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When Teaching Thinking Does Not Work, What Goes Wrong?

A number of years ago, one of the authors of this article attempted to water a lawn. He put a nozzle at one end of the hose, attached the other end of the hose to an outdoor water faucet, turned the spigot, and waited for the water to be emitted in a gushing stream from the nozzle. He waited, and he waited, and finally, a weak, irresolute drip came leisurely out of the nozzle-nothing like the gushing stream he expected. He asked himself what might have gone wrong, and considered several possibilities. One possibility was that there just was not much water entering the hose in the first place. This possibility generates two subpossibilities that there just was not much water coming out of the well, or that water was coming out of the well, but the spigot was not turned up enough to allow it to enter the hose with full pressure. A third possibility was that the water was indeed entering the hose, but was leaking out along the way because of small holes in the hose. A fourth possibility was that the water was making its way adequately through the hose, but that there was a problem with the nozzle that was preventing adequate release of the water onto the lawn. In an article on teaching thinking skills, a vignette such as this one might be included to demonstrate and then elaborate on the thought processes involved in cause-effect trouble shooting but we include the water-hose vignette not as a model for explicating thinking, but as a model for what may go wrong in the transmission of thinking skills from teacher to student. In talking to teachers about thinking, we have found that one truism seems always to hold, no matter who the audience is, where it is addressed, or when the address is presented: Virtually all teachers believe that they teach for thinking. When we have asked them whether they believe that their students are learning to think, however, most of them shrug their shoulders or otherwise convey an indefinite response. Clearly, they are less happy with the learning that is going on than with their teaching of what the students are