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From the issue dated 4/11/2003
Teaching the Mind Good Habits
By SAM WINEBURG
Smoking is a habit. Even the most hardened smoker had to take
a first drag, sucking into the lungs a noxious cloud that
scorched the unsuspecting alveoli and produced an
uncontrollable cough. For many people, what began as a bizarre
and exotic behavior becomes second nature, and they light
cigarettes on rising in the morning, pouring a cup of coffee,
relaxing at lunch, or unwinding after work.
Habits of mind aren't exactly the same, of course, but there
are similarities. At some point in our lives, each part of the
intellectual process demanded our full concentration. But once
learned (or, more precisely, once mastered), our mental habits
became so automatic that they faded from view.
It is that very point that spells trouble in the classroom.
For the same aspects of cognition that ease our job as
thinkers pose the greatest threat to our effectiveness as
teachers. Our familiar mental habits, often overlooked or
omitted when we describe our thinking processes to others, can
create a gulf between us and our students.
For more than a decade, I have studied intellectual habits by
asking scholars to read documents in my presence and to
describe their thoughts as they do so. I have focused on
historical texts because the ability to reconstruct the past
from fragmented documents requires an expertise that intrigues
me, as a cognitive psychologist. I search for clues that
reveal how scholars see patterns among apparent contradictions
that daunt less-skilled readers.
A typical research session goes something like this: I tell an
Americanist that he will be reading documents on Abraham
Lincoln and ask him about Lincoln's views on race. He cites
classic monographs like Winthrop D. Jordan's White Over Black
and George M. Fredrickson's Black Image in the White Mind,
articles by Don E. Fehrenbacher and Lerone Bennett, and newer
works like Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic and Eric Foner's Story
of American Freedom. Even historians with specialties distant
from the topic -- Africanists who study the Portuguese rule in
Mozambique, or medievalists who write about the Albigensian
heresy -- have no trouble delivering mini-lectures, bringing
to bear the expertise they do possess and drawing analogies to
Lincoln and the American Civil War.
Despite the range of documents, periods, and topics
represented in my research, nearly all the historians I've
studied have approached the primary sources that I give them
in the same way. They glance momentarily at the first few
words at the top of the page, but then their eyes dart to the
bottom, zooming in on the document's provenance: its author,
the date and location of its creation, the time and distance
separating it from the event it reports, and, if possible, how
the document came into their hands. Then the historians mull
over that information like a prospector examining a promising
rock for ore. Is the document an un-self-conscious diary
entry, or a text written to be read by others? Is the author
someone noteworthy, or an ordinary person? Did the author
write when the events were fresh in his or her mind, or so
many years later that memories may no longer be reliable? The
answers to questions like those create a framework upon which
the historian's subsequent reading rests.
Few historians have found the pattern of looking first at the
attribution worthy of comment when they describe to me how
they approach a document. In fact, when I asked one prominent
scholar of American industrialization about his initial focus
on the document's provenance, he said, "Why would I mention
that? Everyone does it."
For as long as I have been interviewing historians, I've also
been presenting the same documents to high-school and college
students. The students' readings follow a different path from
the scholars', beginning with the first word at the top of the
page and ending with the last word at the bottom. Rarely do
students consider the attribution until they get to it; if
they do look at it earlier, their goal is often utilitarian --
for example, to clear up a fuzzy pronoun reference. Primary
documents differ little from textbooks to students, except
that documents are harder to understand. For students, the
purpose of both kinds of text is the same: to convey
information that they can repeat on tests.
During the same semester that I interviewed the specialist on
industrialization, I sat down with a dozen of his students
from a large undergraduate course. It turned out that none of
the undergraduates had yet acquired the habit of mind that he
found unremarkable. Fresh from high school, where they had
been fed a diet of textbook gruel, the undergraduates
continued to read in ways that had served them well.
