How KIPP Teachers Learn to Teach Critical Thinking (Transcript)

Kellan McNulty: Prior to coming to Kipp, I tried to do a fishbowl discussion and it failed. And I had the kind of vague idea of how to do it, but I didn’t have the specific tools. When I got to Kipp last year, we had a really good professional development on Socratic seminars that really showed me kind of the little tricks that made it work. My name is Kellan McNulty and I teach tenth grade AP world history and eleventh grade AP US history at Kipp King Collegiate.

Katie Kirkpatrick: I think the hardest thing for teachers in adopting a critical thinking model is that it requires them to kinda step back and let the students do all the work. And I think for a teacher who’s used to being the agent of knowledge, it can be hard for them to take a back seat to the learning that’s happening in the classroom. My name is Katie Kirkpatrick and I’m the dean of instruction at Kipp King Collegiate High School. I also teach ninth grade speech and composition.

Kellan McNulty: Another thing that I started doing at Kipp is using like very specific structures to push students to critical thought. And the biggest impact has been the Socratic seminar rubric. Last year, before I started teaching at Kipp, we went through a lotta professional development, and one of the most useful sessions was on the Socratic seminars. To set up my classroom for the Socratic seminar, I basically moved the desks into a square in the middle of the room and twelve students sit there. And then outside of that square, I had the desks surrounding it into a larger square and twelve, you know, to fourteen students sit on the outside. Many teachers know this as a fishbowl, and the rubric asks the person on the outer circle to grade them on, did they use the text to support their arguments? Did they use analytical language? And it gives examples of analytical language. Did they make a connection to what someone else was saying in the discussion, right? Did they agree or disagree with someone else?

So if you wanna do this in your classroom, like it’s really important that you actually seat them in a way that’s conducive and you maybe sit down yourself, or you even take yourself outta the discussion, ’cause if you’re just standing up there normally, like they might not be able to have a discussion like you want.

During PD last year, I learned how to set up the room like that, and how to use that rubric, and the different jobs that you can give people on the outside to stay motivated and invested and paying attention.

Jacob Springer: To keep your kids engaged, these kids who are in the center, or you who are in the center, you’re always gonna have a role, right? If you’re a student, you’re a participant, or you’re a teacher-facilitator. Those are the only roles that are available to the inside. But the outside, you don’t wanna just let them sit there. They need an active role and they need a role that helps them really follow what’s going on. So here are the roles you might assign to people who are on the outside. You might tell, “Okay, you’re a reporter,” and you can have multiple reporters. In fact, it’s really interesting to have multiple reporters, ’cause sometimes they see things differently and they report out different things. Your silent contributor, I really love this role. So like they follow on as if they were in the conversation, but they’re not in it. And at the end, you get the chance to say to them, “What would you have said?” And then the shadower. And when you’re a shadower, you’re directly assigned to a student in the inner circle. So your job is to say, did she speak loudly and clearly? Did she give reasons and evidence for her statements? Did she use the text? Did she paraphrase accurately?

Kellan McNulty: Typically, once students get used to this, they do very well with it.

Katie Kirkpatrick: The thing that’s compelling about this specific model is that it shows up everywhere, you know. So how is it that you can convince your mom to buy you a cell phone? How are you going to convince a college to accept you? I mean, those situations require critical thinking, and argumentation skills, and we all use them in our daily lives so frequently.

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Schools That Work

KIPP King Collegiate High School