Lunch yesterday was a sandwich at my desk. I looked around for something to read and noticed a slim red spine which had slipped back between thicker volumes: Education and Learning to Think. Wow! 1987 – it’s 20 years old. Judging by the amount of ink I put on its pages, I thought it had something to say, so I leafed through it. Forget the past tense: This book is more important than ever. I fear it may outline goals of educaton which are in danger of being lost in the pressure to demonstrate narrowly defined achievement.

I once said to a principal “I’m more interested in what you do than in what you say.” Whether that should have made him as angry as it did is perhaps worth discussion. I’ve become more diplomatic over the years. Whether that’s a good thing is also open to discussion. I think learning to think is getting a lot of lip service in the schools. But if we look, minute to minute, day to day, at what gets done in the classroom, how much of it encourages higher order thinking?

Resnick says we can recognize higher order thinking when it occurs, and gives criteria. Higher order thinking – let’s call it HOT. Here’s my shorthand version of his criteria:

* HOT is nonalgorithmic –when you start, you don’t know how to get to the answer.
* HOT is complex – There’s no one place where you can “see” the whole task.
* HOT doesn’t have one “right” answer.
* HOT calls for subtle judgment and interpretation – answers aren’t black and white.
* HOT may have different ways to judge your answer, and they may be discordant.
* HOT is uncertain – you don’t even know what you need to know.
* You’re in charge of how you tackle HOT. No one else “calls the plays.”
* You have to find structure and meaning in apparent disorder.
* HOT’s hard work.

Here’s a problem that doesn’t ask HOT:
Match the names of dead, bearded white men in column A with the historical events in column B.

Here’s what I was working on this afternoon. I think it requires HOT:
How can I help the Forest Service develop citizen support groups to help protect all 408 Wilderness Areas under their jurisdiction, the way PWV does for our local Wilderness Areas?

Make a quiz out of this. If you’re a student, how much of what you do day to day is HOT? If you’re a teacher, how much of what you actually ask students to do is HOT – encourages the sort of HOT the real world requires? I suspect the answer is “Not much.” If I’m wrong about this, I’d like to know. I’d like to be wrong. Am I?