What the @#*% Does Writing Have To Do with Fixing Cars?

Teaching communications skills to trades students can be a sales job above all else, especially at the beginning of the semester. I learned a lot from my teaching predecessor, Janie Harr, about how to help students establish those links by interviewing successful professionals in their fields about how they've used writing to find and keep good jobs. So often, these bright, capable hands-on learners have had very little success in traditional classrooms and see themselves as "bad writers." Sometimes just getting them past this stigma of "I suck" and instead into the land of "here's what I'm doing well, here's what I can improve upon" can do wonders.

http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gedney.KY0180/

Let's face the facts: all of the classes I teach are required in some way, and the majority of my students would not be taking my classes if they weren't required. So motivational theory is highly relevant to my job. I like what Matthew Weller has to say in his LA Business Journal article on General Principles of Motivation, in particular his establishment of a timeline and what we can do to motivate learners at the beginning, middle and end of a learning experience.

Up, Down, All Around

Teaching critical thinking is the most important thing we do. You know the saying: give a person a fish; teach a person to fish. . . We want our students to be able to fish for themselves and get their intellectual essential fatty acids forever.

It's not a bad idea, either, if they also learn to look at the situation from the perspective of the fish. Maybe they'll choose not to eat it then, or maybe they still will, but they'll understand the complexity of the situation and make a well-informed moral decision.

Now that word, "moral". . . I dislike it; it makes me feel squeamish and uncomfortable. I far prefer the word "ethical," so maybe I should just use the word ethical.

Contemplation, Perseverance, Imagination, and Free Will. From the morality play Hickscorner. Reproduced in H.W. Mabie, William Shakespeare (1900).

http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/drama/moralities.html

I agree with a lot of what I read on the Critical Thinking Community website, but I don't agree with this assertion - "We must resuscitate minds that are largely dead when we receive them." Students come to us teeming with ideas and opinions, and it's more a manner of connecting, channeling, challenging and engaging.

To me, critical thinking is about unknowing as much as it is about learning. It's about humility, complexity, and entering the wide world of shared knowledge, shared experience, and shared confusion. The benefit therein is not an easier life, but a rich one with strong ties to community, self, society, and the fish that one eats or chooses not to.

Through the Years

As a strong believer in life-long learning, I found it helpful to consider students' learning needs and styles in terms of their developmental stages. Erik Erikson's theory of eight stages of human development includes three stages that many of my students are in, namely five, six and seven - adolescence, young adulthood, and middle adulthood. I plan on being more mindful of how a student's stage of life can affect his or her intellectual needs and potential.

http://www.zazzle.com/hiker_in_the_mount_aconcagua_valley_in_chile_1915_poster-228197591982579602

Reading about Kohlberg's stages of moral development led me to think about Carol Gilligan's work on women's moral development, which I was first exposed to in college. I agree with Kohlberg's assertion that why an individual makes a certain ethical decision is as significant in some ways as the decision that is made. Moral reasoning and critical thinking skills are vital aspects of being well-educated, and the goal is to challenge and empower students to improve their critical thinking skills so they can make well-informed moral decisions.