Author: Terry Heick
by Terry Heick Critical reading is reading with the purpose of critical examination of the text and its ideas. To add a bit more to that definition, we might say, “Critical reading is reading with the purpose of critical examination of the text and its implicit and explicit themes and ideas.” What is Critical Reading? To expand on the simple definition above, critical reading is the close, careful reading of a text to understand it fully and assess its merits. It is not simply a matter of skimming a text or reading for plot points; rather, critical reading requires that…
by Terry Heick As a culture, we have a thought crisis–namely, a harmful and enduring refusal and/or inability to think well and think critically. This is just an opinion, but I hope not a radical one. To clarify why this crisis exists–or even why I believe it exists–would require a sweeping analysis of cultural, societal, political, and other anthropological terms beyond the scope of TeachThought. For starters, skim through almost any social media ‘discussion’ about any culturally critical issue. If you disagree that such a crisis exists, the rest of this article will likely not be worth your time. If…
by Terry Heick My wife is a schoolteacher, and recently I’ve been listening to her online meetings. And there have been a lot of them. Yesterday, I was at a cafe sitting next to what seemed to be a group of teachers and they had a lot of ideas. And a lot of enthusiasm. Over the low but constant noise of most cafes, some words and phrases were audible: Data. Goal. Standards. Vision. Fidelity. Roll out. More about data. Activity. Track. Something about dots and dot walls and data walls. They talked about goals. i Groups and grouping. Tracking. Programs.…
by Terry Heick We tend to teach reading in a very industrial way in the United States. We focus on giving kids ‘tools’ and ‘strategies’ to ‘make’ sense of a text. To ‘take the text apart’. To look for the ‘author’s purpose’—to bounce back and forth between a main idea, and the details that ‘support’ the main idea, as if the reading is some kind of thing that students happen upon by chance while on some purely academic journey. And we push the illusion of the ‘otherness’ of a text by promoting the lie that they simply need to decode…
by Terry Heick The first step in helping students think for themselves just might be to help them see who they are and where they are and what they should know in response. See also 100 Questions That Help Students Think About Thinking If we truly want students to adapt their thinking, design their thinking, and diverge their thinking, it (the thinking) has to start and stop in a literal place. Generally, this means beginning with the learning target a teacher establishes and ending with an evaluation of how the student ‘did.’ Isn’t that, at best, odd? Thinking has nothing…