Learning to Think Like Experts
Since we faculty have spent years or decades immersed in our own fields of study or creative work, we may not often think about the conventions and idiosyncrasies of our disciplines. To us, it may seem like our field’s ways of knowing are the ways of knowing, and our field’s ways of communicating are the ways of communicating, but every discipline has its own distinctive traditions that may be totally unfamiliar to students.
In fact, first-year students bounce from discipline to discipline as they take general education courses. To them, our courses may simply seem to be about different topics—chemistry, art history, religion, math—but each introductory course is actually the gateway to a discipline. How can we welcome them in?
Of course, we’re not just covering topics, we’re helping students understand new ways of reasoning, ask new kinds of questions, and look for certain kinds of evidence. Students need to learn how to read, write, and think in disciplinary ways because all of our conventions will be new to them. Teaching disciplinary ways of thinking is both challenging and rewarding; it is exciting when we see students begin to think in new ways, even if progress is slow at the start.
So how do we coach thinking? First of all, we need to articulate for ourselves what kind(s) of thinking students need to practice in our courses. Then, we can describe what it means to do that thinking. For example, what does it mean to analyze, evaluate, or synthesize in your discipline? What does it mean to take context into account or apply a theoretical lens when analyzing or evaluating something? What are some of the steps in the process of doing the complex intellectual work in the course?
After you’ve defined the relevant thinking for yourself and your students, you can provide illustrations. When you’re demonstrating the relevant kind of thinking in class, you can point that out to your students. You can also give them examples and ask them to compare and contrast, helping them develop a better understanding of what it looks like to do certain kinds of thinking. They can identify and discuss the processes, expectations, and variations. You might find examples they can explore in published work, or students’ work can serve as examples during a structured peer review activity. Whichever examples you use, you’ll need to highlight the relevant thinking and clarify what it means to do that thinking well.
After students have a clear understanding of what it means (and doesn’t mean) to do a certain kind of thinking, you can ask them to go ahead and try it. They might do so in or out of class, depending on the activity or assignment. After they have opportunities to practice, we can give them feedback on their progress. Learning to think in disciplinary ways takes some time.
Another way to coach thinking is by teaching students to pose good questions. In Engaging Ideas, John Bean explains, “As students move from discipline to discipline, they need to learn the kinds of questions scholars in a given discipline typically ask. Novices often don’t know how to distinguish a good question from a naive one.” Bean shares strategies and examples for helping students ask good questions. “One teaching approach is to model question-asking by regularly posing well-framed questions for students to consider through exploratory writing, small group discussions, or class debates. Another strategy is to help students see how points in a lecture are connected to underlying questions.” If you read Engaging Ideas, you can check out Bean’s question templates for the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
In short, teaching students how disciplinary experts think and communicate that thinking is an important part of welcoming them into the discipline. Since many undergraduate students are novices in our fields, we can’t expect them to be able to do expert thinking themselves without coaching. Over time, through discussion of examples and through opportunities for practice and feedback, we can help them make exciting progress.
If you would like support to create activities that help students understand and practice disciplinary ways of thinking, we will be happy to help! You can email us at pro-teaching@fsu.edu to schedule a consultation. We look forward to working with you!