How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

Petruchio

As a teacher, I wonder if it is possible to instill this skill into students the skills of rationality and critical thinking. I teach the third grade, and it is not immediately apparent how to apply this with my own class.

The problems I foresee are as follows:

Young children often do not know the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.
Many children are very shy, and try to give as short of an answer as doable to a verbal prompt.
Written prompts are arduous, straining the attention span and writing capabilities of the students. This is not a bad thing, but it presents difficulties in the economy of time and material to be presented.
Attention spans in general are very short.
Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.
Children, at this age, are likely to take the words of a parent or teacher at face value, and naturally parrot it back. This may be a hard habit to break.

In the sequences, it is suggested teachers should drill into students words don't count, only anticipation-controllers. How practical is this for an elementary school level? Also appreciated would be any ideas or experiences on how to do this, or how to combat the above problems. Hearing from other teachers would be excellent especially.

The problems I foresee are as follows:

Young children often do not know the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.
Many children are very shy, and try to give as short of an answer as doable to a verbal prompt.
Written prompts are arduous, straining the attention span and writing capabilities of the students. This is not a bad thing, but it presents difficulties in the economy of time and material to be presented.
Attention spans in general are very short.
Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.
Children, at this age, are likely to take the words of a parent or teacher at face value, and naturally parrot it back. This may be a hard habit to break.

There a lot of learning where students need to give a specific answer to a specific question. It's useful to learn multiplication tables by heart. The most efficient way to teach that stuff is spaced repetition. Every kid should use Anki for those problems.

If you solve those topics with Anki you have more time for teaching critical thinking.

Let students evaluate the work of other students. Every student writes a text. Alice gives her text to Bob. Bob reads Alice's text and searches for spelling errors. Afterwards the two students discuss the erors that Bob found in Alice's text.

If Alice and Bob can't agree on whether something is an error they ask the teacher.

In art class students should evaluate and discuss the work of other students. To prevent concerns of bullying I would advocate to randomize groups and use mostly groups of two students.

Create a enviroment where the kids can give each other constructive feedback.

Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.

Then how about increasing the amount of experiments?

Experiments in itself are however not without issues. One of my worst experiences in school was where we did an experiment about gravity. In our group we didn't reproduce the official results, It would have been quite trival for me to change the value to match reality as it's supposed to be. I sticked with the values that I measured and got a bad grade. The teacher didn't explain to me why I did get the results I did.

I think nearly all physics experiment had a "correct" result and the result that the formula predicts overrules the result of the experiment. That style of making experiments doesn't teach believe in empiricism.

Young children often do not the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.

What's the goal of that religion class? It's probably not to let the children ask critically whether or not god exists ;)

I think nearly all physics experiment had a "correct" result and the result that the formula predicts overrules the result of the experiment. That style of making experiments doesn't teach believe in empiricism.

Indeed. The results of experiments done in first-year physics and chemistry labs routinely demonstrate that the laws of physics as we know them are clearly wrong. ;)

5ikrase14y

I agree that experiments in school tend to be downright TERRIBLE. THere is never, even in a wealthy enviroment, enough time, equipment, or whatever to let students make any more than trivial choices in experimental design -- and I would say that knowing what experiment to perform is downright essential. My main opinion is that we should not teach so many scientific facts in high school, and more rationality and scientific method, using that as a hook for specific disciplines. Chemistry is pretty good because you can get into some nice empirical predictions and deconstructionism without much difficult math. A lot of labs in high schools are not even all that experimental, and the hypothesis is always crystal clear.

3Desrtopa14y

I don't expect ordinary elementary school students to be mature and competent enough to do this without devolving into bickering and status posturing. Keep in mind the age of the students in question. Feedback from eight year olds on academic work is likely to be unhelpful even to other eight year olds.

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How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

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How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

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