Engaging Ideas

The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom

John C. Bean, Dan Melzer

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119705383
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Use your course's big ideas to accelerate students' growth as writers and critical thinkers

The newly revised third edition of Engaging Ideas delivers a step-by-step guide for designing writing assignments and critical thinking activities that engage students with important subject-matter questions. This new edition of the celebrated book (now written by the co-author team of Bean and Melzer) uses leading and current research and theory to help you link active learning pedagogy to your courses' subject matter. You'll learn how to:

• Design formal and informal writing assignments that guide students toward thinking like experts in your discipline
• Use time-saving strategies for coaching the writing process and handling the paper load including alternatives to traditional grading such as portfolio assessment and contract grading
• Help students use self-assessment and peer response to improve their work
• Develop better ways than the traditional research paper to teach undergraduate reading and research
• Integrate social media, multimodal genres, and digital technology into the classroom to promote active learning

This book demonstrates how writing can easily be integrated with other critical thinking activities such as inquiry discussions, simulation games, classroom debates, and interactive lectures. The reward of this book is watching students come to class better prepared, more vested in the questions your course investigates, more apt to study purposefully, and more likely to submit high-quality work. Perfect for higher education faculty and curriculum designers across all disciplines, Engaging Ideas will also earn a place in the libraries of graduate students in higher education.

1
Using Writing to Promote Thinking : A Busy Professor's Guide to the Whole Book

In his now classic study of pedagogical strategies that make a difference, Richard Light (2001) examined the connection between writing and student engagement. “The results are stunning,” he claims:

The relationship between the amount of writing for a course and students' level of engagement—whether engagement is measured by time spent on the course, or the intellectual challenge it presents, or students' level of interest in it—is stronger than the relationship between students' engagement and any other course characteristic. (55)

More recent research, conducted jointly by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA), has shown that for promoting engagement and deep learning the number of writing assignments in a course may not be as important as the design of the writing assignments themselves (Anderson, Anson, Gonyea, and Paine, 2009). Good assignments, this research has shown, give students opportunities to receive early feedback on their work, encourage meaning‐making, and clearly explain the instructor's expectations and purpose. (We discuss this research in depth in chapter 4.) The aim of this book is to give professors a wide range of options for bringing the benefits of engaged learning to students. Our premise, supported by an increasing body of research, is that good writing assignments (as well as other active learning tasks) evoke a high level of critical thinking, help students wrestle productively with a course's big questions, and teach disciplinary ways of seeing, knowing, and doing. They can also be designed to promote self‐reflection, leading to more integrated, personally meaningful learning. Moreover, the benefits do not accrue only to students. Professors who successfully integrate writing and other critical thinking activities into their courses often report a satisfying increase in their teaching pleasure: students are better prepared for class, discussions are richer, and student performance improves.

But the use of writing and critical thinking activities to promote learning does not happen through serendipity. Teachers must plan for it and foster it throughout the course. This chapter suggests a sequence of steps that teachers can take to integrate writing and critical thinking into their courses. It then addresses four negative beliefs that often discourage teachers from taking these steps—the beliefs that integrating writing into a course will take time away from content, that writing assignments are not appropriate for some disciplines or courses, that assigning writing will bury a teacher in paper grading, and that assigning writing requires specialized expertise. Because these beliefs raise important concerns, we seek to supply reassuring responses at the outset.

This chapter provides, in effect, a brief overview of the whole book; subsequent chapters treat in depth each of the suggestions or issues introduced briefly here.

Steps for Integrating Writing and Critical Thinking Activities into a Course

This section surveys seven steps teachers can take to integrate writing and critical thinking activities into a course.

Step 1: Become Familiar with Some of the General Principles Linking Writing to Learning and Critical Thinking

To appreciate how writing is linked to learning and critical thinking, we can begin with a brief discussion of how we might define critical thinking.

Critical Thinking Rooted in Problems

Although definitions in the pedagogical literature vary in detail, in their broad outlines they are largely elaborations, extensions, and refinements of the progressive views of John Dewey (1916), who rooted critical thinking in the students' engagement with a problem. Problems, for Dewey, evoke students' natural curiosity and stimulate learning and critical thought. “Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding [their] own way out, does [the student] think” (188).

Part of the difficulty of teaching critical thinking, therefore, is awakening students to the existence of problems all around them. Meyers (1986), who agrees with Dewey that problems are naturally motivating, argues that teachers ought to begin every class with “something that is a problem or a cause for wonder” (44). Meyers quotes philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi, who claims that “as far down the scale of life as worms and even perhaps amoebas, we meet a general alertness of animals, not directed towards any specific satisfaction, but merely exploring what is there: an urge to achieve intellectual control over the situations confronting [them]” (41).

