because good thinkers want to share ideas.

Near the end of the semester, problems are presented, and the teachers leave the room. After the students recover from this abandonment, groups form, students go to the board to share their ideas and discuss them intelligently. This leads to shared insights. This type of “education” more closely matches the skills needed to be a successful adult and to contribute to society.

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I’m always on the lookout for others who understand and support the extreme importance of properly teaching Critical Thinking to K-12 students — which currently is happening in zero States.

I was pointed to Dr. Ed Meyer. I reached out to thank him, and we had some communications. I asked him to write up something about why Critical Thinking was so important, and he did. That will be in my next commentary.

Part 1 is a section of his interesting website, called his Teaching Philosophy:

A quick internet search on skills for which employers are looking always includes Critical Thinking/Problem Solving plus Communication/ Collaboration/Teamwork at or near the top. I agree 100%. These skills are not just applicable in a career, they will result in good decisions in one’s personal life involving relationships, finances, and time management.

The only way to develop these skills is to practice. That is, the only way to develop the ability to communicate and collaborate to solve challenging problems is to work in groups to try to solve challenging problems by communicating and collaborating. In the courses I teach, the students invest a lot of time struggling with challenging problems in groups. The problems always require the students to reach a new level of understanding and to generate an idea in their minds that wasn’t put there by anyone else. To have an “Aha!” moment.

Basically, I’m not trying to teach the students as much as I’m trying to develop them. Develop their mental strength, mental stamina, and the ability to tackle a problem that they have never seen before and have no idea how to solve. Today’s students aren’t used to this. Many students today prefer to be trained how to do a problem rather than to invest time trying to figure it out for themselves.

This is not surprising because the word UNDERSTAND was recently banned from learning goals at many universities! The reasoning cited that you can’t measure understanding, but you can measure whether the student can solve a particular type of problem. In fact, with non-standardized assessment, it is possible to determine whether a student understands a concept.

When students are trained to follow specific procedures to get the answer, they are flummoxed when they are given a problem that they weren’t trained how to solve. They raise their hands and say things like, “I’ve never seen a problem like this before,” “I have no idea what to do,” “How do you expect us to do the problem if you don’t show us how, you’re the teacher; that’s your job.”

It may seem counter-intuitive to some, but a teacher best supports students by not jumping in to steal their struggle. Difficulty awakens the genius. The problem, as I see it, is that students are used to getting help as soon as they don’t know what to do. As a result, not knowing what to do creates stress and shame. These are unhealthy emotions that hinder the development of the student. One way to avoid stress and shame among the students is by giving them straightforward problems that they have been trained to solve.

Another is to explain to the student that there is no progress without struggle and that school is the best place to practice struggling with challenging problems. Once the students understand that struggling with challenging problems is the key to their development, they have the attitude, “I have never seen a problem like this before and I have no idea how to solve it. What a wonderful opportunity to learn and develop!”

These students have a lot of fun tackling really challenging problems in a group. Sometimes they don’t solve them. That’s OK. The answer is not important. It is the struggle that is important. It is important that young people develop the skills to tackle challenging problems because they will have to tackle challenging problems after they leave the university. The first time that a young person must tackle a challenging problem should not be during a job interview.