Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is known, or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds?
– Jean Piaget, 1896 – 1980, psychologist known for his work on child development

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks writes:

“To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students…I have been most inspired by those teachers who have had the courage to transgress those boundaries that would confine each pupil to a rote, assembly-line approach to learning. Such teachers approach students with the will and desire to respond to our unique beings, even if the situation does not allow the full emergence of a relationship based on mutual recognition. Yet the possibility of such recognition is always present.”

In From Teaching to Thinking, Ann Pelo and Margie Carter share how The Thinking Lens© for Learning Together with Children invites the kind of courage hooks writes about:

“The Thinking Lens is a protocol for teacher research…an expression of pedagogical documentation [that] breaks open our singular and isolated perspectives to create collective understandings. It changes our focus from talking about individual children and their behavior or learning, to talking about ourselves and our thinking about children’s thinking process. Our conversations become tentative and introspective rather than certain and proscriptive, vehicles for our exploration and experimentation and learning.”

They continue:

“Questions. Not answers. Not expertise. Questions, which are the beating heart of research. ‘I wonder why?’ ‘What if ?’ ‘Who else?’ The Thinking Lens carries us into the arena of research by asking us to lay down the activity guides and lesson plans that are weighted with answers, and, instead, to take hold of questions. They will spool us always forward, sure guides in the project of becoming a community that learns.”