INTENSIVE CRITICAL THINKING - A UNIQUE TAG CLASSROOM EXPERIENCE.
Critical thinking is the hallmark of gifted and talented (G&T) education. But at TAG, critical thinking should be so intricately woven into teaching and learning that it grounds G&T education as at no other G&T school. My goal is to transform each TAG classroom into a laboratory for intensive critical thinking.
This uniquely TAG classroom has begun to evolve with a consultant from Atlas Communities (funded by our General Electric grant), Ms. Rhonda Cleavenson. She is working with each teacher on the fundamental question of student engagement.
She begins by examining a teacher's lessons; then she looks at students' responses to those lessons. She helps teachers rethink the teaching-learning context by understanding that critical thinking is a shared teacher-student and student-student experience.
Teachers learn to talk less
to their students. Students learn to talk more
with one another. In the TAG classroom, a teacher will move among student discussion groups (2-4 students) rather than stand and instruct in front of them.
The intensity of critical thinking will be evident most in the evaluation and analysis of students' writing. Teachers and students will jointly critique writing content (conceptualization and expression) and structure (grammar, spelling, and syntax). TAG teachers will always grade assignments. But their students will join them in analyzing the problems classmates face, beginning at the point at which each student looks at a blank page or computer screen through proofreading her or his final draft.
In the near future, I will offer parent clinics to extend the intensive critical thinking experience into the home, where, as we all know, much of your child's learning still occurs.
The TAG intensive critical thinking laboratory, I believe, will become a model for G&T classrooms. More importantly, it will give our students a competitive edge as they encounter problems throughout their lives requiring solutions based on the most developed thinking skills they possess.
