Today's critical thinking

 

Theories of Critical Thinking

 

               While there are many different opinions about critical thinking and how best to accomplish it, one thing is clear, getting students to this point is important. Throughout the years, teachers have used different methods of teaching to give students the greatest learning opportunity. The methods that teachers have used, often were dictated by school systems or boards.

Teachers have always had the closest connections to their students and have known that sometimes there were better ways to help that student, which is what all good teachers want, but teachers are not always given the freedom to use methods outside the prescribed current teaching methods. Much of this is because in teaching the teachers tend to see firsthand what is working and what does not, but the policy makers are slow to adapt to changing their policies to allow these new methods. While with everything else in life, change takes time. In some cases, the changes can be done quickly, while some take extremely long periods of time.

Within the education system, changes that are mild adjustments can often be made quickly where more extreme changes take longer due to reluctance. Today, we see that we have shifted to a new way of thinking where teachers no longer expect to give students information and expect them to remember it and instead teachers look to have students not only learn new information but also how to find new information and to understand and be able to use this information in the real world. This is a major shift in the pedagogy of educators today than that of the past. Teachers today must also keep up with new information and technologies themselves to help students. Therefore, teachers now must work together to help each other learn new skills to better help student learning.

With todays climate in the school systems, I think we are at a much better advantage to teachers of the past. Leaders now recognize that all students do not learn the same and usually give teachers more latency when it comes to the way teachers teach. And with technology and information so easily available and quickly changing, views on best methods of teaching are also much quicker to change. One of the biggest advantages we have today is that we know we must get students to use critical thinking and that there are various levels to thinking and understanding. We use Bloom’s taxonomy today as a guide to help use see where students fall in their critical thinking and it helps us know what type things, we should do to help them reach a higher level. The biggest thing teachers today can do is always be open to change, and to always keep learning new things.

Theories of Critical Thinking

There’s an old saying in coaching I always like to use and it says “either you are getting better or you are getting worse. You never stay the same” and that applies to education with technology as well. The education profession is a unique field where you were taught a certain way, but you are asked to teach in another. In all five articles, education was viewed as a profession that has become inefficient compared to what capacity we are able to be innovated. The days of pulling information from a textbook are almost obsolete. Teachers who have been teaching twenty-plus years can lose their effectiveness if they are not up with the times. Being removed from high school just eleven years, I have seen drastic change in education. I had multiple honors and AP classes and we were still using textbooks then. The articles, especially the Deep Learning article stated that sort of learning is really handcuffing our educational system as a whole because that is only one source. Students simply pulling information from a textbook are at the mercy of what the perspectives of the authors in the textbook perceive is the best way to present information to the reader. Technology can be a blessing and a curse. Students have to the ability to be informed about anything at the swipe of a finger on any app they choose to synthesize themselves to. The ability to have access to multiple sources causes competition among sources, providing news and educational outlets to be on their best games all the time to get the most followers and sponsorship money they can attain. My mother has been working in IT for a law firm longer than I can remember, but why is technology slow to be being adopted and implemented in learning with flipped classrooms? In my personal opinion the reason for this is simply control. As teachers we are given the responsibility and pressure of student achievement within the four walls of our class rooms. To make sure this on schedule and on pace we like to have a hand in every step within this process pulling further away from being more of a drill sergeant where everything has to be done the way like we always done before. In my opinion, and I can honestly say this because I am one, the people in the school building who have the most difficult time relinquishing control in a classroom are your coaches. For the last 8 years of my young coaching career I have always done and taught the same practices in the same order early on in the season because I want certain things done in a certain way. For the most part, I have had a great deal of success early on in my career, so why change things up if it has already been proven to have success? Currently I am reading a book my old football coach wrote, and even he said that he had to evolve as a coach through the years. Student athletes are not wired the same way as they were when he first entered coach, so why would the same way of doing things be the most effective way in reaching athletes maximum potential? In the adoption process I am man enough to admit that I have always fallen in the late majority on the bell curve. I have always been skeptical of change and need to see proven results before I try something new. For this reason, I feel like this where PLCs are the most effective for me because we have so many different personalities in our group all at different stages in their careers. If this pandemic has any positives over the last year, I hope that it shows educators like me that are resistant to change and risk, the use of more technology in the classroom may be a curveball to us, but worth it for our student’s future.

