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Who wants to be `right-thinking'?
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Don't reprimand your child if she tells you that a chalk is meant for throwing at front-benchers. It's not wrong, but divergent reasoning, said experts at a recent seminar in the city.
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All co-curricular activities, be it dancing wild in the rain or meditation, help children develop thinking skills.
DO OUR schools teach children to think? And more importantly, can one be taught to think? Yes, believe the new age educationists and psychologists. While the ability to think was earlier attributed to heredity and genes, thinking is now looked at as a skill which can be acquired and improved upon. A workshop for teachers, organised by Prism Educational Resource Centre last week, dealt with the various tools that can provoke children into serious thinking.
It is easy for a teacher to teach. It is difficult for him to sit and listen. Dr. Srikanta Swamy, professor and co-ordinator, Institute of Advanced studies in Education, R.V. Teachers' College, intended making this task a little easier through his presentation on Teaching Children to Think. About 200-odd highschool teachers of the City were taught techniques on teaching thinking. Dr. Swamy, who specialises in advanced educational psychology and multimedia systems of education, said: "All great men were inevitably great thinkers. And like a computer, a mind can be programmed to think. And the thinking capacity of the child, be it at whatever level, can be raised."
Like intelligence, thinking can be measured, he argued. There are verbal and non-verbal tests to measure thinking. Also, there are specific tests to measure various types of thinking and reasoning, such as Watson - Glaser critical thinking appraisal, Cornell critical thinking test, Ross test of higher cognitive process, Minnesota test of creative thinking, Passi test of creativity, and Swamy's test of critical thinking.
Elaborating on the types of thinking, Dr. Swamy observed that most classroom teaching tends to focus on convergent thinking. For instance, teachers encourage children to come up with the single, most-accepted "right answer" to a question such as "What is the purpose of a chalk?" And most children respond with "To write." But it is "divergent thinking", or the ability to think of new aspects, new answers, and new methodologies that make for a creative process. While teaching divergent thinking, teachers need not worry about the "rightness" or the "absurdity" of the divergent lines of thought different children may come up with, Dr. Swamy suggests. So to the question on the function/purpose of a chalk, if your wards come up with answers like "To throw it at the student on the first row", teachers should welcome it rather than reprimand the child. The idea is that the mind is exercised to think out of the box.
Vikram Prabhu, psychologist, said: "A child, given exercises of problem solving on his own now, will find it easy to find solutions to real problems he would face in his future, both at the personal and the academic level."
Dr. Swamy, who was conferred the NCERT Award in 1998 for his work in Educational Psychology, also offered more food for thought. Children who want to become scientists should be encouraged to develop their inductive thinking ability, the thinking process that helps a scientist make inferences from observation.
Reflective thinking is what can help us learn from our mistakes. Anyone aspiring to be a lawyer needs to focus on his logical thinking abilities, which facilitates establishment of logic. Budding industrialists need to nurture their lateral thinking to come up with new ideas for catching the public attention. And everybody needs to develop vertical and critical thinking to excel in any line of work.
Teachers may induce thinking in children by co-curricular activities such as riddle solving, presentation of case studies, and discussions. There are also specific mental exercises to incite thinking. At the physiological level, silence and meditation can improve thinking capabilities in children by creating peace, and consequently, clarity of thought, Dr. Hemant Agarwal, a paediatrician, added. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, all children, and probably adults too, need to learn to do away with negative thoughts and understand the power of positive thinking, all those who were part of the discussion felt.
Teachers and parents interested in learning more on teaching thinking may read Edward de Bono's Teaching Thinking, Barry K. Beyar's Developing Thinking Skills, John Dowey's How We Think, and David Perkins' Thinking Frames.
Dr. Srikanta Swamy can be contacted on 6391106 or on swamythink@yahoo.co.in. Prism Educational Research Centre can be contacted on 6713991 or on prism@vsnl.com.
H.V.
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