Abstract
In this article we argue that school leaders should ensure that teachers experience a supportive professional learning community committed to collaborative, thoughtful inquiry and be enabled to create similar communities in their classrooms. This study followed on one published in 2017 that explored school leaders’ responses to an introduction to cognitive education. The same participants investigated cognitive education practices (ways of teaching thinking) in their schools, with an emphasis on the factors that facilitated or constrained implementation. Using a qualitative research approach an open ended research assignment in the form of a report was completed by 32 teachers in school leadership positions. The data was analysed using the guidelines of grounded theory to identify key themes. The findings suggest a possible starting point for leadership initiatives, although cognitive education practices in the participating schools were constrained by a number of structural, contextual and personal factors. Discussion highlights the importance of the development of professional learning communities that focus on cognitive education and identifies a possible leadership direction, namely, building on the progress already made in training teachers to apply Bloom’s taxonomy to assessment tasks. Although our data is from schools in one area of South Africa, our conclusions are likely to have implications for school leadership generally, with particular reference to the development of classroom and professional thinking and learning communities.
Highlights
In this article we draw on the literature from two historically separate areas of scholarship and on our data to point out some parallels between developing thinking and inquiry skills in classrooms and in staffrooms
We argue that leaders in schools need to be better informed about actively teaching thinking and about teacher development in order to capacitate teachers as mediators of thinking
When the country became a democracy in 1994, a complete reform of education was considered essential, resulting in, inter alia, a new national curriculum first formulated as Curriculum 2005 in March 1997, revised in 2000 as the National Curriculum Statement (NCS), which was streamlined in 2011 as the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) (Department of Basic Education (DBE), Republic of South Africa (RSA), 2012)
Summary
In this article we draw on the literature from two historically separate areas of scholarship and on our data to point out some parallels between developing thinking and inquiry skills in classrooms and in staffrooms. We draw attention to our research participants’ focus on Bloom’s taxonomy (first published in 1956 and revised by Anderson & Krathwohl in 2001) as an assessment strategy and suggest that introducing this, or any other taxonomy of cognitive skills for assessment purposes only, is unlikely to be successful in improving thinking, unless both teachers and learners are actively equipped with the skills to generate and answer questions at a range of cognitive levels. Authors such as Killen (2007) provide valuable pedagogical suggestions, they do not directly focus on thinking processes, the development of metacognitive awareness and the conscious independent application of thinking strategies, which is the aim of cognitive education. When the country became a democracy in 1994, a complete reform of education was considered essential, resulting in, inter alia, a new national curriculum first formulated as Curriculum 2005 in March 1997, revised in 2000 as the National Curriculum Statement (NCS), which was streamlined in 2011 as the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) (Department of Basic Education (DBE), Republic of South Africa (RSA), 2012)
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