Alabama Virtual Library Resource Demonstration- Kristy Bettis

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ldx6yXz_vS6yXXWDgiYPw_dDK6cqNidP/view


The Alabama Virtual Library is a site that's filled with some much information and resources. I decided to look at the elementary resources and clicked on the link; Discovery Library by Britannica. This particular resource would be one that I would use for my K-2 students. It's early childhood friendly and the books are full of color, so it would catch the students attention. Each book can be read at school, as well as online by almost any device. The students can be monitored by the library administrator at any time. These books are e-books and can be printed as well. The librarian can tie these books to the MARC system in their particular school. This resource can be implemented in a lot of classroom standards and activities. I would use this resource in the library by reinforcing different skills that have be taught in class and in the media center.

AVL Demonstration - La'Vonda Thomas

https://youtu.be/iiDjBJbUheM

The Alabama Virtual Library also know as AVL is a resource database that is free and can be accessed by anyone. It gives a wide variety of resources that can help research a topic or just simply look up a children's book. The Alabama Virtual Library is really easy to use and navigate and will assist you if you need help. I am a Kindergarten teacher and this was my first time really using this resource. I liked how smooth it was and because I read a lot of children's books this would be very efficient for my read aloud because sometimes the library doesn't have the book I'm looking for. This is a great tool for anyone that wants to look up credible sources or reliable information.

Jason Mallet - Alabama Virtual Library Demonstration

Link to video:  https://youtu.be/dtZeSC67pHo


I chose EBSCO's History Reference Center as my database to use. I earned my BA in History and earned my Masters in North Korean economy, so I feel this will be beneficial for teaching my advanced ESL students when I teach classes on these two areas. This resource focuses on history in all areas. It offers general search of articles on a wide variety of history topics. It also offers help on how to properly do research and cite used articles. This is recommended for students in high school and college. I will be using this with both groups when I begin teaching again. I am hoping to teach a course just for how to write a research paper, and honestly the tools offered in that section of the website would be extremely helpful. I will also be showing it to my students in my advanced ESL classes related to history on how they can easily find articles to help with their research.

Please forgive my fast talking; I recorded this several times and each time it went well over 3 minutes!

AVL Screencast- Constance Bass

AVL Screencast -Business Insight essentials

I used the resource Business Insight Essentials for my AVL Screen cast. Business Insight Essentials is a resource with information on  thousand of publicly traded companies. This resource shares information about the companies history, financial data, market share and SWOT analysis. It also  allows you to compare financial data among its competitors in a particular industry. I would be able to use this resource in many of the career development training, as well as in a business setting regarding competitors and industries norms.

AVL Screencast Brandace Sims

Link to screencast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5ikXoYHEYQ&feature=youtu.be

The resource I used is PebbleGo.  PebbleGo is a resource with thousands of articles, activities, and videos created for K-3 students. It offers kid-friendly information in six different areas: Animals, Biographies, Health, Science, Social Studies, and Dinosaurs.  The site offers support for nonreaders by providing voice over annotations and audio text.  I could use this resource in my 2nd grade classroom to support my students with informational text and also for research projects. The content maps provided in the educator resources would be very beneficial when assigning topics to my students.

AVL Demonstration - Spencer Tinman

AVL Demonstration - Brittanica School: Middle

I used Screencast-O-Matic for my virtual demonstration on Brittanica School: Middle.  This resource is a kid-friendly encyclopedia that covers any topic that you could think of as a K-12 educator.  It allows for safe research to be performed by students and gives teachers a central place to find and store resources.  The most exciting thing for teachers that it offers is the "Lesson Plan" and "My Content" resources.  These allow for teachers to get new and creative ideas on teaching topics that they're not as comfortable with and allow for the resources to be stored in one place.  As an educator, I would use this resource to gather the available resources or find new lesson plans for certain topics and assign research projects using the vast database of this encyclopedia. 

AVL Demonstration - Amy Franklin

AVL Demonstration - Personal Finance

When browsing the Alabama Virtual Library, I found a great resource for personal finance. The eBook, Household Spending: Who Spends How Much on What contains financial data organized into several categories such as health care, housing, transportation, and entertainment. This would be an appropriate resource for high school or college students learning about personal finance. I plan to use this resource when teaching personal finance to future finite math classes.

AVL Demonstration - Mysti Nichols

AVL - Professional Development Collection Demonstration

The Alabama Virtual Library provides a very extensive list of databases. One of the search engines that I find most interesting is the Professional Development Collection which is found in the Colleges and Universities tab. This database allows one to search for journal articles and videos on various professional development topics easily and quickly with resource refinements. This could be a very useful tool in any profession especially right now when we cannot attend conferences and workshops as planned.