Developing a New Teaching Paradigm for the 21st Century Learners in the Context of Socratic Methodologies

Grasping the Interplay between the Verbal Cultural Diversity and Critical Thinking, and Their Consequences for African American Education

“…How does language make us better thinkers? Crogman et al (2015) started by initially connecting thinking, question asking and learning by showing that: "Description invites students to ask 'what, ' 'when, ' 'who, ' whereas analysis focuses on 'why' and 'how, ' and evaluation encourages students to think beyond the phenomenon by going deeper and asking 'what if ' . " The ability to question at increasingly complex levels refines the learning experience.…”

“…As such, in Figure 1, a change in the learner's environment is sensed through their sensory receptors, which brings about a response. Crogman et al (2015) deconstructed the connection between environment and thinking processes showing how changes in the environment evoke perception and provoke responses, which are the result of thinking. They point out to two possible outcomes: (1) thinking creates a question that is answered by memory content.…”

“…Questioning can also be used to deepen and enrich knowledge as well as expand the understanding of content. Question asking helps learners link all prior knowledge, think about the exact content, draw out meaning in order to make coherent explanations, develop inference skills, and construct key points to build mental representations (Martin and Duke, 2011;Crogman et al, 2015). Therefore, language is directly linked to question asking.…”

“…If language is essential to human learning, then practitioners need to do their best to learn the language of their students. This means relating classroom concepts to the experience of their students (Crogman et al, 2015). This could be one of the reasons why Black students tend to perform on average worse than other groups.…”

“…This model has historically been rejected. Crogman et al (2015) showed that the difference for the success in the Finnish school system is due to its singular structure. The American school system is much more culturally multi-facetted, with a deep-rooted history of racial prejudice, where racial biases are prebuilt into the language of instruction.…”