CRITICAL THINKING: Second Grade
- Creates and implements instructional units that promote critical thinking, problems solving, and inquiry.
- Synthesizes information to promote concept development.
- Integrates engaging problems that are connected to students lives.
- Uses effective questioning methods that encourage higher order thinking.
Description & Rationale
In planning and implementing this unit, I consciously considered how I would integrate tasks and activities that would require the students to critically think at various levels based upon Bloom's Taxonomy. Since they had to create a paragraph for a letter and design the stationary for the letter, the students obviously engaged in higher order thinking activities. But, one of my objectives for this unit was to have the children do more than write. I wanted them to write in a certain format and for a particular purpose that required them to write with awareness about the writing PROCESS. We talked a lot about this process. The BrainPop Jr. movies addressed this process, and of course, we executed this process. In this process, probably one of the most challenging critical thinking exercises for the students was to organize their ideas into a topic sentence/main idea with supporting detail sentences and a concluding sentence using a graphic organizer I supplied them. For students who were writing about the science unit we did on butterflies, this activity required them to summarize events in a particular sequence, whether they were writing about the life cycle of the butterfly or the order in which we covered that particular unit in class. Students had to recall, articulate, and explain what they had done, read, or learned. They had to apply rules of grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling that they had been studying for weeks leading up to and during this unit. They had to make value judgments about word choice and overall topic both for their paragraphs and when they peer-reviewed the works of other classmates. I think through this unit, the students' minds ran the gamut of Bloom's Taxonomy more than once. (The butterfly above was drawn by Student 11 as part of the Letter Writing Unit.)
Below is a chart of activities the students completed as a part of this unit and how those activities might be classified based upon the six categories of Bloom's Taxonomy. I used the revised version that places "Create" above "Evaluate" and renames "Knowledge" as "Remembering" and "Comprehension" as "Understanding." The images below can also be viewed as PDF documents by clicking here. The images in the next set are the graphic organizers of Students 2, 17, and 20.
Below is a chart of activities the students completed as a part of this unit and how those activities might be classified based upon the six categories of Bloom's Taxonomy. I used the revised version that places "Create" above "Evaluate" and renames "Knowledge" as "Remembering" and "Comprehension" as "Understanding." The images below can also be viewed as PDF documents by clicking here. The images in the next set are the graphic organizers of Students 2, 17, and 20.
Reflection
When I decided to do this unit, I was concerned that I might be asking many of these students to do more intellectually than they were capable of doing simply by virtue of their ages. These children are, after all, early second graders; many of whom are only seven years old. A piece of constructive criticism I received more than once from a couple of professors at UAH was that my lesson plans were too sophisticated for my intended student audience. After discussing my concerns with Jan Ingram, I went forward as planned since my unit aligned sufficiently with ALCoS standards for second grade. While many students struggled with some of the higher order thinking activities associated with this unit, many others performed extremely well. I was teaching these children concepts and skills that they would be using throughout their educational years and lives. I did not expect them to fully master some of these concepts and skills at this stage. I viewed this unit as the beginning of a process that they would be developing for years to come. I had Jan Ingram's enthusiastic blessing and the students actually did better than we anticipated.
While it is necessary to design lessons that fall within the cognitive capabilities of the students, I think it is a teacher's obligation to push the students toward the next level. So much of education, particular at this level, is about repetition. Even if some of the students struggled with understanding the concept of a main idea or experienced difficulty with commas in a series, when they see these topics again in third grade or fourth grade, the topics will not be foreign to them.
It was interesting to see the progession of the paragraphs from brainstorming list to graphic organizer to rough draft to final draft. Many of the students had a finished product that looked nothing like their graphic organizers, while many did. But, I explained to them that this was just fine. As a matter of fact, it reflected the realities and the purpose of the writing process. Again, I focused heavily on the process of writing and the steps in the process. Teaching the children to be cognitively aware of that process as they wrote, I think, exemplifies the best in encouraging critical thinking skills.
While it is necessary to design lessons that fall within the cognitive capabilities of the students, I think it is a teacher's obligation to push the students toward the next level. So much of education, particular at this level, is about repetition. Even if some of the students struggled with understanding the concept of a main idea or experienced difficulty with commas in a series, when they see these topics again in third grade or fourth grade, the topics will not be foreign to them.
It was interesting to see the progession of the paragraphs from brainstorming list to graphic organizer to rough draft to final draft. Many of the students had a finished product that looked nothing like their graphic organizers, while many did. But, I explained to them that this was just fine. As a matter of fact, it reflected the realities and the purpose of the writing process. Again, I focused heavily on the process of writing and the steps in the process. Teaching the children to be cognitively aware of that process as they wrote, I think, exemplifies the best in encouraging critical thinking skills.