Changing My Mind on How To Teach Thinking Skills
In the fifth year of my teaching at Cleveland’s Glenville high school–it was the early 1960s–I had already introduced materials to my classes on what was then called “Negro history” (see here and here). I then began experimenting with the direct teaching of critical thinking skills. I believed that such skills were crucial in negotiating one’s way through life and understanding history. I wanted my students to acquire and use these skills every day. So I began teaching my U.S. history courses with a two-week unit on thinking skills. My theory was that the students learning these skills at the very beginning of the semester would then apply them when I began teaching units on the American Revolution, Immigration, Sectionalism and the Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution.
In the two-week unit, I selected skills I believed were important for understanding the past such as: judging how reliable a source of information is, figuring out the difference between a fact and opinion, making hunches about what happened and sorting evidence that would support or contradict each one, and distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information in reaching a conclusion