Cultivating Creative-Mindedness. Guy Claxton

Teachers strongly influence the mental skills that students activate in their classrooms. In mathematics, you can teach “area” in a way that builds students’ capacity for problem-finding – not just problem-solving – and their dispositions for curiosity and collaboration. Or you can teach “area” in a way that strengthens their inclination to be passive, dependent and instrumental. You can teach the history of World War II in a way that cultivates empathy and tolerance. Or you can teach it as if there were a single “correct” point of view…

I was chatting to a group of history teachers the other day, and we got on to the subject of young people’s lack of critical awareness as they browsed the Internet. They read things on Wikipedia and assumed they were true. We agreed that a healthy skepticism towards “knowledge claims” was a pretty useful habit of mind in the 21st century. I said to them: “Just reassure me, will you, that the way you are teaching history to your 9th-graders is designed to develop the skeptical disposition towards knowledge claims that you are now (quite rightly) complaining that they don’t have…” And I have to tell you that they went a bit quiet. Because it had never occurred to them that a history topic could be used as an exercise-machine for stretching a vital 21st-century attitude such as skepticism – as opposed to a dysfunctional inclination to believe everything they read. You can’t opt out and say “I just teach knowledge”. However you teach, every teacher is a mind trainer, somewhere on a continuum from building compliance to building creative intelligence.