When I've broached the topic of habits of mind with
historians, I've often encountered an uncharacteristic
reticence. Those who comment often refer to general
critical-thinking skills that could apply just as easily to
texts about astrophysics or wire-haired terriers as to
historical documents. Yet across the many historians I've
interviewed, from the most traditional diplomatic historian to
the hippest adherent of the trendiest subfield, I've been able
to discern the contours of a shared disciplinary culture.
Not all intelligent people read the same way -- not even all
people who spend their working lives with written texts. I was
able to demonstrate that point clearly in a workshop I
conducted for an interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled
by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Four of the roughly 20 participants were historians; the
others were mathematicians, biologists, psychologists,
engineers, or literary scholars. It was from the last group
that I recruited a volunteer to read aloud a primary source in
a public demonstration of my research technique.
The document came from one of my earliest studies, in which I
had asked historians to reconstruct the events at Lexington on
the eve of the Revolutionary War. I presented my volunteer, a
specialist in 19th-century British literature, with a diary
entry from John Barker, a lieutenant in the British army. In
the entry, Barker said he was writing on the same day as the
bloody encounter at Lexington and the even bloodier retreat
from Concord. Barker blamed his own men for "rushing in and
putting to flight" the minutemen gathered in Lexington, and he
explicitly denied giving the order to fire.
My volunteer gave a dramatic reading, commenting on archaic
figures of speech, the density of the prose (the first
sentence has more than 150 words), and linguistic mannerisms
indicative of social class. As she read, she made many astute
comments about the language but seemed at times confused about
the narrator's identity. On reaching the attribution at the
end, she said, "Ah, yes. From a British soldier. That's what I
thought."
The listening historians confessed to me privately afterward
that the reading had shocked them. It had cast doubt on their
core assumptions about the reading process, for checking the
source before reading the text, which was second nature to
them, never occurred to our intelligent and careful reader.
Indeed, the trajectory of the literature professor's reading
-- the subjects it touched on, as well as those it never
addressed -- demonstrated to the historians the complicated
truth that there is no such thing as generic critical
thinking. We think critically within the bounds of our
disciplines, and features of thought considered critical in
one field often fail to appear in another.
For students, historical habits of mind constitute major
intellectual hurdles. Students see their professors' thoughts
as finished products, tidied up and packaged for public
presentation in books, articles, and lectures. Historians
shield from view their raw thinking, the way they try to make
sense of their subject.
We need to bring this messier form of expertise into the
classroom. Students who believe that knowledge bursts
Athena-like from the professor's head may never learn to think
like historians, may never be able to reconstruct past worlds
from the most minimal of clues. We need to show students that
the self-assured figure lecturing from the podium is not what
a historian looks like in his or her office, puzzling through
difficult texts.
In fact, the processes by which a scholar makes sense of
material -- what I sometimes call the intermediate processes
of cognition -- are powerful teaching tools. Historians can
model in class how they read by having students bring in
unfamiliar texts and demonstrating how to interpret and assess
them. With a companion document, they can show the strategies
they use to corroborate evidence and piece together a coherent
context. Or professors could refer students to the useful Web
site History Matters (http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu),
whose section on making sense of evidence includes acclaimed
historians' discussions of how they evaluate different genres
of primary evidence.
By sharing their mental habits, historians could teach
students skills they would find useful every time they faced a
take-home exam or research paper: how to get started when they
lack necessary information, how to prepare their minds to deal
with new topics, how to develop a hunch. The benefits would
extend far beyond the intellectual. Students would come to see
professors as kindred spirits, as people who formulate and
struggle with questions rather than merely assigning them on
tests.
Professors may assume that their students are stupid or suffer
from a learning disability. Often the truth is much simpler:
No one has ever bothered to teach them some basic but powerful
skills of interpretation. As teachers, we need to remember
what the world looked like before we learned our discipline's
ways of seeing it. We need to show our students the patient
and painstaking processes by which we achieved expertise. Only
by making our footsteps visible can we expect students to
follow in them.
Sam Wineburg is a professor of education at Stanford
University. His most recent book is Historical Thinking and
Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past
(Temple University Press, 2001).
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Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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