Introduction: We have asked Melissa Sommerfeld Gresalfi ’95, to first explain her academic and research work at Indiana University on critical thinking and then elaborate on how that work was based on her Roeper experience.

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I have spent the past four years as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University working on one seemingly modest goal: to design curricula that encourage students to engage “critically” with information. Critical engagement involves being intentional about the disciplinary tools you use to resolve a problem, and being able to reflect on how that tool (as opposed to another), enables you to achieve the end you had in mind. Let me give an example from one of the curricula I have designed in math (to see more, check it out at: http://worked_examples.crlt.indiana.edu/projects/9). Let’s say you had to decide which brand of bikes was safest. Someone gave you data about how long bikes took to stop once the brakes were applied. You have data from two brands of bikes. You are shown this graph. Then you have to decide: which brand is safest?

If you are like many middle school students, you might say to yourself: “My teacher told me that I should always use the mean. Gee…how do I calculate the mean….add up all the numbers and divide by the total. OK. Hmmm…Speedy Spokes has a lower mean than Rollin’ Steady. It must be the safer bike.” Next problem.

We call this procedural engagement. This means that kids are using procedures, (hopefully) accurately, but without considering why that procedure works, or how it supports some conclusions (but not others). Some educators are quite content with this level of engagement, believing that what it means to “understand” statistics involves being able to accurately use procedures when called upon to do so. There’s a problem with that definition of understanding.

It turns out that the mean ISN’T the only tool that you could use to decide which brand of bike is safer—nor is it necessarily the best. In fact, using the mean gives a particular definition of safety that is different from other definitions of safety. Specifically, the mean tells you which brand of bike is likely to stop most quickly, on average. So if you think that safety is about stopping quickly, then using the mean is a reasonable way to make sense of the data. But—and here’s the crucial part—if you think that a safe bike is one that’s predictable, that is, you know that the bike will stop in about the same time EVERY TIME, then the mean isn’t going to help you. At all. Instead, you need to consider the range of the data for both brands of bikes. And if you think about the range, suddenly you have a very different recommendation to make….Rollin’ Steady, which has a larger mean, but a much smaller range.

What does all this detail about math have to do with critical engagement? The point is that the decision you finally make is based on the tools you used and what you personally value. This is what expertise is really about—not blindly following a procedure, but making intentional decisions about how to approach a problem, what tools to bring to bear on it, and how to convince others that we are doing something reasonable. Whether the topic is politics, literature, history, engineering, or medicine, expert practice always involves intentional decision-making—critical engagement with the situation and tools you have available to you.

In my research, I argue that critical engagement should be a primary goal for education for two reasons. First, as explained above, critical engagement closely resembles expert practice. The other reason is that students actually learn more when they engage critically (as opposed to procedurally). Think of how deeply you have to understand an idea if you are going to use it to support a claim or challenge a counter-claim. Contrast that with how deeply you have to understand an idea if you merely need to be able to replicate a procedure or provide a definition. Critical engagement involves owning an idea; procedural engagement involves merely reproducing one (to read more about these distinctions, and how they play out in curricular designs, see http://inkido.indiana.edu/gresalfi/Pubs/Gresalfi,Barab,Siyahhan&Christensen(2009).pdf).

Despite the seemingly obvious benefits to teaching students to engage critically, it is unfortunately not a typical educational outcome. There are some funding agencies (like the MacArthur Foundation and the Spencer Foundation) who agree this is a worthwhile goal to pursue. The Carnegie foundation has even put together a series of videos about novel insights from educational research that challenge the current status quo in schools—the video can be found at their website: http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/carnegieviews/transformational-play-and-math-education Despite these small successes, it continues to be shocking to me how much effort it takes to convince some people that fostering critical engagement is a reasonable—and attainable—learning goal.

My befuddlement stems, no doubt, from the fact that until I started graduate school, I took it for granted that everyone thought that the purpose of education was to be able to engage in a good debate. This conviction developed from my own educational experiences, which have dramatically shaped my expectations of what education can and should be. Specifically, having attended Roeper for 14 years, I was quite accustomed to being asked what I thought about something, and then having to explain why I thought I was right. I was fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of other students who ALSO had ideas and opinions about things, and were equally passionate about persuading others that THEY were right. And we were quite privileged to have teachers who helped us to transition from simple debates based on opinion to reasoned arguments that leveraged disciplinary evidence to support our claims. Indeed, in the real world, shouting loudly is rarely the ticket to winning the battle (except, perhaps where politics are concerned, unfortunately).

When I look at the careers that my peers from Roeper have chosen, which range from law, to the arts, ecology, engineering, medicine, engineering, writing, and beyond, the clear thread that cuts through their work is a commitment to using their expertise to critically engage the world. It is one thing to be an attorney; it is quite another to use one’s law degree to advocate for children in poverty. It is one thing to study community art; it is quite another to leverage that experience to design programs where children learn to advocate for their own futures. What we learned at Roeper was the importance of taking a stand; what our classes provided for us was a way to engage content so that it could be a tool to use to support those stands. In the short term, this approach to teaching fostered an interest in learning that could be seen in heated debates, frantic study sessions, and creative independent projects. In the long term, this approach fostered so much more: a commitment to look at the world not as it is currently is, but as it could be, and a sense of ourselves as people who are expected, obligated, and entitled to make those changes.

Melissa Sommerfeld Gresalfi
Roeper Class of 1995