Welcome To The Classroom

It’s an honor and a privilege to teach students. If you don’t think so, don’t become and educator. The classroom is a place that should inspire, encourage creativity and problem solving, teach 21st century skills, and most importantly, be a place that connects the real world to what is being taught. It is the job of the teacher to teach students HOW to think, NOT what to think. The moment a teacher uses the classroom as a political soapbox or pushes personal and political ideology, they should be removed from the classroom immediately. It is at that point that learning has stopped and indoctrination has started.

I have worked in a building where teachers use Kid’s CNN news in their classroom. I have always had a hard time with this, as this is only one source of information, and that source usually pushes some kind of a political agenda. News today is not what it used to be – unbiased and focused on factual information. If educators are going to use news outlets in their classroom, they MUST use more than one and provide a good array of sources for students to consider. Most teachers will only use the news sources that THEY agree with. This is also wrong. By doing this, a teacher is still pushing personal and political opinion and ideology in the classroom. Teacher’s need to respect the learning of students and provide them with multiple sources to consider and engage. The teacher’s feelings and opinions on the subject DOES NOT MATTER. 

The best way to challenge anyone in their thinking is by asking questions. The questions that are presented to the class should be based on the content standards and connected to real world learning and skills. An essential part of the classroom is to prepare students for the real world. You might be arguing that some content standards do not encourage real world skills and learning, and to that I would agree with you, and I will be writing about that later. However, the purpose of this article is to express the importance of teaching students HOW to think and not what to think.

So the question remains, “How do you teach students HOW to think?” First, students need to be allowed to be uncomfortable with not knowing the answer. The first step in teaching students HOW to think is teaching perseverance and grit. Without these two qualities, thinking usually doesn’t occur. The process of thinking is most often a daunting task; especially in today’s society. Students are constantly bombarded with information everyday due to technology that they carry around in their pockets. Technology has created a society of “right her, right now” thinking. In other words, everything is taken at face value and not really considered if it is true or factual. Thinking involves disassembling information and finding the factual content through research and problem solving. To do this, one must have the perseverance and grit to wade through the “BS” and discover the facts. 

If students are not taught how to back up their thinking with factual evidence, then they are not learning how to think. If facts are not part of the learning process, then the classroom has turned into a propaganda and indoctrination machine.

Finally, and most importantly, teaching students how to think means the teacher asks questions to encourage deeper thinking. “How?” and “Why?” questions are critical. After asking said questions, the teacher must allow the student to process through those questions. When a student answers a proposed question, the teacher should ask the students to support their thinking with factual evidence. This goes back to the second part of teaching students how to think. Here comes the clincher – If the student’s thinking differs from the teacher’s, and the student has supported their thinking with factual evidence, then the teacher remains silent and congratulates the student on a job well done. If the student is lacking factual evidence, the teacher challenges the student to find the evidence to support their thinking. In other words, the teacher keeps their ideas out of it and allows the student to formulate their own through research and factual evidence.

Bottom line, as educators, our job is to teach students how to think and not what to think. Our personal opinions, ideologies, and political agendas have NO place in the classroom. If you can’t handle that as an educator, then leave the classroom. Your job is not to make people in your own image. Your job is to make strong, individual thinkers and achievers by teaching skills needed to be successful in the classroom. So let me ask you, what are you teaching?