III. Typical Teaching Situations

Promoting Students' Intellectual Growth

Two women students discussing medieval architecture.

How often have you found students' comments such as these frustrating? (adapted from Perry, 1985):

• "What's this rigmarole about three theories of the economic cycle? Why doesn't she give us the right one and forget these games? How can we study for the exam?"
  
• "My roommate says his instructor really knows; maybe I should go to that section."
  
• "You said three to five pages. Does that mean four? Double-spaced or single?"
• "Everyone has a right to his own opinion."

Irritating and disturbing as such perspectives are, they are common to many young people who still believe what they learned as children: that knowledge comes from authority and if one memorizes and restates the "facts," one will receive good grades and be educated. Because these attitudes are, in fact, normal stages of cognitive development, faculty members and TAs need to know how to help students move to higher levels of understanding and graduate as people who reflect thoughtfully, or think critically, about the world around them.

Understanding Students' Perspectives

The prominence of "critical thinking" as a buzzword during the past two decades at times threatens to overshadow the usefulness of this concept for teachers. Yet critical thinking refers to those advanced cognitive processes through which educated people 27 make a rational response to questions that cannot be answered definitively, a response that integrates all relevant, available information to justify conclusions (Kurfiss, 1988, p. 2). People who think critically recognize that, in effect, little in the world is absolutely known but that we need to learn all we can and make reasoned judgments about what we believe and why. You can better encourage your students' progress to this level of intellectuality when you understand their different conceptions of knowledge. Through hundreds of interviews over many years in several different contexts, cognitive psychologists have documented young people's development through different stages, or levels, of understanding what constitutes knowledge (see especially Perry, 1970, 1981; Belenky et al., 1986). Kurfiss (1988, pp. 52-56) offers a clear overview, integrating Perry's nine "positions" and the seven ways of knowing outlined by Belenky et al.:

• Stage 1: Knowledge as facts. As some of the comments above show, many students believe that knowledge is a collection of discrete facts that one simply has to acquire from the professor or text and articulate on papers and exams. They see the professor as an authority who should give them the right answers. For such students, the concept of interpretation is puzzling, and they have no awareness of the complexity of the world.
  
  
• Stage 2: Knowledge as opinion. Students progress to this level when they have been convinced by the presence of conflicting theories, perspectives, and interpretations that one cannot always know what is right. But since they have not yet moved to a position from which they truly understand the reasons behind different points of view, they attribute them solely to personal opinions, all of which they see as equal: "I mean if you read them [critics], that's the great thing about a book like Moby Dick. [Laughs] Nobody understands it!" (Perry, 1981, p. 84). These students believe that giving one's opinion is enough and that teachers have no right to call the student "wrong" on matters of "opinion" (Perry, 1970, p. 97).
  
  
• Stage 3: Knowledge as reason. At this stage, students realize that there are indeed reasons why some opinions are better than others and that people use logic and evidence to support their arguments. In studying people who have progressed this far cognitively, Perry (1970) and Belenky and associates (1986) find different ways of understanding another's way of thinking. (Perry and colleagues interviewed Harvard University male undergraduates in the 1960s; in the 1980s, Belenky et al. interviewed female students and female parents.) Perry's scheme focuses on the traditional academic view that reasoning is primarily objective analysis and argument, whereas Belenky and her colleagues found that some women focus on trying to understand the reasons for another's way of thinking (hence, the term "connected knowledge"). In either case, the student realizes that "you've got to have some facts under the opinion, I guess" (Perry, 1981, p. 86).
  
  
• Stage 4: Knowledge as commitment. At this final stage, individuals recognize the complexity and uncertainty of knowledge while realizing their need to make commitments to reasoned positions. Perry's imaginary student sums up this stage this way: "I must be wholehearted while tentative, fight for my values yet respect others, believe my deepest values right yet be ready to learn" (1981, p. 79). Also described by Belenky and colleagues as "constructed knowledge," this stage for some people consists of integrating knowledge they learn from others with knowledge they feel intuitively is personally important: "Once knowers assume the general relativity of knowledge, that their frame of reference matters and that they can construct and reconstruct frames of reference, they feel responsible for examining, questioning, and developing the systems that they will use for constructing knowledge" (Belenky et al., 1986, pp. 138-39). In the end, critical thinkers continually question received knowledge and their own assumptions, approaching life with a spirit of inquiry.

