Action+Research

Iroquois Middle School, Niskayuna, NY
This is our third year of collaboration with CELA. The first year was devoted primarily to study, reflection, and discussion among ourselves and the CELA consultant. The problem before us was how to extend the CELA literacy model, which had already been adopted by a number of English and social studies teachers in our district, to an entire middle school team comprised of the four core disciplines. It soon became evident to us that the discussion and writing strategies used in English and social studies classrooms could not simply be overlaid on a math or science class. We wanted methods and vocabulary that would fit all of our curricula and provide our students with a powerful and coherent literacy experience. Out of the conversations came the unifying concept of critical thinking - a set of general cognitive processes that are applicable to all disciplines. We defined critical thinking as being synonymous with the analytical, synthetic, and evaluative levels of Bloom's taxonomy. We believed that promoting higher-order thinking of this nature was a worthy cross-curricular goal and developmentally appropriate for 8th graders whose minds are ready to be stretched.

In the second year, we began to implement our ideas. We introduced the notion of critical thinking early in the year by having students engage in a series of group tasks, one from each of our four disciplines, that required higher-order thinking. A subsequent pre-survey, administered in October 2007, captured students' nascent concepts of critical thinking. The instructional activities that we undertook in the ensuing months focused first on group discussions, which were a central component of the original CELA interventions in English and social studies. Each of us video recorded at least one extended discussion in our classrooms, and we worked on developing a rubric for evaluating the quality of the discussions and the level of thinking exhibited by the participating students. We also worked on a rubric for evaluating student writing but did not use the rubric in any systematic way that year. This was slow and sometimes halting work, as we were not having CELA meetings on a regular schedule. A post-survey in June 2008 asked students to reflect on how their understanding of critical thinking had evolved over the year and to make suggestions to the teachers for increasing the impact of our critical thinking initiative. The students' responses were remarkably perceptive and mirrored many of the shortcomings that we had noted in our own reflections on that second year:
 * We needed to be more overt in talking about critical thinking in our classes. We needed to model critical thinking in our subjects and to explicitly point out examples of critical thinking by students when it occurred. We also needed to be more intentional about illuminating for our students the similarities in thinking across the disciplines.
 * We needed to intensify our efforts if there was to be a significant impact on student thinking.
 * Class discussions are a useful vehicle for stimulating higher-order thinking, although not all students participate verbally. We needed to place more emphasis on writing in order to assess the thinking of all students.

These reflections provided a framework for planning our action research for the current school year, 2008-2009. Our goal is to develop the critical thinking skills of all our students. A key decision, made at the beginning of the year, was to devote one planning period a week to CELA. This commitment, which we have kept throughout the year, has imparted momentum and helped us keep our critical thinking goal at the forefront of our lesson planning and instruction. A second important decision was to complement class discussions with a greater emphasis on writing. We developed a Team 82 Writing Rubric early in the year and began using it for writing assignments in all of our classes. The rubric and a Levels of Thinking Triangle posted in our classrooms provide visual cues that help students how our team's critical thinking focus cuts across the four subjects. Students will keep portfolios of their writing, which will be used to assess growth in their thinking over the course of the year. A weekly CELA meeting typically consists of jointly reading and evaluating recent writings from one of our classes, using the team rubric.

While all students on our team are participating in the critical thinking activities, a representative sample of 12 students was chosen. It is these students whose written work is evaluated at our meetings and whose portfolios will be examined at the end of the year to measure the impact of the CELA interventions. These case study students will also participate in an oral debriefing about CELA at the end of the year.