Let me ask you a question.
What is critical thinking, really?
Beyond the abstract notion that we want kids to show
some common sense, what does it really mean?
It's really pretty hard to nail down.
Is it answering questions that go beyond the basic facts?
Is it problem solving?
Is it coming up with new theories?
Even if we agree that any or all of these are what we mean
by critical thinking, how do we help students get better at it?
And it gets worse.
This stuff often gets elbowed out of our lesson plans
because we have so much content to get through.
In Big History, we try to do a few very specific things
to help students develop critical thinking skills.
First, we have a set of practices--
we call them claim testing practices--
woven throughout the course.
Claim testing helps students engage with unfamiliar ideas
and we encourage teachers to use them in teaching reading,
writing, and in managing classroom discussions.
Second, scale.
One of the ways we encourage students to see familiar things
in new ways is to move up and down in scale.
Third, as we've seen before, we rely heavily
on interdisciplinarity to help students develop new questions
and bring new insights to bear on familiar problems.
So, let's get started by looking at claim testing.
Claim testing is introduced in Unit Two in a terrific video
with Bob Bain.
Here's the short version.
There are four claim tests you'll introduce
to your students: intuition, authority, evidence, and logic.
Students will ask themselves these four questions
about a claim...
For intuition: does the claim jibe with your intuition?
For authority: does the claim come from a trusted source?
Evidence: does the claim come with data points to back it up?
And logic: does the claim follow a clear line of reasoning?
Claim testing is integrated into nearly everything in the course,
videos, activities, worksheets, reading strategies,
investigations, and debates.
There's even a series of comic books
to help introduce the concept.
As students start out, they'll claim test readings
and statements made in class.
No question, it'll be a little clumsy at first.
But there are a series of activities
called Claim Testing Debates, as well as lesson openings
called Snap Judgments, that are designed to help them
get a lot of practice early on.
About the same time students get more sophisticated
in their use of claim tests, claim testing starts to become
more pervasive in the lessons, and it will start to become
second nature.
At this point, think about pushing your students to use
the concept of claim testing in your discussions in class.
Students challenge each other using the language
of claim testing:
What's your evidence?
Who's providing that evidence, and so on.
And claim testing will start to play an important role
in writing.
Students can start to review and claim test
each other's written work, and then ultimately their own.
We can't say enough about the value of claim testing
for developing critical thinking skills.
Need a concrete reason?
Imagine giving a student the gift of not being the one
who thinks an article from "The Onion" is real.
We've talked about scale a few times now,
and it won't be the last.
Scale is another one of the key tools we use to help students
think critically.
Let's talk about how we can get students to use the concept
of scale to develop new questions
that unlock new insights.
Keep in mind, scale can be pretty abstract
for young students.
Thinking about humungous numbers like 13.8 billion
can make an adult's head explode.
So we encourage you to draw pictures, make models,
and a couple of times in the course,
we give you activities that take you outside.
The Big History on a Football Field activity is one example.
It's not just about driving home the point
of what 13.8 billion years looks like.
It's also intended to bring up questions like,
what's happening in these massive empty spaces of time?
And what took humans so long to show up?
When you start discussing migrations and marches,
similar exercises can help your kids understand distance.
You might ask students to compare the number of steps
they take each day--
which they can find on their phones these days--
there's an app for that--
with how far early humans traveled out of Africa.
Comparing population sizes can help students gain perspective
on the civilizations they study.
What cities today are the same size as ancient Uruk,
or Jericho, or Ghana?
This shifting in scale across time and space
is something historians do all the time and we want
our students to get into this habit early.
Finally, let's revisit the idea of multi or interdisciplinarity.
We've covered this idea a few times already.
The key idea we want to focus on here is how this concept helps
students generate new questions by incorporating the insights
of other disciplines.
One activity type to call out here is,
What Do You Know? What Do You Ask?
In these activities, teachers choose a significant event
of some kind.
It might be something modern like a refugee crisis
or something historical like the discovery
of an archaeological find.
Students have to suggest a group of scholars they would invite
to form their team, in order to help develop
a solution or response.
For each scholar, kids have to think about their discipline
and what questions that particular person
would help them answer.
This practice helps students develop stronger questions.
By looking at the situation from multiple angles,
they're able to develop deeper insights
and think more critically about the context.
So, that's about it here, let's recap.
Big History helps students think critically
across the curriculum.
They're presented with a simple, clear set of tools
for engaging with readings and discussion in the form
of claim testing.
These four simple questions provide explicit guideposts
for them to use and examine new information.
In addition, students are regularly encouraged
to shift scales in terms of time and distance to see
if new trends or insights emerge.
Finally, if, throughout the course,
we consider the insights and questions of scholars
from many disciplines, not just historians,
we have tremendous opportunities for deeper inquiry
and understanding.
That's all for now.
Be sure to visit the Big History Project community on Yammer
for more about claim testing, scales, and interdisciplinarity.
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