60 Ways To Help Students Think For Themselves

by Terry Heick

Motivating and engaging students is the goal of most teachers–priming them to receive instruction, or otherwise align themselves to a pre-set process you’ve sketched out that you hope will yield a learning goal you selected beforehand.

But I’ve also been thinking recently of how learning actually happens–the causes of learning. Learning events, maybe? Eh.

So I came up with 60 (of millions) of these ‘learning events’ (for lack of a better term)–circumstances in which students seem to learn effortlessly. They can learn when they are coerced–to start, to increase the pace, to finish, to revisit. But what kind of conditions or contexts promote effortless learning? Learning when they don’t even know it’s happening? When they’re (essentially) tricked into deep understanding?

How does this happen–especially when you have a very specific daily learning target you’re trying to meet in pursuit of an academic standard? That’s where curriculum mapping, learning models, and lesson design come in. For now, consider the following events as examples. Templates. They may not lead to the precise mastery of the standard or objective in your Carnegie unit or Hunter’s lesson plan, but they’re thinking. And in these cases, rather than following your trails of breadcrumbs, they’re actually thinking for themselves.

That’s a critical shift in the learning process. The more common approach is to ask a question in hopes of perhaps causing thought, or eliciting an accurate response. There may also be projects, where students–over time–combine skills and both concrete and procedural knowledge to create and or fulfill the requirements of a project. These all require thought, but it’s all within the framework or under the scrutiny of the teacher and the planning. It’s a matter of sequence.

A more accurate approach is the essay, where students have to take a position and defend it carefully. (And is part of #10 on the list below.) In the essay, students have to think about what they think, and then clarify why they think it. That’s definitely a student “thinking for themselves.” But it also depends on the craft of writing–another kind of knowledge in and of itself–which can both reveal and obscure the thinking.

What about something more precise? Tidier? Something that can be done moment by moment in any classroom? Used in almost any lesson? Those are the ideas below.  We’ll do a model for this idea soon. Below are some examples of what it might look like on the ground.

60 Ways To Help Students Think For Themselves

1. Let them watch their predictions play out
2. Let them form theories, and immediately test and revise those theories based on observation
3. Give them the right collaboration with the right ‘mind’ at the right time
4. Allow them to read with choice–without guidelines or external pressure
5. Let them play with content or dynamic learning tools–no goals or prompting or rules (other than basic common sense, safety, etc.)
6. Let them see the parts of the whole, and the whole of the parts
7. Help them realize the interdependence between content and themselves
8. Make sure they are motivated to know themselves
9. Help them serve others, and learn to value themselves and their own human utility in the process
10. Help guide them to write about something complex, personal, emotional, meaningful, or seemingly trite
11. Teach them to meditate (seeing without thinking during, thinking about thinking after)
12. Help them start with what they don’t know–this will guarantee that they think for themselves, as it provides each student with their own launching pad
13. Allow them to navigate ‘unfiltered’ sources of information
14. Encourage them to begin to separate basic epistemology–the differences between information, knowledge, and wisdom, for example
15. Help them attempt to transfer understanding (prompted)
16. Allow them to attempt to transfer understanding on their own
17. Encourage them to believe they can, and make the choice to not be denied
18. Allow them to practice, practice, practice in the company of some kind of feedback loop
19. Teach them to make mistakes without blame
20. Help them explore something they see as mysterious, untamed, or socially ‘disallowed’
21. Allow them to receive learning feedback from someone just beyond their own ‘level’
22. Teach them to try to find the common ground between seemingly disparate positions
23. Encourage them to think critically about what others perceive as uninteresting or unworthy of that thinking
24. Make sure they think frequently about complex ideas or situations
25. Help them to realize everything is infinitely complex when you see information as a matter of perspective (this causes an endless chain of other realizations if they’re willing to consider it long enough)
26. Encourage them to be bored and allow that boredom to ‘sit’
27. Allow their mind to wander
28. Encourage them to play video games or learning simulations
29. Teach them to set goals with extrinsic or intrinsic rewards
30. Help them sense an authentic need to know or understand
31. Ask them what they stand for, and why
32. Leave them alone
33. Make sure they hear ‘something’ in multiple times in multiple ways from multiple perspectives and voices
34. Help guide them to recognize the nuance in other people’s thinking
35. Help them to honor the limits of human knowledge
36. Encourage them to operate within their Zone of Proximal Development–the ZPD of that student for that standard (which is really, really difficult to promote consistently)
37. Make sure they have meaningful choices at every step
38. Make sure they are given the support to self-direct their own learning
39. Encourage them to make things
40. Help them to see the value of their own performance
41. Give them personalized direct instruction
42. Allow them to hear a well-written lecture
43. Help guide them to think about their own thinking
44. Encourage their passions to lead them into spaces where learning can occur on its own
45. Help them honor uncertainty
46. Make sure they are able to establish their own relevancy for content
47. Encourage them to ask their own questions–and then ask better questions
48. Encourage opportunities for inquiry to meet a motivated mind
49. Guide them to dynamic spaces characterized by people, thought, and creativity (rather than intricate policies, rules, and standards)
50. Expose them to something worth doing, and is expertly gamified
51. Help them to confront and internalize diversity and divergence
52. Encourage them to revisit their past mistakes, thinking patterns, and moments of genius
53. Guide them to seek self-awareness rather than content-awareness
54. Help them to not take anything too seriously beyond playful curiosity
55. Encourage them to trust themselves to fail
56. Allow them to see their own progress
57. Guide them in studying patterns
58. Make sure they can explain the significance of an idea, skill, or other academic topic
59. Allow them to see or experience affectionate modeling
60. Make sure they are mentored with love

60 Ways To Help Students Think For Themselves