Teachers in my school were given this wonderful book. Looking through its content, I find parallels between quality questioning and inquiry-based art classroom. In the inquiry-based approach, there is a range of structured inquiry and guided inquiry (teacher directed) to open inquiry (student directed). In art lessons, teachers used the thinking routines adapted from the Harvard Project.
In the Singapore Teaching Practice (STP), we see that 'using questions to deepen learning' is a subset of lesson enactment. The desired outcomes of education also value 'critical and inventive thinking' and thus enables students' capacity to 'critically discern'. Even Fox news had the slogan 'We report, You decide' in 2008 to counter 'fake news' and referencing the 2008 US presidential election.
With various initiatives in the education realm focussing on critical thinking, perhaps, the urgency of teaching it is to teach children how to think rather than what to think.
In this post, I attempt to unpack the purpose of promoting critical thinking.
Brain hacking. Persuasive technology. According to Anderson Cooper, our phones, apps and social media are engineered to hook us, using a hormonal carrot-and-stick approach. Read it here. If it's true, then children who have minimal supervision would be the most vulnerable. The issues as defined by the Center for Humane Technology are pervasive in education/ society.
I marvel at the engineering feat to combine psychology and persuasive concepts to target users' weaknesses. Formulas and behavourial prediction engines could anticipate people's thoughts and emotions based on the patterns found in the data that users volunteered on social media. The accumulated data offers advertisers customised targeting to potential consumers.
Tristan Harris, an ex-Google Design Ethicist attempts to reverse self-destructive ways humanity is moving towards. It is said that there are design choices in any given product that can be made humane or not. For example, monochrome smartphone displays are more humane than brightly-coloured ones because they trigger less dopamine.
Hence, if the tech giants are not advocating human-centered design, teachers would need to play a much more crucial role and becoming aware.
Reference
McNamee Roger, Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe. USA: Penguin Press. 2019.
