WEEK 4: Critical Thinking, Dust Echoes and Candy Graphs!

Encouraging our Students to Think Critically

In today’s lecture Greg spoke about the importance of helping our students develop critical thinking skills. He defined critical thinking as the ability to think clearly and rationally. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking.

Critical thinking promotes creativity, is crucial for self-reflection and can develop problem solving skills in students. As teachers it is important that we promote the development of critical thinking skills in our students through engaging and authentic inquiry tasks and units. We can facilitate critical thinking and reflection in our students by making sure we construct engaging questions for them to investigate and making students aware of their own assumptions. It is also important that we encourage them to constantly reflect and analyse their investigations .

Critical thinking can also be responsible for enhancing students language and presentation skills because thinking clearly and systematically can improve the way we express our ideas. Mind mapping ICT programs like Inspiration are fantastic tools for getting students to express their ideas and to illustrate their comprehension of concepts . Some other useful site that promote the use of concept mapping for critical thinking include:

• Concept Draw (http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/products/mindmap/ap-visualthinking.php )
• IMindMap (http://www.imindmap.com/)
• Mind Manager (http://www.mindjet.com/us/)

Workshop Activities and Classroom Applications

Today Greg introduced us to an ABC website called Dust Echoes: www.abc.net.au/dustechoes/ . Dust Echoes contains a series of 12 animated dreamtime stories from central Arnhem Land. The animations are great for exploring the aboriginal culture and could be incorporated into the civics and citizenship domain at level 4 which states that students “explain the concept of multiculturalism and describe the contribution of various cultural groups, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, to Australian identity.” The site also has some great study guides and suggested activities for students and teachers.

During today’s workshop we watched one of the animations and used inspiration to create a mind map/story board of the main themes and events represented in the film.

Using the print screen function and paint program I was able to create some still pictures of the film. I used inspiration to arrange these pictures into a mind map.

This activity could be repeated for any animation or film the students view on the internet. Taking the still frames and arranging them into a concept map allows the students to reflect on the subject material more deeply. This process would also be great for story boarding or recount activities. The second activity we did today had a math’s focus. We brought in packets of M&Ms and grouped the chocolates into colours. We used a piece of paper to make a simple graphical representation of our M&Ms.Once we had collected and recorded our data we used Excel to graph the chocolates by colour.

The M&M website can be used to complement this activity (http://www.mms.com/us/about/characters/). We were able to get some pictures of the M&M characters to complement our graphs in the same way we used paint to obtain some pictures from the print screen function.

This activity is an engaging one because it has students graphing and charting using a medium that they are familiar with (and enjoy!). It is a good idea to keep in mind that When doing a graphing activity like this one with students, it is Important to ask the right questions when analyzing the data. How many were in your box? How many of each colour was in your box? What colour appeared the most/least? Ect. It is from the answers to these questions that some fantastic chance and data activities can be developed. The website is also a surprisingly good resource because it can be used by students to investigate real work issue like healthy eating.

As teachers however we need to be wary of food allergies when doing such an activity. It is also problematic to do an activity with chocolate in schools that may have specific guidelines in place about what the students can and cannot eat while in class. Other school communities may frown upon the distribution (and assumed promotion) of junk foods. While lollies can be a great way to engage children in chance, data and graphing activities, it is best to check with the principal of your school first to make sure that doing such an activity is appropriate. If it isn’t, you can just as easily use confetti or other coloured objects instead of chocolates.