Get It Right: Use Reading and Writing to Teach Critical Thinking

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the demise of Communism in Europe and Central Asia.

During the heady years of hopeful democratization that immediately flowed from that watershed event, the International Reading Association teamed up with the Open Society Foundation to create an innovative education program to help prepare a generation of young citizens to become responsible and active participants in the political and social cultures then beginning to re-emerge in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

That program was entitled Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking (RWCT).

The RWCT program was developed by Jeannie Steele, Kurt Meredith, Charles Temple and Scott Walter, and implemented through a series of structured teacher professional development workshops facilitated by an all-volunteer cadre of the leading professors in teacher education and literacy pedagogy. The program consisted of a collection of practical techniques teachers could use to leverage routine reading and writing activities into powerful opportunities to help their students develop critical thinking skills and democratic habits of mind.

Thirty years later, I find myself wondering whether it might be time for a reboot of the RWCT program---But this time targeting the countries of Western Europe and the United States.  The rationale that originally led to the development of RWCT for countries back in the Post-Communism era sadly seems applicable to the political and social scenes disrupting across the countries of Western Europe and the United States today.  

Recent years have seen the rise not only in the number of conspiracy theories and unfounded claims put forward as alternate reality but an astounding increase in the number of people who appear willing to accept outrageous disinformation as fact. Much of this phenomenon corresponds with the burgeoning field of social media and clandestine websites. Some is alleged to be evidence of the interference of adversarial nations seeking to undermine democratic societies. But a significant amount of propaganda has openly emanated directly from official government platforms and Orwellian press secretaries. The daily accumulation of unthinking acceptance of these misrepresentations and outright lies has had and is continuing to have dire consequences.

From climate change deniers to xenophobic nationalist policies, from systemic racism and anti-Semitism to Brexit, from attacks on key military and political alliances to attempts to discredit vital international institutions,  and from militant responses against government mandates to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic to spurious claims of election fraud, the destructive ranks of political and social agitation have grown into vicious mobs and well-armed militias eagerly yearning for shameless strong leaders whose aim is not to build up but to tear down democratic institutions and to fracture communities into warring factions in the process. Blind obedience to such charismatic leaders has replaced genuine public discourse with the chanting of competing incendiary slogans.

Fed on a steady diet of disinformation, distortion and untruth the deranged mentality of the fringe has grown to become the accepted marching orders for the mainstream in Western Europe and in the United States. Opinions are being used to weaponize ideas, and issues are used to polarize discourse.

While politicians and social scientists appear at a loss for strategies to directly confront this slide into dystopia, I firmly believe that classroom teachers around the world are uniquely positioned to stem the rising tide of this dangerous threat to democracy and civil society. A practical way forward is to renew the deliberate effort to create critical thinking, democratic classrooms. And once again, reading and writing activities offer perfect opportunities to do just that.

The conceptual premises underpinning RWCT are simple and straightforward:

1.     Citizens of a democratic culture must be able to evaluate and use information to form their own opinions and actions;

2.     Citizens of a democratic culture must be able to tolerate the diverse ideas and opinions of others;

3.     Ideas that derive from a process of cooperative and supportive discussion benefit individuals and the community as a whole.

Literacy skills have always been viewed as necessary for the operation of stable democratic systems. To be sure, an ability to read and write is fundamental for contributing to public discourse and for informed responsible citizenship. However, as the developers of RWCT astutely observed, an ability to read and write may be necessary but not sufficient for a participatory citizenry. As they rightly pointed out, many countries that were dominated for so long by authoritarian political systems were also highly literate societies.  So what was missing?

Missing was the capacity and opportunity to think critically about the information one was reading. Indeed, what can be the value of literacy if everything one reads is infused with political propaganda? Informed citizens need to be able to compare information they are provided with objective reality, experience, and common sense. And since critical thinking often generates legitimate, diverse fact-based opinions, informed individuals also need habits of mind that tolerate diversity. They must share the belief that a dialectic of diverse opinions can yield ideas and innovative outcomes that build upon each other and that a synthesis of diverse ideas in an open society is always preferable to the elimination of dissent.

There are any number of education programs that explicitly teach civic behavior. An equal number teach critical thinking through courses in logic and philosophy and debate. But these are rather situational experiences. That is to say, one learns to think critically when in the debate hall or civics class. This sort of critical thinking has not been shown to carry over to learners’ general thinking and behavior. The genius of RWCT was the insight that literacy is a cognitive process that requires critical thinking and reflection. For too long, the critical thinking processes that enable competent reading and writing were laboring away in the background of the mind as teachers focused attention instead on students’ ability to answer questions correctly. The developers of RWCT brought those critical thinking skills to the fore and demonstrated how the same cognitive and communicative competencies that lead to effective reading and writing can be used to serve the causes and needs of a democratic society.

So exactly how does that work?

