Towards 2025 – Intellectual Character

This is the third article in a series of Blue Ribbon contributions where I have discussed the idea of students working deeply in their academic pursuits, to challenge and extend their thinking.

In September I wrote about the Dyson Technology company and the importance of bridging the divide between the Arts and Science in developing a more balanced view of the world for our students. The October Blue Ribbon piece explored the concepts of Flow, developed by Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi and also the notion of ‘Deep Work’, which is essential for the development of a strong and capable academic mind.

Collectively, these concepts might be labelled the development of ‘Intellectual Character’ in our students. This idea of what it means to be intelligent is the focus of my final article for 2021.

This week I had the joy of observing a group of budding Year 8 scientists demonstrate the effectiveness of catapults made out of paddle pop sticks, a bit of glue and elastic bands. The girls spent an enjoyable lunchtime in the Physics Lab launching small projectiles and comparing the various elements of height, angle of release, length of levers and variables in elasticity in order to send the object as far as they could across the room. A chocolate frog for the furthest distance covered was an added incentive.

While the exercise was obviously great fun for the girls, there was a deeper and intellectually rigorous activity at play here. The girls were very focused and deeply interested to figure out what worked best. Using their Physics knowledge, engaging in trial and error, educational hunches, talking with each other and learning from previous attempts, all added to their manipulation of their catapults to produce the best mechanism for firing objects into the air.

Ron Ritchhart from Harvard University, in his influential book, Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters and How to Get It, (Jossey-Bass, 2004) presents a powerful argument on viewing intelligence by focusing on cognitive dispositions.

Ritchhart believes thinking is not only a matter of skills, but also dispositions. He identifies open mindedness, curiosity, attention to evidence, scepticism, and imaginativeness as important for good thinking. From a teaching and learning perspective, Ritchhart argues that teachers need to see evidence of these dispositions rather than just production of work in an assignment, test or some other requirement requested by a teacher. He goes on to state that we must see student thinking rather than just inferring what is happening in a student’s head. Ritchhart coined the term ‘Visible Thinking’.

In order to ensure this occurs in the classroom we need to develop an environment conducive to students being able to think deeply. Again, Ritchhart discusses how thinking is developed. He identifies that although thinking occurs in our heads, there is a constant interplay between the class and the individual. Humans are social beings, and we learn from, and with, the people around us.

The thinking culture characteristics which we create in our school are crucial for our students to become strong and independent thinkers. Our school environment needs to be one which fosters professional learning communities, described by Ritchhart as communities with “rich discussions of teaching, learning, and [where] thinking become[s] a fundamental part of teachers’ experiences — provid[ing] the foundation for nurturing thinking and learning in the classroom. School Leaders need to value, create, and preserve time for teachers to discuss teaching and learning, grounded in observation of student work.”

This approach is very much at the heart of our Teaching for Thinking project at St Catherine’s, as outlined in our Towards 2025 Strategic Plan. The end of year reviews which have just been completed, where every teacher is interviewed by a member of the Senior Leadership Team, have revealed a rich body of work by our teachers. Our educators are indeed establishing a rich and dynamic culture of thinking in our classrooms.

As I observed in the classroom this week, we had students working on small catapults sending projectiles flying into the air, in the future perhaps, they might be part of a team sending the first humans to Mars. That really would be evidence of a rich and rigorous culture of thinking.

Mr Robert Marshall, Deputy Principal, Director for Teaching and Learning