I am interested in finding ways to blend the two methods. One way I have thought about is to teach several constituent skills explicitly over a few classes, and then spend a couple subsequent classes asking bigger, exploratory questions (and having students come up with questions themselves) that can be answered at least in part by the skills taught explicitly.
I am wondering if anyone can point me to any resources on methods that have been tested to blend the two methodologies.
Hi David!
Harvard University's "Project Zero" might be a good start - the "Artful Thinking" project might be close to your specification here, but there are numerous other projects to explore from the PZ website's menu.
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/artful-thinking
Perhaps not quite as specific, but not unrelated to your theme:
Halpern, D. F. (1998). Teaching critical thinking for transfer across domains: Disposition, skills, structure training, and metacognitive monitoring. American Psychologist, 53(4), 449.
http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/vtt/HalpernAmPsy98CritThink.pdf
And
Marzano, R. J. (1988). Dimensions of Thinking: A Framework for Curriculum and Instruction. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED294222.pdf
Hope these help in any way. What you're proposing is most interesting - I'd be very grateful to know what your results and conclusions are!
Best,
Richard.
David:
I have had to do a similar kind of blend when I was looking at curriculum design for international students. I think the theoretical approach I used might be helpful as the article was published in a peer reviewed journal. I am also including my recent conference paper on "debating" as a teaching strategy that incorporates explicit (debate topic and instructions) and constructivist (rebutting opponents) instruction.
Best regards,
Debra
Article Integrating Cross-Cultural Elements Into Workforce Education...
Conference Paper Debating: A Dynamic Teaching Strategy for Motivating Student...
I have done the explicit with problems and applications to provoke the constructivism. This has proved very successful for my groups, e.g. adult students. One additional step that I add is to request from them to create a problem on the subject. This problem has to be solved by one of the peers--it has to have all the variables that can produce a solution. If it cannot be solved, the student is missing some understanding of the variables related to the problem. That really "constructs" their knowledge in depth.
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