In order to respond to the changes that society experiences on a day-to-day basis, teachers must prepare their students to be able to think both inside and outside the classroom. But what exactly does this learning entail?
Teaching to think involves fostering certain skills, such as critical ability, problem solving or decision making. The purpose of incorporating the culture of thought in the classroom is for students to become more critical, reflective and autonomous people. And in the stage of adolescence this development is key.
Robert J. Swartz, director of The National Center for Teaching Thinking, explains that, in order to achieve reflective and more autonomous learning, it is necessary to make the thought process explicit and practice it in everyday situations. In other words, it is a learning that does not happen implicitly: not because we carry out activities in which students have to criticize, solve a problem or make a decision, they will already be learning to think or, at least, not correctly.
This learning must be made explicit with tasks that allow the student to see the process followed: the questions that are asked, the choice of answers, the analysis of options, the reflection before and after and any other cognitive process. The challenge lies in integrating these thinking routines and strategies into the course content and classroom activities.
Working on the culture of thought in the secondary classroom means helping adolescents to structure their thinking. To achieve this, we must design activities with which they learn and practice, in an integrated way with the contents of the area, those reasoning skills that will allow them to develop more complex and creative thinking.
A very good strategy to achieve this is to design PBL (Problem Based Learning) of the learning area. PBL is a method in which real world problems are used as a vehicle for building knowledge and developing skills. That is, learning situations that allow the development of competencies, as indicated by the LOMLOE.
The realization of the PBL follows some steps that structure the thought. The most common steps are: reading the context and identifying difficult words, detecting challenges to solve, analyzing problems, structuring ideas (forming hypotheses), formulating learning objectives, searching for information individually, sharing the results with the team and respond to the challenge.
As we can see, thanks to the learning situations, the students learn, in this case, the steps to solve a problem, making these steps explicit and working on the basic knowledge and necessary skills.
ONMAT, the mathematics program for secondary schools, has been designed with one objective: for adolescents to connect with mathematics. This program is developed by tekman Education, an expert publisher in didactics of mathematics and among its pedagogical bases we find manipulation, contextualized activities, competency assessment, cooperative work and culture of thought.
ONMAT is committed to the didactics of mathematics and to bring them closer to the daily life of students. To achieve this, it offers contextualized activities that allow them to solve real-life problems and encourage their curiosity about mathematics. And, of course, they integrate thinking routines and strategies to work on mathematical knowledge and thinking skills that will help students to be more critical, reflective and autonomous.
The platform offers teachers a sequenced and interconnected organization of mathematical senses so that students can connect learning and develop their skills.
In ONMAT all the activities (cooperatives, manipulatives, challenges, demonstrations, calculation games…) and resources (interactive, self-correcting, theoretical videos, etc.) are available within a digital classroom manager, which allows the activities to be projected in class, print them or work with individual devices. An agile platform that will save teachers time.
