OLDaily

How to teach critical thinking skills online
Megan O’Reilly Palevich, eSchool News, 2020/12/22

I think a lot about teaching critical thinking skills. It is at once to my observation the area of the greatest need in our field (and in society generally), and also the subject that can have the most transformative impact on a person. Anyhow, the author of this short article claims to "have mastered the art" of teaching critical thinking in an online classroom. the recommendations are run-of-the-mill: collaboration is necessary, assessment should be formative, and guided writing and thinking prompts should be provided. Maybe. I think, though, that critical thinking involves seeing beyond surface features (that's why rote learning is so ineffective) and being able to visualize the structure of (various forms of) reasoning that lay deeper. It's about learning to see as much as it is about learning to do.

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Creativity in Education: Reflections From ISTE 2020
Pronita Mehrotra, edCircuit, 2020/12/22

I think this summary makes some useful points but should be read from a wider critical perspective. For example, this is a good point: "simply giving students the space to be creative doesn’t necessarily equip them with the skills to think creatively." But this seems wrong to me: " creativity is the ability to come up with ideas that are both novel and useful." This may define innovation, but creativity has to make room for the useless. Also, it's useful to note that most digital tools help students "express their creative idea but didn’t play a role in enabling creative thinking." But the idea that using pencils and paper is 'not using tools' is just wrong. Non-digital creativity still uses tools, whether they be classrooms, flipcharts, or other objects. And we can doodle and interact and play and be creative using both digital and non-digital tools. I do it all the time.

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Differentiation is in our schools to stay. What is it? And why are most criticisms of it just plain wrong?
Linda Graham, Kate de Bruin, Carly Lassig, Ilektra Spandagou, EduResearch Matters, 2020/12/22

Much of the criticism of learning styles is in reality criticism of a specific type of differentiation, that is, the idea of "teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities" (a much more precise definition is offered later in the article). The authors look at the arguments about differentiation, identify some that are "just plain wrong", and offer an analysis of some research to investigate the others. Note that they did not sample studies "differentiating for learning styles or intelligence strengths, or by ability grouping and segregation as there is either no evidence to support their use or because there is clear evidence against their use." What's left of the other studies? A mixed bag, including "great diffusion in how differentiation was conceptualised making it difficult to produce clear findings about whether differentiation works." For me, the literature on differentiation - including learning styles - has yet to come to grips with the question of what counts as success. As the authors acknowledge in this study, "the  question of the ‘what’ in ‘what works’ in relation to differentiation is yet to be answered, as the diversity in focus... weakens the evidential basis." Here's the full paper (38 page PDF) (note it granted me access to the full text, but warned me that this was 'limited access').

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Teach Your Students to ‘Explode’ Complex Text
Sunday Cummins, Middleweb, 2020/12/22

It is common for students to disguise their inability to comprehend a text by simply regurgitating text or citing evidence with little explanation. This post offers ways to help them improve by 'exploding' complex test. I would describe this as finding ways to critically analyze text (and it is a huge advantage to be able to do this naturally while reading). I used to do this a lot with my critical thinking students; I'd have them bring in clippings from the newspaper and we'd analyze them together. Now I would analyze this rather differently than Sunday Cummins does in this article, and I think there's a need for much wider critical reasoning skills on the part of both teachers and students. But the method is solid.

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3 Keys to Building Individual Learning Capacity
Betsy Hill, Roger Stark, edCircuit, 2020/12/22

This article has two good points to make about learning. It notes that while we all have the ability to learn because "learning is what our brains do", we differ in our capacity to learn. The two good points follow. The first is that it makes sense to understand an individual's cognitive skills. You might know them as learning styles, though I would characterize them as critical literacies. Second is "to help develop individual students’ cognitive skills so that those skills are simply there to use and support them in learning." Now there's a lot of populist theory here, as critics are quick to point out. But we can say that people are better or worse at logic or reading, etc., and we can identify ways to help their learning by supporting these skills. But beware the snake oil, like 'executive function', 'growth mindset', or 'cognitive flexibility'.

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Black Boxesor Unflattering Mirrors? Comparative Bias in the Science of Machine Behaviour
Cameron Buckner, 2020/12/22

I have long compared human learning with machine learning, in the sense that both work on the basis of using data (aka experience) to develop networks of connections. This paper considers criticisms of that perspective, specifically, "that processing in deep neural networks is unlike human cognition for four reasons: they are i) data-hungry, ii)  brittle, and  iii) inscrutable black boxes that merely iv)  reward-hack rather than learn real solutions to problems." These four arguments are effectively the argument that this view amounts to some form of behaviourism (a view expressed explicitly by Audrey Watters, among others). The responses look at some of the more recent challenges to deep learning that are also challenges in human learning: one-shot learning, perturbed images, explanatory rationality and interpretability, and game exploits. Even if you're not convinced by the argument there is a wealth of conceptual insight here. Image: DARPA.

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