By Dennis Sale
IN recent columns I outlined major factors that are rapidly impacting the educational landscape and changing it in fundamental ways. We now have a situation where knowledge is expanding exponentially, and we cannot keep adding more and more content to the school curriculum.
However, at the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) is providing almost unlimited access to this massive global knowledge base through technology agents. Furthermore, we are living in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, and this is not going to change in the foreseeable future.
Hence, the emergence of so-called 21st-century competencies such as communication and collaboration, metacognition, critical and creative thinking, and digital literacy is seen as a necessary educational reframe to prepare young people for this reality. Central to a new educational direction is the need for students to learn how to learn effectively and efficiently – what I refer to as mastering the learning process – so that they can develop the capability to be self-directed learners. In this column I focus on one major competence; that is critical thinking, and how it can be taught in the context of subject content knowledge.
The systematic infusion of critical thinking skills with subject concept knowledge
I spent many years researching how to create, design, implement and operate a thinking curriculum (Sale, 2015 and 2020) that involved the following essential prerequisites: 1) a valid framing of the key mental/cognitive operations involved in the thinking process (especially good thinking) to be able to define thinking skills at the level curriculum outcomes; and 2) identifying effective teaching methodologies that facilitate students’ ability to develop these cognitive skills. Note, thinking skills are invisible mental operations and can only be inferred through actual behaviours and sustained introspection – typically by experts from various fields.
The successful development of students’ critical-thinking skills involves a teaching strategy that systematically infuses the key concepts that are fundamental to understanding the structure of the subject topic being taught along with the relevant critical thinking skill(s). In most basic terms, knowledge + thinking = understanding. Critical-thinking skills include the ability to analyse, compare and contrast, make inferences and interpretations and evaluate data sources to identify fact from opinion and how things work as systems and sub-systems. In this way students can build a foundational understanding of what a subject topic is about and how it applies in real-world contexts. From this base, they can use the affordances of AI to expand their factual knowledge base and apply the critical thinking skills to build – over time and with effort – a deep understanding of the subject topics within the domains of study.
To Illustrate: My experience of learning history at school
I did an A-level in history, which involved lessons of dictation and note-taking, and I revised for the exam by memorising lists of factual knowledge on such matter as the Peasants’ Revolt, the Corn Laws and key inventions that led to the industrial revolution. I did pass the exam with a reasonable grade but had limited understanding of why history is such an important school subject. If I had been asked then what history is about, I would probably have said something like “facts about the past”. Also, if I had taken the same exam a year later, I would have failed it badly, as I never used this knowledge again. So how can we now teach history that encourages a more interesting and meaningful learning for students as well as developing essential critical-thinking skills?
As a starting point, students must learn that history is not a collection of facts that speak for themselves. Apart from relatively uncontested facts and artefacts (eg, England won the World Cup in 1966) it’s also a collection of stories about past events, written by people who have access, perspectives and intentions about events. Hence, students must understand that much historical knowledge is socially constructed, along with a range of situational limitations and inevitable human biases. For this reason, they must develop the ability to accurately analyse and evaluate historical data sources to make accurate inferences and interpretations that enable the separation of fact from opinion and underpinning ideologies. This is the methodology (eg, practices and tools) of professional historians and must be key procedural knowledge in learning history.
Learning history, apart from any intrinsic interest, must have a central focus on unpacking key features of human nature and societal development, and how this impacts the world we live in. A key aim must be to empower students with the competence to conduct evidence-based historical analysis and evaluation, and then to go on to generate creative and useful scenarios and options that can improve future lives for humans.
How much and what bits of history do we teach, and on what basis?
There is a lot of history (to say the least), and we can only focus on selected segments in terms of the subject content for a history curriculum. Invariably, this is subjective and there are many perspectives relating to what content is most important and on what basis – it’s a very contested area. The stark description of curriculum divergence over the decades (centuries) is aptly captured by Kelly (1995), who describes it as, “…the battlefield of many competing influences and ideologies”.
In summary, I have posed key questions that must be thoughtfully addressed in terms of reframing a better school curriculum – what should be taught and how in the AI era. From my framing, given our increasing knowledge of the workings of both mind and brain in understanding how humans learn best, as well as the affordances of increasingly potent AI agents, there is the possibility of an exciting future for enhancing student learning globally. I envisage a future in which students learn more effectively, efficiently and with the critical competencies to improve human actions both at the individual and global level. It’s a challenging, necessary and exciting project but needs to be done with expertise and courage.
Dennis Sale worked in the Singapore education system for 25 years as adviser, researcher and examiner. He coached over 15,000 teaching professionals and provided 100-plus consultancies in the Asian region. Dennis is author of the books Creative Teachers: Self-directed Learners (Springer 2020) and Creative Teaching: An Evidence-Based Approach (Springer, 2015). To contact Dennis, visit dennissale.com.
