by Craig Nelson Indiana University
Earlier on this blog site, Ed Nuhfer (2014, Part 1, Part 2) urged us to consider the fundamental importance of Perry’s book (1970, 1999) for understanding what we are trying to do in fostering critical thinking, metacognition and other higher order outcomes. I enthusiastically agree.
I read Perry’s book (1970) shortly after it was published. I had been teaching at IU for about five years and had seen how difficult it was to effectively foster critical thinking, even in college seniors. Perry’s book transformed my thinking and my teaching. I realized that much of my own thinking was still essentially what he might have called sophomoric. I had to decide if I was convinced enough to fundamentally change how I thought. Once I began to come to grips with that I saw that Perry’s synthesis of his students’ experiences really mattered for teaching.
Perry made clear that there were qualitatively very different ways to think. Some of these ways included what I had been trying to get my students to master as critical thinking. But Perry helped me understand more explicitly what that might mean. More importantly, perhaps, he also helped me understand how to conceptualize the limits of my approach and what kinds of critical thinking the students would need to master next if I were to be successful. At the deepest level Perry helped me see that the issues were not only how to think in sophisticated ways. The real problems are more in the barriers and costs to thinking in more sophisticated ways.
And so I began. For about five years I taught in fundamentally new ways, challenging the students’ current modes of thinking and trying to address the existential barriers to change (Nelson 1989, 1999). I then decided that perhaps I should let the students more fully in on what I was doing. I thought it might be helpful to have them actually read excepts from Perry’s book. This was a challenging thought. I was teaching a capstone course for biology majors. Perry’s “Forms of Intellectual And Ethical Development, A Scheme” was rather clearly not the usual fare for such a course. So I decided to introduce it about halfway into the course, after the students had been working within a course framework designed to foster a deep understanding of scientific thinking.
I had incorporated a full period discussion each week for which the students prepared a multiple-page worksheet analyzing a reading assignment (See the Red Pen Worksheet; Nelson 2009, 2010a). Most of the students responded very positively to Perry as a discussion assignment (Perry Discussion Assignment1; Perry Selected Passages; Ingram and Nelson 2006, 2009).
For the final discussion at the end of the course, one of the questions was approximately: “Science is always changing. I will want to introduce new readings next time. Of the ones we read, which three should I consider replacing and why, and which three should I most certainly keep and why?” Perry was the reading most frequently cited as among the “most certainly keep.” Indeed, reactions were so strongly positive that comments even included: “I personally got little from Perry but the others in my group found it so valuable that you have to keep it.”
One subsequent year I assigned Perry on a Tuesday to be read for the discussion period scheduled the next week. The next morning I arrived at my office at 8 am. One of my students was sitting outside my office on the floor. I greeted her by name and asked if she was waiting to talk to me. “Why, yes.” (She skipped “duh.” Note that we are into seriously deviant behavior here: residential campus at 8 am, no appointment, no reason to think I would be there at that time.) After a few pleasantries she announced: “I read Perry last night.” (Deviance was getting thicker: She had read the assignment immediately and a week before it was due!) “I finally understand what you are trying to do in this course, and I really like it.” (This was a fairly common reaction as Perry provided a metacognitive framework that allowed the students to more deeply understand the purpose of the assignments we had been doing2.) “And I liked Perry a lot, too.” (I am thinking: it is 8 am, she can’t be here simply to rave about an assignment.) “But, I am a bit mad at you. You have been mucking3 with my mind. College courses don’t do that! I haven’t had a course muck with my mind since high school. And, I just wanted to say that you should have warned me!” (She was a college senior.) I agreed that I should have warned her and apologized. She seemed satisfied with this and we parted on good terms.
