Thinking & Leadership – The Reflective Questioning Mindset!

Geri glided into the principal’s office, smiled, held up the book Making Thinking Visible, and declared, “I want my students to think more!” Geri is a phenomenally talented educator. She is always eloquently planned, yet somehow compassionately flexible in the most purposeful of ways. She exudes teaching moves that deeply engage and she speaks with a voice that creates one of those classrooms you never want to leave. She is an intellectual and a true pedagogue in every sense of the word. My response to Geri, “tell me more…”

“I want my students to think more!”

Several months later, Geri and I sat together in Marisa’s classroom, dialoguing and laughing, about a post we needed to complete for an online course we enrolled in focused on Making Thinking Visible through Harvard Project Zero. Marisa is a firebrand social justice educator with the well-honed ability to teach writing in dynamic ways, a warm demander, and a passionate divergent thinker. Marisa has inspired me to look closely at education and society in new ways.

Late afternoons, with these amazing humans, fundamentally changed who I am as an educator and transformed my thoughts on the experience of interacting with students, teachers, colleagues, and the community as the leader of a school. We pushed each other intellectually as we immersed ourselves in the use of thinking routines and pondered the deeper pedagogical meaning embedded in creating cultures of thinking.

Going Deeper

I began to think deeply about statements like, “as educators, parents, and citizens, we must settle for nothing less than environments that bring out the best in people, take learning to the next level, allow for great discoveries, and propel both the group and the individual forward into a lifetime of learning.”(1) This is something all teachers want and all students deserve. I absorbed all of Dr. Ritchhart’s work, Intellectual Character, Making Thinking Visible, and Creating Cultures of Thinking, as well as the writing and research of other Harvard Project Zero Scholars – Dr. David Perkins, Dr. Tina Blythe, and Dr. Howard Gardener.

I lingered on gems of thought like…

“Understanding is often viewed as richly integrated and connected knowledge. This means that we do not possess a set of skills or collection of facts in isolation; rather, our knowledge is woven together in a way that connects one idea to another. This web of connections and relations is often the vehicle for putting ideas to work and seeing the applicability of our skills in new contexts.”

Dr. Ritchhart goes on to say…

“To accomplish this kind of understanding – an understanding that stresses the exploring of a topic from many angles, building connections, challenging long-held assumptions, looking for applications, and producing what is for the learner a novel outcome – we must engage in thinking.”(2)

I started to reflect on questions related to my own leadership and traditional administrative systems and structures. As a school leader: What actions can I take to create cultures of thinking? What can I do to facilitate the development of thinking dispositions with students and teachers? In what ways can I make thinking visible in all interactions?

The more I read, and the more I studied, the more I expressed the need to create cultures of thinking. Yet, with this burgeoning understanding came more questions, especially related to the idea of applying understanding – or putting ideas to work.

Daily Wonderings…

• Do I practice what I pontificate?

• Do I act on what I articulate?  

This contributed to waking up each morning contemplating an internal leadership dialogue, a metacognitive mulling, that would ramble on as I wandered through the web of school day interactions and self-reflections. Producing actions like pausing, taking a deep breath, and reflecting on the opportunity to be genuinely curious as I swung open the doors of classrooms to observe the pedagogical happenings.

This is vital as a culture of thinking leader – one who is growing a reflective questioning mindset. The goal is not to assert authority or to check boxes on a list of best practices or to pinpoint the place in a framework that certain strategies fit. The goal is to develop a love of learning for the intricacies and beauty of the incredibly complex endeavor of teaching and learning that is so assiduously described here by one of my favorite educational thinkers, William Ayers:

Teachers, whatever else they do, must become students of their students. The student becomes a source of knowledge and information and energy, actor, speaker, creator, constructor, thinker, doer – a teacher as well as a learner. Together students and teachers explore, inquire, investigate, search, ask questions, criticize, make connections, draw tentative conclusions, pose problems, act, seek the truth, name this and that phenomenon, circle back, plunge forward, reconsider, gather steam, pause, reflect, re-imagine, wonder, build, assert themselves, listen carefully, speak, and so on.

This complexity is a dynamic that also exists, and should be propagated, between leader and teacher, educator and parent, student and student, and in all educational pairings and/or interactions.  

Now, it was not only reflective cogitations that whirled around my mind as I breezed from one principal duty to the next. Introspection and evaluation led to a shift in the language I used when speaking with students, parents, and teachers. I purposefully started contemplating effective ways to promote thinking during dialogue sessions. Recess-duty chats became more than just important check-ins, but moments to learn and grow and think together with teachers.

This led to another layer of reflective questioning –  What should be modified in daily practice so that looking closely, observing with not only a curious and critical eye, but with an empathetic heart, becomes habitual - so that a sense of joy swells and a deeper understanding for the craft of teaching persistently percolates? Where and when do I find myself pushing and challenging to create rich collaboration with my colleagues? What other opportunities can I identify, maybe create? What does it look like with different individuals or in different content areas?

 Creating a Dialog with Teachers

Inquiry and dialogue are so important for an educator striving to embody a reflective questioning mindset and lead as a learner. I began to joyfully enter into conversations with the conscious effort to focus on thinking and the mutual development of greater understanding through questioning. I considered with more adept understanding the meaning of thoughts from important thinkers like Freire, “Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.” (4)

There was also big picture considerations – What kind of professional learning can we bring to the school site? What opportunities provide fertile terrain to explore thinking dispositions - professional learning cycles, grade level meetings, or parent communications? What can we do as a team so that metacognitive self-reflection becomes collectively adopted?

Geri and Marisa decided to form a teacher cohort focused on Making Thinking Visible. At first it was only a few teachers from our school, but it swelled to over 40 as word spread and organically developed teacher-led professional development attracted amazing educators from around the district. Meanwhile, as a school site leader, I worked collaboratively with teachers to craft professional learning related to Creating Cultures of Thinking and Making Thinking Visible. We did several professional learning cycles aimed at learning how to use 1 or 2 thinking routines – so that we could observe each other, collaborate, dialogue, and connect powerful pedagogy to transformative learning.

The titles Making Thinking Visible and Creating Cultures of Thinking assert that it takes action. Making, creation, and enculturation are not passive! Too often, leaders look for a list of steps or guidelines, bogged down by an avalanche of information minutiae. When maybe the beginning step is courageously admitting that as an educator and a leader you will focus first on being a learner, most days a questioner, and always a thinker. One way to activate this, to give it a jump start, is working to adopt a reflective questioning mindset!

To end a post about reflective questioning without a reflective question just doesn’t feel right.

So… What are reflective questions you ponder as an educator and/or leader creating a culture of thinking, making thinking visible, or facilitating the growth of intellectual character?

Inquiring minds want to know!

References

(1) Ritchhart, R. Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 2015. p. 6

(2) Ritchhart, R. Intellectual Character: What it is, Why it Matters, and How to Get It. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 2002. p. 223

(3) Ayers, W. Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in The Classroom. Boston, Beacon Press, 2004. p. 42

(4) Freire, P. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, The Continuum International, 1970. p. 178