TITLE: Starting to Think
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 10, 2009  9:48 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Today one of my students tweeted that he had started
doing something new: setting aside time each to sit
and think.  This admirable discipline led to a Twitter
exchange among students that ended with the sentiment
that schools don't teach us how to think.

I'm not sure what I think about this.  At one level, I
know what they mean.  Universities offer a lot of
courses in which we expect students to be able to think
already, but it's rare when courses aim specifically to
teach students <EM>how</EM> to think.  Similarly, we
don't often teach students how to read, and in software
engineering, we don't often teach students how to do
analysis.  We demonstrate it and hope they catch on.
(Welcome to calculus!)

Some courses take aim at how to think, or at least do
on paper, but they tend to be gen ed courses or courses
in philosophy that most students don't take, or don't
take seriously.  Majors courses are the best hope for
many, because there is some hope that students will
care enough about their majors to want to learn to
think like experts in the discipline.  In CS, our
freshman-level discrete structures course is a place
where we purport to help students reason the way
computer scientists do.  In Software Engineering, I've
decided the only way we can possibly learn how to
build software is to do it and then analyze what
happens.  Again, I am not teaching students so much
how to think, so much as hoping to put them in a
position where they can learn.

This is one part of my attempt to
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-08.html#e2009-08-21T15_12_44.htm">
   start where students are</A>.
But where do we go, or try to go, from there?

That said, lots of people in education and academia
spend a lot of their time thinking about how to help
students learn to think.  Last month, I saved a link
to a post at Dangerously Irrelevant on
<A HREF="http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2009/08/education-and-learning-to-think.html">
   Education and Learning to Think</A>.
That post assumes that one goal of education is
"higher-order thinking" -- thinking about thinking
so that we can learn to do it better.  It lists a
number of features of higher-order thinking, goals
for our students and thus for our courses.  The
list looks awfully attractive to me right now,
because my current teaching assignment aims to
prepare prospective software developers to work as
professionals, and these are precisely the sorts of
skills we would like for them to have before they
graduate.  Systems analysis and requirements
gathering are all about <EM>imposing meaning,
finding structure in apparent disorder</EM>.
Building software <EM>involves uncertainty.  Not
everything that bears on the task at hand is
known</EM>.  Judgment and self-regulation are
essential skills of the professional, but much of
our students' previous fourteen or fifteen years
of education have taught them not to self-regulate,
if only by giving them so few opportunities to do
so.  When faced with it for the first time, they
tend to balk.  Should we be surprised?

There are other possible thinking outcomes we might
aim for.  A while back, I wrote about a particular
HS teacher's experience as a summer CS student in
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-08.html#e2009-08-19T15_51_02.htm">
   Teaching Is Hard</A>.
Mark Guzdial also wrote about that teacher's blog
entries, and Alan Kay left a comment on Mark's
blog.  Alan suggested that one of the key traits
that we must help students develop is
<B>skepticism</B>.  This is one of the defining
traits of the scientist, who must question what she
sees and hears, run experiments to test ideas, and
gather evidence to support claims.  One of the
great lessons of the Enlightenment is that we all
can and should think and act like scientists, even
when we aren't "doing science".  The methods of
science are the most reliable way for us to
understand the world in which we live.
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-09.html#e2009-09-04T16_09_41.htm">
   Skepticism and experiment</A>
are the best ways to improve how we think and act.

There is more.  People such as
<A HREF="http://www.dreamsongs.com/">
   Richard Gabriel</A>
and
<A HREF="http://www.paulgraham.com/">
   Paul Graham</A>
tell us that education should help us develop
<B>taste</B>.  This is one of the defining traits
of the maker.  Just as all people should be able
to think and act like scientists, so should all
people be able to think and act creators.  This is
how we shape the world in which we live.  Alan
Kay talks about taste, too, in other writings and
would surely find much to agree with in Gabriel's
and Graham's work.

All this adds up to a pretty tall order for our
schools and universities, for our apprenticeships
and our workplaces.  I don't think it's too much
of a cop-out to say that one of the best ways to
learn all of these higher-order skills is to 
<B>do</B> -- act like scientists, act like creators
-- and then reflect on what happens.

If this were not enough, the post at Dangerously
Irrelevant linked to above closes a quote that
sets up one last hurdle for students and teachers
alike:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
It is a new challenge to develop educational programs
that assume that all individuals, not just an elite,
can become competent thinkers.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

100% may be beyond our reach, but in general I start
from this assumption.  Like I said, teaching is hard.
So is learning to think.
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