Presenting students with problems, then, taps into something natural and self‐fulfilling in our beings. In his fifteen‐year study of what the best college professors do, Ken Bain (2004) shows that highly effective teachers confront students with “intriguing, beautiful, or important problems, authentic tasks that will challenge them to grapple with ideas, rethink their assumptions, and examine their mental models of reality” (18). Set at the appropriate level of difficulty, such “beautiful problems” create a “natural critical learning environment” that engages students as active and deep learners. Similarly, Brookfield (1987) claims that critical thinking is “a productive and positive” activity. “Critical thinkers are actively engaged with life” (5). This belief in the natural, healthy, and motivating pleasure of problems—and in the power of well‐designed problems to awaken and stimulate the passive and unmotivated student—is one of the underlying premises of this book.

Disciplinary versus Generic Domains for Critical Thinking

Not all problems, however, are academic problems of the kind that we typically present to students in our classrooms or that we pose for ourselves in doing scholarly research. Academic problems are typically rooted within a disciplinary conversation: to a large extent, these problems are discipline‐specific, because each discipline poses its own kinds of questions and conducts inquiries, uses data, and makes arguments in its own characteristic fashion. As Anne Beaufort (2007) has shown, to think and write like a disciplinary expert, students must draw not only on subject matter knowledge but also on knowledge about the discipline's genre conventions, its methods of argument, its typical kinds of evidence, its ways of referencing other researchers, and its typical rhetorical contexts and audiences. Chapters 3 and 4 develop strategies for helping students think rhetorically about their purpose, audience, genre, and discourse community. Chapter 10 addresses Beaufort's novice‐expert schema in more detail by drawing on rhetorical understanding to teach undergraduate research.

Although academic problems typically have discipline‐specific features, certain underlying aspects of critical thinking are generic across all domains. According to Brookfield (1987), two “central activities” define critical thinking: “identifying and challenging assumptions and exploring alternative ways of thinking and acting” (71). Joanne Kurfiss (1988) likewise believes that critical thinkers pose problems by questioning assumptions and aggressively seeking alternative views. For her, the prototypical academic problem is “ill‐structured”; that is, it is an open‐ended question that does not have a clear right answer and therefore must be responded to with a proposition justified by reasons and evidence. “In critical thinking,” says Kurfiss, “all assumptions are open to question, divergent views are aggressively sought, and the inquiry is not biased in favor of a particular outcome” (2).

The Link between Writing and Critical Thinking

Given this view of critical thinking, what is its connection with writing? Quite simply, writing is a process of doing critical thinking and a product that communicates the results of critical thinking. As we show in chapter 2, writing instruction goes sour whenever writing is conceived primarily as a “communication skill” rather than as a process and product of critical thought. If writing is merely a communication skill, then we primarily ask of it, “Is the writing clear?” But if writing is critical thinking, we ask, “Is the writing interesting? Does it show a mind actively engaged with a problem? Does it bring something new to readers? Does it make an argument?” As chapters 2 and 3 explain, experienced writers begin by posing two kinds of problems—what we might call subject matter problems and rhetorical problems. Subject matter problems drive the writer's inquiry. The writer's thesis statement (or hypothesis to be tested in empirical research) is a tentative response to a subject matter problem; it poses a contestable “answer” or “solution” that must be supported with the kinds of reasons and evidence that are valued in the discipline. But writers also think critically about rhetorical problems: who is my audience? What genre should I employ and what are its features and conventions? How much do my readers already know about and care about my research question? How do I want to change my audience's views? What alternative views must I consider? Writers produce multiple drafts because the act of writing is itself an act of problem‐solving. Behind the scenes of a finished product is a messy process of exploratory writing, conversation, and discarded drafts. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with these issues in depth.

Step 2: Design Your Course with Critical Thinking Objectives in Mind

Once teachers are convinced of the value of critical thinking, the next step is to design a course that nurtures it. What is such a course like? In her comprehensive review of the literature on critical thinking, Kurfiss (1988) examined a wide range of successful disciplinary courses devoted to the teaching of subject matter and critical thinking. In each case, she explains, “the professor establishes an agenda that includes learning to think about subject matter. Students are active, involved, consulting and arguing with each other, and responsible for their own learning” (88). From this review, she derives eight principles for designing a disciplinary course that supports critical thinking:

1. Critical thinking is a learnable skill; the instructor and peers are resources in developing critical thinking skills.
2. Problems, questions, or issues are the point of entry into the subject and a source of motivation for sustained inquiry.
3. Successful courses balance challenges to think critically with support tailored to students' developmental needs.
4. Courses are assignment centered rather than text and lecture centered. Goals, methods, and evaluation emphasize using content rather than simply acquiring it.
5. Students are required to formulate and justify their ideas in writing or other appropriate modes.
6. Students collaborate to learn and to stretch their thinking, for example, in pair problem solving and small‐group work.
7. Several courses, particularly those that teach problem‐solving skills, nurture students' metacognitive abilities.
8. The developmental needs of students are acknowledged and used as information in the design of the course. Teachers in these courses make standards explicit and then help students learn how to achieve them. (88–89)

This book aims to help teachers develop courses that follow these guidelines. Of key importance are Kurfiss's princ...