There is an old saying that teachers don’t tell students what to think, but what to think about. A new study from the University of Kansas found that even beyond helping students understand how to think through complex topics, a classroom can work with a teacher to develop its own social construction of thinking.
Teaching students how to think in critical, reflective and deliberate ways has long been an important part of public and literacy education. But there is a common assumption that teachers provide the knowledge and students are recipients on how to form these processes of thinking.
Min-Young Kim, assistant professor of curriculum and teaching at KU, led a study in which she observed how a teacher in an eighth grade English language arts class engaged students in constructing how they thought about literature. Kim found the students and teacher socially constructed how they think about a poem through a process called “languaging.” The teacher held them accountable for how they think, and the process facilitated the students’ engagement and connection with the material.
A growing body of literature has focused on the nature of knowledge in various academic subjects, but there has been little study on how thinking processes are formed in each.
“As a learning community, every classroom is constructing what thinking means, even though they have curriculum, materials and other things they share,” Kim said. “I wanted to understand that better. How do we facilitate thinking as a learning community? Not many studies have examined that.”
To probe the question, Kim observed an eighth grade English language arts class as the teacher and students studied Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Witnesses.” Over several class sessions, the students read the poem, analyzed it, discussed their thoughts on the author’s intent, their reactions to it and more.
“Here and there the teacher used the term ‘thinking aloud’ in her classroom and framed thinking in different ways,” Kim said. “As the class moved on, I saw that thinking is something constructed, and I wanted to research that more and interviewed the teacher about thinking processes and how she teaches them.”
Through observation and the interviews, Kim found the framework of “languaging” — using gestures, facial expressions and other forms of nonverbal communication along with speaking about the material — to be more useful than traditional views of language to construct how they thought about the poem.
In addition to the modeling of a way of thinking, the teacher held the students accountable for what they thought and how by asking them why they had certain thoughts, ideas and reactions or how they came to their conclusions. That led to students articulating their thoughts, explaining why they came to certain methods of thinking and how together they formed a method of thinking about the material and modeled it not only through their linguistic repertoire, but through posture, gestures and expressions.
Lastly, Kim noted that the teacher acknowledged the students’ ideas and contributions. She said yes to their ideas and added to them. In essence, this made the entire class co-authors in the construction of how they thought through and about the poem, Kim wrote in the study, which was published in the journal Reading Research Quarterly.
The findings show that languaging thinking aloud engages the students on a deeper level and makes them the authors of how the class thinks about the subject matter, instead of simply being told how to think about it.
“I am arguing in this study that with languaging thinking practice, students are not passive receivers. It’s not just transfer, but students are part of constructing what they think about in the class,” Kim said. “It’s more than the assumption of knowledge transfer. Instead, it’s a dynamic construction. They articulated their thinking practices, and the teacher acknowledged them.”
Kim, who has also studied how teachers teach argumentation, said future research could further examine how students use similar practices to construct how they think about class material in small group settings. Similar studies could also go beyond English to classes including science, history, arts, physical education and more to better understand how classroom culture influences how students thinking about various subject matter.
Traditionally, research has focused on instruction and how best to convey knowledge to students, but not how they can contribute to the ways the class thinks about topics and thereby becomes more engaged in the material.
“I think this paper gives us a tool or framework to look at how we can analyze thinking construction in many different kinds of classrooms and what kind of thinking practices take place and what more needs to be done to engage students in the social construction of how they think,” Kim said.
Journal
Reading Research Quarterly