Too Fluid

Dawn Beck, Peggy Turlington, Farid Matuk

While our group believes in the need to incorporate critical thinking, imagination, and empathy into our instruction of English across all grade levels, we found these categories to overlap in ways that made the exercise nearly impossible to complete. This may be because the ideas generated last year speak to a different prompt (“how to prepare our students for a changing world”) and so do not lend themselves to being grouped under the three headings of critical thinking, imagination, and empathy. Those items listed by groups in the 2008-09 school year that address discerning between values and organizing information into structures, etc., were easy to label “critical thinking”. One example of this would be “How to structure an essay”. Yet even this concept is potentially something that would be classified under “Imagination” because, of course, structuring an essay requires that a writer project or imagines the perspective of her reader.

So, while we recognize that the boundaries between critical thinking, imagination, and empathy are porous, we also understand the importance of making judgment calls that will allow us to discuss a given assignment or teaching strategy as particularly beneficial to the development of one of these modes over the others. Ultimately, our group thought it would be best to spend time in each other’s classrooms during the 2009-10 school year and blog about the ways the given activities and teaching strategies we witness lend themselves most to the development of one or another of the three modes/aspects of literature.

It seems to us that a conversation about the inclusion and balance of these attributes in the classroom, done after the classroom visits are completed, would be beneficial. A fluid conversation might fit the flexible nature of teaching a little better than a chart. Such a conversation may not quantify these qualities, but we are not sure that quantifying critical thinking, imagination, and empathy is the point; balancing and reflecting seem more relevant to us.