Cognitive development research provides useful background for understanding critical thinking, but we academics have our own understanding of what it entails in our disciplines. Still, we can generally agree on several aspects of critical thinking, including many, if not all, of the following:

• it requires open-mindedness o it proceeds from a sense of curiosity and/or inquiry
• it is self-reflective, recognizing the need to examine one's own assumptions
• it takes evidence into account
• it is logical, or ordered o it is purposeful
• it is individual and independent
• it is tenacious, persevering in asking questions and seeking answers
• it is not averse to taking some risks
• it proceeds to develop a clear argument meant to persuade
• in fact, because critical thinking is difficult, it requires that people be willing to make the effort to do it.

Giving students insights into how you and your colleagues think critically about your discipline broadens their outlook and develops their own skills. Moreover, since Perry's (1970) study shows that students can progress at different rates in different academic disciplines, what they learn to understand in your course may well help them better grapple with new ideas in another.

Teaching Students to Think Critically

So, how can you help your students develop such habits of mind as to make them reflective, engaged citizens? First, recognize that you are not alone; advisors, academic deans, and students' peers (many of whom are at different stages of cognitive development) engage your students in situations that provoke puzzlement and growth. And know that intellectual growth is usually unsettling and upsetting, although we tend to forget that once we've arrived. Since some students resist or are angered by activities that make them question their assumptions and previous understandings, telling them the purpose of such exercises is usually helpful. Consider how to incorporate some of the recommended activities below, or create your own (for more ideas, see "Further Reading").

One of my greatest joys is to see the classroom become a vibrant intellectual community, with students and professor dynamically engaged in the animated exchange and discovery of ideas. Cooperative devices can help students to learn more by taking active responsibility for their own educations.

—Jahan Ramazani, English

• Encourage students' interest and their awareness of complexity by highlighting problems, issues, and topics that experts wonder about. By showing them that all is not known, you invite students to engage their minds; their own questions will open new avenues of thought to them (Meyers 1986).
  
  
• Design assignments that require students to argue positions not their own. Those who have difficulty understanding others' positions gain new understanding. Students who are cautiously considering embracing a position can "try it on" without taking the responsibility inherent in actual commitment.
  
  
• Create activities that enable students to juxtapose their current model of understanding with a better one. For instance, students who have learned an Aristotelian view of the universe will not forego it for a more accurate model until they see their theory fail (see A Private Universe).
  
  
• Emphasize change as inherent to the learning process. For instance, ask students to write briefly about how and why their perceptions about a certain issue have changed since the beginning of the course.
  
  
• Model the critical thinking process. For example, you might describe how you modified your position on an issue, emphasizing changes attributable to students' comments and ideas. Or, you can point out discrepancies in different texts, and explain how you came to be at ease with them. You might also ask students to point out assumptions in your thinking that you may not perceive.
  
  
• Remind students that embracing a position is not a lifelong commitment. With more information, they will reevaluate and change positions accordingly. Moreover, even wrong positions can lead to positive outcomes when wholeheartedly pursued.
  
  
• Respect and encourage each student. Students considering abandoning their family's world view may consider you a role model and need to know that you will stand by them, even if they lose familial support. Students who do not yet trust their own thinking process (and would prefer indisputable external evidence about "truth") are heartened by knowing that someone they respect trusts them to embrace the right position. In contrast, attacking students' positions (no matter how narrow-minded these seem) may make them cling to biases even more tightly, impeding their intellectual development.
  
  
• Identify the general principle behind students' comments and "mirror" it back to them, giving them a chance to ask, "Is that what I really believe?" and to reconsider: For example, "so you think moral principles differ in war time and peacetime?"
  
  
• Ask students to list and then compare the pros and cons of an issue. By juxtaposing their ideas with those of peers, they are prone to perceive some of their assumptions and might begin questioning them (Angelo and Cross, 1993).
  
  
• Show students that writing is, in effect, thinking: that in writing they clarify and refine their thoughts in wording them so as to communicate with others. For practical tips, see "Conceptualizing and Assigning Papers and Projects" in "Evaluating Students' Work."

Whether you define this issue as one of intellectual growth, reflective habits of mind, critical thinking, or thinking "like a mathematician, historian, etc.," you and your courses are essential to helping our students achieve an advanced level of understanding and thought. Consciously teaching them how to think about your discipline along with what to know about it will help them develop into reflective, engaged members of society.

Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, & that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.

—Thomas Jefferson, letter to
   Littleton Waller Tazewell,
   January 5, 1805