I got the latest edition of English Journal this week, and while I have been remiss in keeping up with past issues, I jumped for joy to see this one, which centers on one of my favorite areas of study: Logic and Critical Reasoning. I try to teach critical thinking to all of my classes, and I was excited to see what ideas were included to reinforce this absolutely vital universal subdiscipline.
I am happy to announce that I have not yet been disappointed.
Before I get into the specifics of what I’ve read so far (which isn’t much, but there’s plenty to say about that), let me just say that I was impressed first and foremost by a few of the authors of articles in this edition. The first two actual articles are written by (respectively) George Hillocks, Jr., and Thomas M. McCann; the former is a very highly respected language arts researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, and the latter is another very respected researcher, former superintendent, and associate professor at Northern Illinois University (who also gave the keynote at this year’s ITEC conference that I attended in April at Illinois State University).
My knowledge of these gentlemen is roundabout: I had heard of Hillocks through Peter Smagorinsky (both from a college text and from articles in EJ) and knew that Hillocks basically set the standard for English language arts through his constructivist modeling. When I heard McCann’s keynote in April, he also spoke of Hillocks as somewhat foundational. Hillocks is particularly responsible (I believe) for the recent conclusion that traditional grammar instruction does not improve student writing, despite how well entrenched it is in modern practice.
If I had generalized Hillocks’s position into a rule, I might have had warrant for guessing what his position is on teaching arguments: don’t teach the formal stuff. (Do you know the Toulmin method? You do if you got the significance of the italicized words.) As disappointing as it is for me to admit – I love formal logic! – I think Hillocks is right. When I teach logical fallacies, most of it goes over their heads, even with giving them examples and asking them to determine what they think is wrong first. Simply put, students can tell you that it’s illegitimate to argue based on how popular a belief is, but they don’t really care that it’s called the bandwagon fallacy or argumentum ad populum or even argument from popularity. Robert C. Covel later disagrees with this and does introduce an interesting point: students may encounter terms like ad hominem if they get interested in national discourses, even on 24-hour news or some political shows, but I think that such discussions probably should not carry much weight.
What has surprised me (in some ways) about the Hillocks and McCann articles, as well as later ones, is the wide range of activities intended to teach critical thinking. Hillocks suggests a murder mystery scenario, asking students to identify general rules that can then be applied to the scenario to deduce what actually happened; McCann presents an activity where students have to analyze paintings to see which one would be best suited to be donated for a hospital waiting room; Paula M. Carbone even explains how a commonplace book – a scrapbook of sorts intended to help students engage current issues – can be used to cultivate multiple perspectives, an invaluable tool for arguing effectively.
Since I am so passionate about helping students learn how to think well, these ideas strike me as incredibly useful, and I suspect that I will use Hillocks’s idea in particular for my sophomores this year. (It’s fitting since we’ll read Agatha Christie at the end of the year, and I have students write their own murder mysteries to get them to think about the components of a good mystery.) I do a lot of persuasion with all of my classes, and this would be an interesting way of testing how this method works on a class I’ll get to follow for the next few years and see how they progress.
Educators – if you’re still with me this summer – what are some critical thinking exercises that have worked well for you? Leave a comment about how you use critical thinking and reasoning in the classroom.
Docere Est Discere 
July 30, 2010 at 7:22 am
I’m really skeptical about the idea of not teaching grammar. Grammar wasn’t taught to most people my age in my province, and there are far too many reasonably intelligent people with blatant errors all through their writing. How are kids supposed to learn grammar if you expect them to pick it up by osmosis?
July 30, 2010 at 7:34 am
Hillocks’s method (IIRC) doesn’t abandon grammar altogether, just the systematic teaching of it. The idea is not to teach what nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. are but to show students real contextual examples (because language changes based on the rhetorical context) and give a high amount of feedback so that students learn to internalize the heuristics – general trends, as opposed to the strict algorithms that dominate most grammar instruction, e.g. “Never end a sentence in a preposition” – that will help them be creative and intentional writers. Very few people really respond well to traditional grammar instruction, and there is a fair amount of research showing that this traditional model is one of the only ways (if not the only) of teaching language that either has no impact or a negative impact on student writing. Students largely understand the grammar of the English language; they just need to understand the contextual constraints that they will be under in defined settings, modes, etc.
August 6, 2010 at 11:11 am
It still doesn’t make any sense to me that kids would learn something better by not actually teaching it or providing them with terms and constructs with which to understand it. Is it really that unusual that I learn things better when they’re systematized?
August 6, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Well, for one, teaching grammar is not the same thing as teaching writing. And I do think that you (and I) are probably in the minority of people who do find it easier to learn things that are systematized.
Take one instance from grammar: you probably learned in your language education that there are two way to make the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives, the prefatory words more/most and the word endings -er/-est. Knowing that those forms are (respectively) called the periphrastic and inflected forms is totally irrelevant to using them correctly (although it’s a nice linguistic tidbit that applies outside of English as well).
Then there’s also the fact that traditional English grammar instruction has been on the wrong foot for a few centuries. For instance, you might have learned (or at least it’s canon in the US) that there are eight parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, conjunction, preposition, interjection), but that is a holdover from Latin and highly oversimplified. The only reason we even have English grammars (i.e. books prescribing proper grammar) historically is because English speakers wanted to show that English was as rule-bound as Latin.
I’d have to go back to some of Hillocks’s articles to give you some specifics on what he found, though. Whether or not it makes sense based on the (obviously imperfect) impression I’ve given, it’s well-attested, -researched, and -accepted by other researchers.
August 11, 2010 at 2:28 am
I actually learned virtually no grammar in school. I picked up most of it on my own from reading, but my spelling and grammar have, if anything, gotten worse since I started doing most of my reading on the Internet. I’ve always tended to know what was and wasn’t good grammar in most respects, but I haven’t been able to explain why–things just look wrong or right. However, I think I was probably born with an innate tendency towards strong verbal skills that would have been fulfilled under most circumstances.
May 28, 2013 at 7:39 pm
It is interesting to me that you have such a passion for teaching logic, but do not place heavy importance on grammar. To me, logos and ethos run fairly parallel with each other, and ethos can be easily destroyed by poor grammar. However, my question to you is: did the journal help you create any new ways to teach critical thinking that you found effective?
August 9, 2013 at 8:42 pm
I’m planning on doing a 4 day crash course in logic for my students. Any thoughts?
April 15, 2014 at 4:14 pm
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May 28, 2014 at 12:20 am
debate is best way to teach logic. With the help of debate you may learn many new thing and you may also know it’s advantages and disadvantages.
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