engagement. In The Role of Education in Building Soft Skills, teacher Gareth Hancox (as cited in Greenberg & Nilssen, 2014) states:
If you watch two learners working on something together, you see that their learning is deeper. They are the ones making the discoveries and asking questions, and consequently teachers are not prescribing all of the information to the children, and instead letting the children have ownership of their learning. (p. 12)
Collaboration increases active participation and student ownership of learning. Often via collaboration, the end result is a better outcome and improved student learning. But there is another reason that collaboration is a great format for engagement and learning—it prompts questions.
During the collaborative process, students often pose many questions to deepen their understanding of a task. Questioning shows students are actively engaged in learning, thus making learning visible (Ostroff, 2016). Unfortunately, questioning in classroom environments is something that research finds erodes over time.
In studies, preschool children ask seventy-six questions per hour to understand and gain information (Chouinard, Harris, & Maratsos, 2007); however, in kindergarten those are reduced to two to five questions in a similar time frame. Dismally, by fifth grade, students ask between zero and two questions per school day (Engel, 2011). Interestingly, an analysis shows top technology geniuses and inventors possess one common feature—asking great questions (Dyer, Gregersen, & Christensen, 2011).
When students ask a question, their intrinsic motivation shows in their internal desire for understanding. Ostroff (2016) states, “Whoever asks the questions holds the power” (p. 100). Students need to know teachers value their questions, and when they know that, questioning can be an ignitor for critical thinking. (Strategy 11: Visual Thinking, on page 46, provides some question stems to spark student questioning.)
Engaging With Media Literacy
Media, which includes online videos, television, newspapers, magazines, movies, songs, cartoons, pictures, and posters, is pervasive in society. The capacity to view media, however, is not the same as understanding it. That requires a specific literacy skill set. For the purposes of this book, media literacy is the “ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a variety of forms” (Chen, Wu, & Wang, 2011, p. 85).
Media literacy education increases higher-level-thinking skills in students rated as low and medium school achievers (Jeong, Cho, & Hwang, 2012; Webb & Martin, 2012). Further, using media to learn is tied to higher rates of student engagement and teacher creativity in instruction. It’s also a daily, sometimes hourly, aspect of students’ lives; it’s a part of their culture. The National Council for the Social Studies (2016) states:
At the core of learning is Literacy—the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and produce communication. Media literacy expands the traditional concept of literacy to include the forms of communication that dominate the lives of our students. If our students are to be literate, we must teach them the skills and habits of literacy for print and non-print mediated messages. (p. 183)
Given this, bringing media into the learning environment is not just a way to grab students’ attention but also connect with them. But what is it that makes media so powerful?
Media has points of view and values. Students can learn how to use it (and how others use it) to influence people’s behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. Ithaca College professor Cyndy Scheibe and media literacy strategist Faith Rogow (2012) detail four main areas associated with media literacy: (1) understanding the media messages, (2) analyzing the message purpose, (3) making reasoned evaluation of media credibility and point of view, and (4) reflecting on how the media aligns to students’ values and beliefs. Likely, you can already see how these skills translate into all the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy revised (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). The fact that effectively using media to aid in students’ learning is also a great way to hold their attention is icing on the cake.
In the following chapters you will see how movement, collaboration, and media literacy join with the fifty strategies for building students from the Understand level to the Create level, and developing a culture of true critical thought in your classroom.
Discussion Questions
As you reflect on this chapter, consider the following five questions.
1. What instructional strategies do you use to promote student movement?
2. What strategies do you find most effective for engaging students in critical thinking and collaboration?
3. How do you integrate media to engage students in critical thinking?
4. What are challenges with incorporating movement, collaboration, and media in classrooms?
5. What other strategies do you use to promote cognitive engagement in your classroom?
Take Action
Use the following three activities to put this chapter’s concepts to work in your own classroom.
1. Review the instructional strategies for engagement in table 3.2 (page 26). Highlight the strategies you currently use in your classroom.
2. Analyze one of your units of study. Record a chart similar to the one in table 3.2 listing the strategies you use that utilize movement, collaboration, and media.
3. Select one lesson you use that needs more cognitive engagement. Identify one way you could integrate more movement, collaboration, and media into that lesson.
CHAPTER 4
Implementing Strategies for Understand-Level Thinking
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
—Leonardo da Vinci
In this chapter, you will find six instructional strategies that focus on learning at the Understand level of Bloom’s taxonomy revised (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Each of the following instructional strategies requires students to deploy cognitive skills at the Remember level (recognition and recall), along with a combination of Understand-level cognitive applications like interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, or explaining content. Icons with each strategy indicate which steps (levels) of the taxonomy the activity touches, as well as its primary tool for engagement (movement, collaboration, or media literacy).
With each strategy, you will find a brief introduction that explains its concept and purpose, a classroom example, a series of steps for implementing the strategy, a list of variations you can choose to implement, and a section detailing additional classroom examples based on different content areas.
Strategy 1: Vocabulary-Building Movement
Vocabulary-Building Movement is a strategy to help students develop their vocabulary using movement. Education expert Eric Jensen (2019) writes extensively on the powerful connection between physical activity and students’ long-term memory and attentional focus across all age groups. In particular, he builds
