Week 8: Higher order

It had been such a hectic week. I have been struggling to keep up with the classes and feel incompetent most days if I didn’t understand the material on the spot. I still managed to muster up some energy and went to classes and tried my best to understand the material being taught. This week, we had learned about the effective use of questions as a teaching strategy. This world is full of questions, and it is important to know how to effectively ask questions as well as how to ask them to incorporate critical thinking skills in the students.
 
This week’s sessions focused on just that and how we can promote critical thinking skills by asking open-ended questions that gets students to think beyond their original state of understanding. For students to achieve critical thinking, they must properly ask questions, collect, and creatively categorize pertinent data, relate new information to previously learned material, reevaluate preconceived notions and ideas, reason rationally, and come to dependable and trustworthy conclusions. Asking questions is a crucial step to achieve higher order thinking as by doing this, students can consider many points of view and gain insight from the perspectives of their peers (Degener & Berne, 2017). I believe that for students to be ready for their life’s journey, teachers must incorporate the ability for them to critically think. This is due to the fact that the world is now becoming much more competitive and being able to think outside the box is a valuable skill to have and would be an advantage to the students in the future.

This reminds me of my own experience as a child. Growing up, I used to hate it when my parents would ask questions that forced me to defend my decisions. They would ask questions such as “Why are you choosing to cry instead of solving the issue?” It really got my blood boiling however, when I think about it logically, I find myself agreeing with them. In turn, that pushed me to regulate my emotions and solve the problem instead. To me, the most important aspect of using higher order questions in the class to promote critical thinking skills is to help foster harmony, promote the ability to properly communicate with peers and for the students to have a friendly competition in the classroom where they can lift each other while being focused on a similar goal. I realise how important it is for teachers to incorporate higher-order questions in the lesson and as a next step, I will strive to gain more knowledge on how I can create better higher-order thinking questions and incorporate them in my future lesson plan.

 

Reference

Degener, S., & Berne, J. (2017). Complex Questions Promote Complex Thinking. The Reading teacher, 70(5), 595-599. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1535