How to Encourage Children’s Thinking

Children learn best when we encourage them to invent their own ways to solve problems.  When we tell or present knowledge to young children, we stifle their initiative and diminish their confidence.  Parents and educators who go beyond worksheet and drill-type methods of teaching will encourage thinking in children. 

Williams and Kamii (1986) proposed three ways to encourage thinking in their article “How do children learn by handling objects?”  One is to use or create situations that are personally meaningful to children.   We think harder about things that matter to us.  Passing out enough cups and napkins for friends or family, for example, motivates children much more than doing exercises on worksheets.  Likewise, trying to knock over more bowling pins or win more cards than other players also means more than attempting to find the answer to a worksheet problem.

Another way to encourage children to think is to provide opportunities for them to make decisions.  When teachers correct children’s worksheets, they learn that the teacher is the only one who determines which answers are right.  When we allow children to decide on their own who knocked over the most bowling pins, what rule would make the game more fair, or which alternative got more votes, they think much harder than when the teacher decides everything.

A third way to encourage children to think is to provide opportunities for them to exchange viewpoints with their peers.  Children think harder when one child says, for example, that the bowling pins are easier to knock over if arranged in a certain way, and another child has a different idea.  Worksheets preclude the possibility of this kind of exchange.  Children cannot agree, disagree, or attempt to convince others when they do only their own seatwork.  On the other hand, they develop intellectually, socially, morally and politically when one child argues, for example, that there has to be a rule specifying a line behind which everybody must stand to roll the ball, and the others retort that such a rule would be unfair.

When the teacher holds all the power of decision making, children become mentally passive because they are prevented from taking a stand, exchanging points of view, and living with the consequences of their own decisions.

Young children cannot think very well when they sit silently.  However, it must be warned that movement, manipulation and noise are not necessarily educational.