High/Middle School-College Teaching Partnerships

Purpose of Project:

High school and college teachers working together proposed to improve critical thinking abilities in students by improving teaching and assessment. Critical thinking for this partnership comprises a pool of features including judgment, synthesis, analysis, reflection, questioning, problem solving, and evaluation.

Innovative Features:

While current educational journals call for locally initiated reform, few high/middle school teachers have become agents of curricular change. Charging teachers with direct responsibility for curricular reform in their schools is the central innovation in this partnership. 170 teachers in teams from Milwaukee area schools formulated specific institutionwide plans for infusing critical thinking across their schools' curriculum. Intensive two-week instructional workshops showed teachers how to design, sequence, and integrate critical thinking into curricula.

This project demonstrates that school teachers can effectively design curricular changes and assist their colleagues in implementing them. Originally, 12 schools were targeted for participation, but that number was expanded to include 22 urban, suburban, and rural middle/high schools, both public and parochial.

The program had several key features: work is collaborative between college and school educators; teams from each school are interdisciplinary; teachers give students ongoing support and feedback about their critical thinking skills; and teams monitor implementation of plans through site visits to participating schools.

Evaluation

• Student test data
• Sample assessments; examples of student performance
• Videotapes of classroom activities
• Teacher and student interviews and questionnaires
• Teacher and student reflective logs
• Faculty inservice and work session documentation

Impact or Changes From Grant Activities:

Twenty-two individualized school plans for integrating critical thinking across the curriculum were designed by participating teachers. Of 13 schools in the grant's first year, 11 reported 50% or more of their plans implemented by 1987. Of nine schools in the second year, eight plans were almost fully implemented by 1988. Most of the schools, then, have implemented the critical thinking plans they designed or are in the process of implementation.

Only two years have elapsed since some of the teachers implemented curricular changes in their schools, too brief a time to establish definitive test score improvements. Nevertheless, one school's early data produced some astounding results. The comparisons made are for seventh graders over the course of six years on one measure (Iowa Tests of Basic Skills) and for eighth graders over six years on another measure (Milwaukee Public School Competency Test). Note the data do not take the same students and instructors on the same measure in two consecutive years.

At the end of the implementation year, the seventh graders' test scores were up by 17% in the high and average categories for math, up 15% in those categories for reading, and up 12% in those categories for language arts. Eighth graders meeting competence were up 12% in reading and 7% in math. These results are promising but only a single case that needs confirmation from other school sites, and they only indirectly measure critical thinking.

Questionnaires show that the program's impact was felt by the majority of students in participating schools. Many reported that the critical thinking abilities they were developing helped them to study differently, to take tests more effectively, to note linkages among subject areas, and to understand what they were learning. Over half of the teacher teams noted that students were seriously engaged in learning, and became more reflective and better able to consider multiple perspectives.

Also significant was the program impact on the participants' views of themselves as teachers. They reported becoming more conscious of the need to make teaching more deliberate, to refine questioning techniques, and to infuse critical thinking within every class lesson. They explored new ways to assess student learning-trying to integrate students' processing skills with disciplinary content-using special essay questions, journals, lab reports, group projects, and simulations. Project staff learned that they need not define critical thinking in exactly the same way in every school. The key to success, they claimed, was to define critical thinking within a predetermined cluster of abilities so that it has meaning for the faculty who will be teaching it.

Many reported greater enjoyment in teaching their classes, energized by heightened responsiveness of their students. Nearly all of the participating teams included all-faculty inservice as part of their plans, requiring teachers-in-training to give critical thinking presentations before their colleagues. In school after school, fellow teachers responded positively to the teams' presentations and to discussing learning and teaching issues with their colleagues.

Structural differences in the ways faculties worked together were reported. The work informally begun by teachers from different subject areas was continued in formally structured interdisciplinary exchanges among faculty in the schools. As a result of all these team activities, administrators of two districts incorporated explicit statements about critical thinking within their schools' educational goals. In some schools, there was a strong tendency to simply equate doing and learning, without the necessary awareness of an individual learner's understanding. Participating teachers observed that for any systematic learning to take place, each critical thinking component had to be analyzed separately. That step of identifying and analyzing the abilities proved to be as difficult as teaching them.

What Activities Worked Unexpectedly?

While Alverno sought to improve its inservice, it did not anticipate the degree to which the teachers would be affected as professionals. Repeatedly, the teachers working together claimed not only to have enhanced school programs as embodied in the critical thinking plans but to have experienced renewed enthusiasm for teaching as well.

What Activities Didn't Work?

To a large degree, successful curricular reform depends on support from school administrators, especially in providing released time for participating teachers. In the first year, released time received low priority but was realized the second year through common preparation periods.

What Do You Have To Send Others And How Do They Get It?

Since the basic program strategy stressed individualized plans that matched the needs of each school, work products of the teams were not intended for other schools. However, teams could share their experience in addressing critical thinking goals in different school situations. Primary dissemination linked successful teams with schools of similar circumstances and populations. Alverno continues to make individual arrangements to work with schools that contact them, and either provide inservice or linkages with other schools.

Several project materials are available by writing to the project director. Alverno's final report provides a program overview, accompanied by videotapes of participants discussing the project and of inservices given by the teams.

Mary Diez
Alverno College
3401 S. 39th Street
Milwaukee, WI 53215-4020
414-382-6213

What Has Happened To The Program Since The Grant Ended?

Alverno has maintained linkages with all 22 schools and several new ones, supplying useful resources, working on an ad hoc basis with their teams, and involving team members in critical thinking workshops or conference presentations.

The College's strong commitment to teacher education and its growing expertise in critical thinking has had a special impact on its own teacher education programs. First, it has provided Alverno with new colleagues in public and private schools and new sites for student teacher placements. Second, it has stimulated original classroom ideas to use with preservice education students. For example, an Alverno course now focuses on the development of critical thinking throughout the curriculum. Students design critical thinking plans and then compare them against those created by the team teachers to get a sense of how prepared the students are to work as school professionals.

Currently, the College is considering a master's degree program that would follow the design of the project, i.e., open only to teams of teachers from middle and high schools, and focused on curricular plans for developing students' abilities in critical thinking.