Your Professional Learning Community and your students use the same Thinking Skills

Since leaving the classroom, it’s been great to help teachers teach thinking skills to their students. It warms my heart to hear a Head Start teacher describe her students as “little systems thinkers” or to watch students with special needs compare and contrast two ideas for the first time. The Patterns of Thinking impact students’ learning.

But these thinking skills aren’t just for students. Adults also use the Patterns of Thinking to structure ideas, and we can use these thinking skills to tackle educational issues.

For example, let’s say that your professional learning community (PLC) is trying to understand how background knowledge and academic vocabulary affect students’ learning. These are thorny issues, with writers as diverse as Robert Marzano and E.D. Hirsch weighing in on the issue. Let’s see how the Patterns of Thinking could help teachers have a more focused discussion and march out of that PLC meeting with ideas that impact their pedagogy.

To start, educators could define terms background knowledge. What does it mean? What are some examples? As teachers list the parts of this concept, they build a shared definition of it.

I remember meetings with fellow teachers quite clearly. We often realized halfway through a session that, even though we were using the same words, we were talking about two different ideas. What we needed was a shared toolkit for talking about ideas in a shared, meaningful way.

Next, they could relate it to an activity such as reading. How do background knowledge and reading affect one another? Some might say that background knowledge impacts students’ reading skills. But it’s also worth noting that reading increases students’ background knowledge.

Members of PLCs often observe one another, and participants could use background knowledge as a point of view in observation. As they watch fellow teachers interact with students, the observer could look at a lesson from the point of view of background knowledge. The could ask questions like, “What background knowledge did students need? How did the teacher draw upon this background knowledge?”

This Perspective provides structure to the observation and provides teachers with a lens for looking at their own professional practice.

Another theme commonly discussed in PLCs is academic vocabulary. As they did with background knowledge, members could build that concept to develop a shared definition. If teachers develop long-term goals before the start of the school year, one of those goals may be that students develop a rich academic vocabulary.

This idea, too, could structure a classroom observation. Using academic vocabulary as a point of view, the observer could ask questions like “What academic vocabulary did the teacher use? What vocabulary did the student use? Which of these vocabulary words are used throughout the school? Which are unique to this classroom/subject area?”
These perspectives make professional learning and classroom observation more meaningful. Everyone knows what to look for in a classroom. The team has built concepts together, reducing confusion.

With the Patterns of Thinking, a professional learning community shares a common vocabulary for teaching thinking skills to students. And they use these same skills to address their own educational dilemmas.