However, I was not satisfied with this state of affairs. She had felt violated by my trying to foster changes in how she thought. And I guessed that many of my other students probably had felt at least twinges of the same feelings. This led me to ask myself: “What is the difference between indoctrination and meaningful but fair education.” I concluded that fair educational practice would require trying to make the agenda public and understood before trying to change students’ minds. This openness would require more than just assigning a reading in the middle of the semester. Thereafter, I always included a non-technical summary of Perry in my first day classes (as in Nelson 2010 b) and usually assigned Perry as the second discussion reading, having used the first discussion to start mastering the whole-period discussion process.
I would generalize my conclusion here. We instructors (almost?) always need to keep students aware of our highest-level objectives in order to avoid indoctrination rather than fair education. Fortunately, I think that this approach also will often facilitate student mastery of these objectives. It is nice when right seems to match effective, eh?
1I decided somewhat reluctantly to include the details of this assignment. I strongly suggest that you read this short book and select the pages and passages that seem most relevant to the students and topics that you are teaching.
2Students find it especially easy to connect with Perry’s writing. He includes numerous direct quotations from interviews with students.
3She used a different initial letter in “mucking,” as you may have expected.
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Ingram, Ella L. & Craig E. Nelson. 2006. Relationship between achievement and students’ acceptance of evolution or creation in an upper-level evolution course. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 43:7-24.
Ingram, Ella L. & Craig E. Nelson. 2009. Applications of intellectual development theory to science and engineering education. P 1-30 in Gerald F. Ollington (Editor), Teachers and Teaching: Strategies, Innovations and Problem Solving. Nova Science Publishers.
Nelson, Craig E. (1986). Creation, evolution, or both? A multiple model approach. P 128–159 in Robert W. Hanson (Editor), Science and Creation: Geological, Theological, and Educational Perspectives New York: MacMillan.
Nelson, Craig E. (1989). Skewered on the unicorn’s horn: The illusion of a tragic tradeoff between content and critical thinking in the teaching of science. P 17–27 in Linda Crowe (Editor), Enhancing Critical Thinking in the Sciences. Washington, DC: Society of College Science Teachers.
Nelson, Craig E. (1999). On the persistence of unicorns: The tradeoff between content and critical thinking revisited. P 168–184 in Bernice A. Pescosolido & Ronald Aminzade (Editors), The Social Worlds of Higher Education: Handbook for Teaching in a New Century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
Nelson, Craig E. 2009. The “Red Pen” Worksheet. Quick Start Series. Center for Excellence in Learning & Teaching. Humboldt State University. 2 pp. [Edited excerpt from Nelson 2010 a.]
Nelson, Craig E. (2010 a). Want brighter, harder working students? Change pedagogies!
Examples from biology. P 119–140 in Barbara J. Millis (Editor), Cooperative Learning in Higher Education: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy. Sterling, VA: Stylus.
Nelson, Craig E. 2010. Effective Education for Environmental Literacy. P 117-129 in Heather L. Reynolds, Eduardo S. Brondizio, and Jennifer Meta Robinson with Doug Karpa and Briana L. Gross (Editors). Teaching Environmental Literacy in Higher Education: Across Campus and Across the Curriculum. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Nelson, Craig E. 2012. Why Don’t Undergraduates Really ‘Get’ Evolution? What Can Faculty Do? P 311-347 in Karl S. Rosengren, Sarah K. Brem, E. Margaret Evans, & Gale M. Sinatra (Editors.) Evolution Challenges: Integrating Research and Practice in Teaching and Learning about Evolution. Oxford University Press.
Nuhfer, Ed. (2104a). Metacognition for guiding students to awareness of higher-level thinking (part 1). Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognition-for-guiding-students-to-awareness-of-higher-level-thinking-part-1/
Nuhfer, Ed. (2104b). Metacognition for guiding students to awareness of higher-level thinking (part 2). Retrieved from https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/metacognition-for-guiding-students-to-awareness-of-higher-level-thinking-part-2/
Perry, William G., Jr. (1970). Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Perry, William G., Jr. (1999). Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years: A Scheme. (Reprint of the 1968 1st edition with a new introduction by Lee Knefelkamp). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.