IGE INNOVATION ABSTRACTS x2: | 2G Published by the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development oN With support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and Sid W. Richardson Foundation GETTING STUDENTS TO THINK Sometime past midterm, I ran into one of my older students in a restaurant. We had become comfortable with each other by that stage in the course. The term-beginning battles over perception and demand had softened—enough so that he told me then what his initial perceptions had been of my class. They hadn’t been favorable. "Man, I didn’t know what you wanted. Everything I brought in you chopped to pieces. Then one night I realized: He’s not just being a ____; he’s trying to make us think." Trying. That’s the key. But how do you get your students to think? Or do you expect them to think? Perhaps this is the beginning, then. You must expect thinking in order to get it. Hand back work that had no real effort in it. Do not accept superficial or silly ideas. If you think they have not thought, tell them that as diplomatically as you can. Let's be truthful; we have a few students who simply lack the capability to think. But many can be awakened and can deliver if we make the demand. Be ambitious. Expect. But, of course, you have to get them started. They’re not used to thinking in class. A good start is asking the right questions. By right, I mean questions that will get their brains exploring—not just questions that will simply get them to your own answers. I find this hard to do. It’s easy to slip into old ways. I have been guilty of asking the narrowly defined question, something a colleague of mine called the "gaucho." "What is distinctive about Argentina?" the teacher asks. The class has many answers: the pampas, the history, the population mix. "No, no, no!" the teacher shouts them down. "Gauchos!" This is not getting them to think; this is fill-in-the-blanks. Students pick up on it very quickly and will not often risk themselves again. Asking The Right Questions There are basically two kinds of questions, questions of fact and questions of interpretation. Questions of fact are not thinking questions. You might, however, ask fact questions to get students to notice details that might lead to theorizing. "Which direction is the train going?" I asked a class once about Stephen Crane’s story, Tie Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. When they answered, "West" (their third choice, if I remember correctly), | asked them another question: "So what?" This isn’t a "gaucho," though. I was steering them—steering them into discussing Crane’s theme of the dying frontier. We often have to steer—by getting students to note those details they might have overlooked, by asking them to stop and examine significance. A more ambitious kind of interpretive question is the open-ended one, one for which you yourself don’t have a good answer or one where you keep your good answer to yourself. I take an image out of Dante, but I do not decipher it. | ask the class what they think. I sit back and wait. My busy graduate-school brain works overtime. "I know, | know," it shouts. We teachers were great students (at least in our disciplines). We like having answers. Also, we were taught that teachers have the answers. Are we doing our jobs if we keep our mouths shut? I say, "yes." We are in fact not doing our jobs if we too often open them. Keeping Silent In an honors course | helped team-teach, I developed a plan whereby all the rubber-lipped professors would agree to keep quiet for ten minutes. It was painful, listening to that silence. But the students did come up with ideas. Teachers can’t fill all the voids. If we expect serious thinking, we must learn to listen. When we learn this, it takes pressure off us. We don’t have to be the architects of all the thinking in the class. My students do come up with wonderful angles on Dante. It makes me humble.