The trend of promoting thinking emerged as a result of the trend towards higher thinking skills, and a reaction to the educational negatives that resulted from activity-based education. A person has become in need of skills that help him process the information present in the environment of life situations that he faces, more than just memorizing facts that he has not learned how to apply in life situations, or to solve his problems.
The teacher is a model for promoting thinking
The teacher is the person responsible for preparing learners to coexist in their society, as he is able to design a set of activities, through which he achieves the goals of improving their thinking. The focus of these activities is to challenge their minds, taking into account their individual differences. Here, the mind is used in a broader and deeper way when the situation requires the learner to analyse, interpret, evaluate, and process information in order to solve a problem or answer a question. This cannot happen through routine methods, or the automatic application of previous information. The problem or question must have challenged his thinking, which makes him go through training that he had not gone through before, so he uses his information and skills that he had previously acquired to apply them in this new situation, so he acquires new experiences that enable him to confront new situations.
Elements of achieving improved thinking
- In order to achieve the promotion of learners’ thinking along with educational outcomes, its elements must be integrated into the core of the curriculum, and these elements are represented in the following:
Depth of information: In order for thinking to become logical and mentally acceptable, it must not be isolated from cognitive fields or specific knowledge. Thinking always revolves around a specific thing, or a specific content, so curriculum developers must avoid developing topics that contain disjointed facts, but rather topics that cover a large area of people’s cumulative experiences. To deepen the learner’s understanding, and achieve integration and coherence between subject information, or a single topic.
Higher mental skills: They mean a set of cognitive or strategic activities that the learner uses to answer a question or solve a problem, and they include: the ability to build a logical argument, criticize areas, identify problems, provide solutions and various alternatives, the ability to contemplate and create, and analyze information, Interpreting, evaluating, and processing them, and the ability to infer and link causes to results. The learner must be trained in these skills and produce activities beyond just collecting information. When he faces a non-routine problem, these skills will become an important tool for facing that challenge.
3. Normalization of thinking: It is a set of characteristics and trends that confirm the effectiveness of the use of information and mental skills, given that the depth of knowledge and mental skills are equally important for mastering certain challenges. However, without the inclination to think, and the inclination towards it, teaching the skills and content, and applying them, becomes unimportant. Among the most important activities that the teacher can use to form the learner’s tendency toward thinking are the following:
Contrasting themes.
– Problems with conflicting solutions.
– Topics that involve a conflict of values.
– Theories highlight the lack of agreement between them.
– Topics include unexpected or surprising events.
– Diverse cultures require the learner to analyze, evaluate, and compare them with each other.
Difficulties that hinder the promotion of thinking
There are several difficulties that we always find to be an obstacle to the new intellectual challenges needed to develop education in our schools, and we summarize these difficulties as follows:
- Increase the volume and density of the content.
- Increasing the number of learners in classes.
- Lack of motivation to think.
- Lack of time to plan lessons.
- Lack of sufficient cognitive skills.
- The teacher’s lack of knowledge of modern methods of teaching thinking.
- Lack of educational designs that focus on thinking.
- Teachers have a large teaching load and overcrowded class schedules.
- Methods of preparing tests that focus on measuring information memorization.
How to overcome the difficulties of improving thinking
Difficulties in promoting thinking can be overcome through the availability of several variables or factors in our schools, and these factors are as follows:
Using the team teaching method, which consists of multidisciplinary teachers cooperating in planning their lessons, criticizing each other, conducting classroom management seminars, and evaluating peer teachers, followed by a seminar to discuss what was practiced in the classroom.
Using a cooperative learning method, instead of individualizing education; It helps teachers reduce observation of each learner individually, and also helps learners learn from each other.
Increasing teachers’ confidence in learners’ abilities, which contributes to teaching thinking to all learners, regardless of their educational background, so teachers do not have to worry about the impact of these variables on their efforts to promote thinking.
The emergence of a group of advanced educators, consisting of faculty members in the departments of curricula and teaching methods in colleges of education. They assist teachers in developing their teaching and train them on how to achieve improved thinking.
Finally, the shortcomings in teachers’ thinking must be addressed, so that we do not stop the wheel of progress and priority in the global balance of power, and so that we do not lose the world’s leadership in the ranks of civilization. We must hasten to address this issue, which has made all our educational efforts Both material and human, are wasted with no return to match these efforts.
As educators, we cannot deny that we live in aspects of civilization like developed countries. Each of us possesses its tools, but the difference between us is that they are inventors, while we are borrowers. Civilization is not about having its tools, but civilization is about inventing its tools ourselves, so that we can have our own unique discoveries.
Dr. Marwan Ahmed Mahmoud Hassan
