Time to employ Critical Thinking in teaching methods: To avoid the shades of prisons in traditional classrooms, lecture halls

In a recent column titled, We can’t memorise our way out of poverty, the minister for education, Dr Yaw Adutwum, noted that it is clear “We have tamed the children; we just want them to write down what we tell them at the day of exams [but] that kind of education system will not transform Ghana or give us critical thinking individuals.”

Natural born strengths

In my book, Strategies for Effective Teaching & Learning, I noted that in childhood, the world seemed so full of life, so full of possibilities. Even the courage to crawl, to stand, and to take the first shaky steps were all done independently, with determination and gusto.

Every step had a marvel of adventure in it. When the child stood up and fell, he was ever ready to stand up yet again, and again. Every step had its own magic and sparked a feeling of wonder – a feeling that “Yes, I can”. Failure was never an option.

The affective prospects — personal agency, excitement, conviction, perseverance, audacity, and curiosity - came naturally to children: they were never taught these things. That’s the wonder of it!

All the child needed to continue advancing were two key conditions: One, a safe protective environment; and two, the approving smiles of an adoring parent or a responsible adult.

Once the centre of attention, the child showcased both their trials and successes with glee.

Of traditions, prisons

Fast forward to traditional classrooms and lecture halls: The teachers are the centre of attention, feeling good about themselves as the fountains of all knowledge and experiences, darting questions back and forth, while the learner looks on sheepishly.

But this inherent need and ability to take the centre stage — which lies about us in our infancy — becomes obscured, and shades of prison begin to close in about the growing person well into adulthood; hence, “the death of the natural life that was originally in us.”

We tend to neglect how well the youth can think and work out their own thinking. We tend to repress their innate ability to formulate and organise queries about nearly everything.

Coming up with the right queries involves vigorous thinking about the larger world around us, starting with the environment in which we live.

In investigating questions from different angles, and even converting taboo questions into open-minded ones, the process leads to the heart of any matter. We can expect three outcomes from such a method. First, pupils become more engaged. Second, they take more ownership of the learning process.

And the third outcome is that the more they learn through their own observations and assertions, the better ideas and solutions they produce on their own.

Experiential Learning at ALU

Years back, I visited the African Leadership University (ALU), Mauritius. A class I observed was led by a facilitator, Tolulope Agunbiade. Explaining the day’s session, she said: “For our course, which is ‘Entrepreneurial Leadership’, we come together, and we decide on what the full year curriculum should look like so we have the high level overview and at the end we ask, What are we trying to achieve?”

She explained, “For us, it’s how we can get people to think like entrepreneurs, be able to identify problems and solve them in a very systemic way. And then we break our larger curriculum into smaller modules so we can focus for almost five weeks and ask, Just how do you spot an opportunity?”

She continued, “And within these five weeks, we break [the modules] down into separate lessons and for each lesson we think of what our learning outcomes are. What are the best ways to hit our learning outcomes in the most engaging way?

So we usually start with some sort of experiential discovery to ease you into it using either a game or real life experiences, and from there we transition and ask, How do we bring it home to what we are then doing?”

That’s when they “start soliciting examples from people within the class. Tell us about a time when this happened to you, and from there we take them into a larger thing: How can you then see in your community or in your country a current problem that is happening? How could we have thought about it, for example, more systemically?”

Facilitators, not lecturers

That was the vigour of that particular class. Tolu was a very young woman with a basic degree in accounting from the University of Abuja. She was neither titled a lecturer nor a professor.

She said, “We usually have the same plans where we just think: What is the topic we are trying to hit on? How long will it be for? What are the objectives we are trying to hit and how do we plan out the sessions?”

The class started off with an activity: the instructions, the experiential, the debrief — which is very important because that is where she gets all the knowledge that the students have learnt so far and hear them say it in their own words. She then followed up with “What is the question that we are trying to introduce them to?”

For facilitators at ALU, when students are thinking more, they can be encouraged to do more with their own thinking, rather than follow someone perched on a command post.

To teach young people that their lives are governed not by their own actions and perspectives, but by some external and fiendish forces beyond their control is to teach the youth resignation, and despair.

The writer is a trainer of teachers, a leadership coach, a motivational speaker and quality education advocate. E-mail: anishaffar@gmail.com