IDEA #14: Lectures for Critical Thinking

“[Student-centered activities] serve as a kind of seventh-inning stretch for students, refocusing their attention and increasing listening during the last part of the class period.”¹

Learning Intention

While lectures are more suited to transmitting information than engaging students in deep processing or promoting critical thought, there are ways to augment lectures to encourage more critical thinking.

Overview

Lecturing alone is unlikely to produce the development of critical thought in students. However, careful structuring of lectures as well as breaking up lecture classes with student-centered activities like the ones below, will increase students’ engagement with both the material and the thought process.¹

Options

• Use narrative lectures to model the thinking process. Start by posing a problem or question that puzzled scholars, then embark on a detective-story style journey through the process of scholars investigating that idea. Re-create for students the false starts, frustrations, and excitements of discovery as the disciplinary community used critical thinking to broaden understanding.¹
• Use Socratic Method(see The Classic Socratic Method and The Modern Socratic Method).
• Use student response systems to involve students in thinking critically about ideas. Pose a question and ask students to choose an option that represents their best guess for solving the problem. You can quickly and easily see how many students chose each option, and walk through the critical thought process of analyzing each option to assess its validity as you lead them to the correct answer. For more about student response systems, see http://www.wwu.edu/teachinghandbook/evaluation_of_learning/student_response.shtml
• Use short "buzz group" discussions. Punctuate lectures by giving students the opportunity to share their ideas with a few classmates nearby. You might ask them to then summarize their conversation for the whole group, or pose a question or insight that arose from the interaction before moving on in your lecture.¹
• Use exploratory writing assignments to encourage students to process the ideas from the lecture more deeply. Design informal, low-stakes tasks that ask students to summarize lecture content, connect lecture material to other concepts, apply ideas in new contexts, argue for or against conclusions from the lecture, or raise new questions about the concepts. These can be done as in-class free writes or short out-of-class assignments.¹
• End lectures with questions, instead of summaries. Point out the questions that are still unanswered or that were made more complex by the lecture, or let students identify those gaps and contentious concepts. This will help model the process of intellectual inquiry and encourage students to be constantly and continually seeking more depth of understanding.²
• Continue the conversation outside of class by encouraging or requiring students to post their thoughts or questions about the lecture content to discussion forums. You might leave the topic open-ended or provide specific prompts to discuss or problems to solve. These could provide useful feedback about how well students are learning the concepts by posing a question like "What is still puzzling you about today's lecture?"

References