A small part of the RWCT approach can be illustrated in a lesson involving reading a history text. In a typical classroom the teacher rewards learners’ ability to locate factual information in a text or lecture. But a history textbook cannot present a rich variety of perspectives. A lecture may contain bias. A text may contain outdated information or facts that have been disproved over time. The ability to locate facts has little payoff if the facts that students retrieve are incomplete, distorted or untrue.

RWCT techniques flip the status quo by helping teachers learn to change their questions from “What did the author write?” to

·      What did you think about what the author has written?

·      What makes you think that?

·      How might another person respond to what this author has written? What might cause her or him think that?

·      What other explanations for events might the author have overlooked?

·      How does the author’s account compare with what others have written about the same events?

·      The author uses the term “progress” to describe the event. What does progress mean to you? What are some other words you think might be used to describe this event? Why might some people disagree that the event led to “progress”?

In this example, the aim of the lesson is not the acquisition of information, but to teach learners to use a text as a starting point for constructing their own thoughts. Eventually, students will begin to be able to generate their own questions about the text and the way authors present content.  Critical thinking becomes a habit of mind when students see and hear their teachers model critical thinking in the classroom on a consistent and daily basis.

The RWCT pedagogy is not confined to the literature or history classroom. The teaching techniques were received and implemented across the education spectrum from chemistry to mathematics to home economics and the fine arts. They were implemented in thousands of classrooms from kindergarten to senior secondary and tertiary education.  Specific teaching techniques enabled learners to make deductive inferences, evaluate information, distinguish fact from opinion, develop vocabulary and to compare information with their own experience. The RWCT program helped teachers create thinking classrooms where learners were encouraged to go beyond the simple act of reading words and searching information. They were given opportunities and freedom to think about what they were reading.

The writing component of RWCT was equally striking. This was in part because traditional writing activities for many pupils and students in Eastern Europe and Central Asia consisted of copying information the teacher had spoken or written on the chalkboard. As one workshop participant commented,

“In Soviet Union we also taught inferences. I would tell students what inferences they were to draw from a particular poem and then students would write this inference in their notebooks.”

Specific RWCT techniques embrace the facets of the writing process and created structured opportunities for learners to write creatively or in authentic response to what they have read. Like the reading counterpart, writing was presented to learners not simply as a communication skill but as a way of making sense of their world. The learner’s written work was not merely a product but a process of thinking on paper.

With all this thinking going on, there was a seismic shift from the consensus classroom where the objective was for everyone to get to the “right” answer to that of a democratic classroom in which the objective was to arrive at meaningful understanding, often through diverse pathways. This shift required specific classroom management techniques such as collaborative learning and structured discussion that created protected environments that allowed learners to share their own ideas and understandings freely with peers, especially those with diverse opinions.

The literacy pedagogy of RWCT is not arcane or specialized. It was culled from best practice teaching techniques that were commonly taught at most pre-service programs in teacher education institutions in North America, Western Europe and Australia and New Zealand. What was unique in RWCT was that these techniques were not only used to teach reading and writing skills but to serve as a structured way of creating classroom opportunities in which learners were not only helped to think creatively and critically, but were obliged to do so.

We do not find ourselves in the present state of disinformation for no reason. History has shown again and again, an assault on critical thinking is always deliberate.  Shouts of “fake news” or labeling the press “the enemy of democracy” and other constraints to critical discourse always serve a political agenda.

Counter-efforts to promote critical thinking and constructive discussion must then also be deliberate. As the developers of RWCT argued, these habits of mind are essential for the survival of democracy.

What targets shall we then take aim at? Teachers must understand the difference between correct thinking and critical thinking. Teachers may lament the outsized influence of mandated assessments of student learning. But critical thinking and factual learning are not incompatible objectives. One cannot think critically unless one is reading information that merits critical thought and discussion is pointless unless learners are able to support their opinions with factual information.

The current situation is grave. Many of the issues confronting democratic societies today are complex. They can appear overwhelming. People may prefer to avoid giving these issues the thought they deserve. But teachers can help learners understand how to break down complex issues into more manageable components. They can help learners identify cause and effect relationships that go along with these issues. They can help students develop innovative responses to endemic challenges.

Even more fundamentally, teachers can help learners redefine what it means to truly understand issues of consequence. One cannot respond to complex ideas with an emoji. A tweet is simply too shallow to allow for meaningful engagement. Being an informed citizen means more than keeping up to date with the latest online fad. Learning and discourse must go beyond the superficial listing of facts. Learners must be able to engage in the thorough exploration of ideas and events in depth and detail.

Teachers can learn and apply techniques that challenge their students to question facts and opinions as they read and write. By helping them develop strategies for critical engagement with ideas and offering them meaningful opportunities to share their own reflections and solutions teachers can help students develop democratic habits that will ensure they will resist the temptation to ever cede responsibility for managing their own lives and communities.  

Teachers, it is our turn to double down, to intensify our efforts for developing future citizens of a participatory democracy. It is time to use reading and writing to teach critical thinking here and now.