Enhancing the quality of thinking and writing
How do you teach for thinking? How can your teaching deliberately target student cognition? These are the central questions that we will explore in our one-day workshop hosted at St Catherine's School, Toorak, on the 1st September 2023.
Critical thinking enhances the quality of writing by enriching the thought process that goes into constructing, presenting, and revising written arguments. The practice of writing, in turn, can help to refine and develop critical thinking skills. Critical thinking and writing are intricately linked and each can enhance the other.
Cognition by Design is the latest workshop in our Teaching for Thinking Continuous Professional Development program. It explores what it means to plan and teach in the language of student cognition, offering a clearer understanding of what these cognitions mean and a structured way to design learning experiences and assessment with precision and intentionality.
Morning session with Dr Peter Ellerton
Cognitive skills are often vaguely defined or abstracted, making a clear focus on their development problematic. For a long time, Bloom’s taxonomy helped to foreground these thinking skills and provided a language and conceptual framework for curriculum and assessment design.
But this taxonomy is now doing more harm than good, since the hierarchical nature of cognitions assumed by Bloom is wrong. Recent research has shown that the relationship of the cognitions to one another is far more organic and contextualised.
The central aim of this session is to make developing students’ cognitive skills more understandable, actionable, assessable and sharable across contexts.
In it, we present a new way of focusing on student cognition using a critical thinking lens. Participants will be introduced to a more actionable cognitive framework and provided with resources that can assist in learning experience and assessment design.
Teachers will leave the session able to analyse and evaluate their assessment and learning experiences to identify in detail the cognitive demands of tasks. They will have a range of resources which will assist in assessment design and construction.
Afternoon session with Dr Yael Leibovitch
Writing is a notoriously difficult skill to teach and to learn. Numerous studies lament student writing proficiency, and students' negative experiences with writing tasks can contribute to both negative school outcomes and self esteem.
But writing needn't be experienced this way.
The central aim of this session is to establish and unpack the benefits of a transferable classroom language to think and talk about writing. Drawing on educational research and theory, this session addresses three cognitively rich tools that simplify writing instruction, and in turn, simplify the writing process for students. More specifically, we will explore how to use Accountable Talk (Michaels et al, 2008) as a concrete means to promote respectful, engaging, and rigorous discussions about writing.
Participants will also explore what it means to view academic writing as a process of argumentation, and how this shift in understanding cuts across all disciplines. Finally, practitioners will drill down into the values of inquiry as a universal criteria for effective thinking and writing, and the many ways that teachers can empower students to use this language.
Teachers will leave the session harnessed with a range of tools to support and extend students’ understanding, collaboration and metacognition when writing, with positive implications for students’ assessment readiness and holistic development.
Engaging in this session will provide educators with an evidence-based linguistic toolkit, and the pedagogical intentionality, to approach writing instruction with confidence, efficacy, and joy.
