Compare and categorise

Back in the 1980s I managed to corner Mike Lake, educational psychologist and thinking skills author, and ask him to give me the bottom line on what lay behind all the various thinking skills programmes.

Back then, the big three and very different approaches were Reuven Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment, Edward de Bono’s CoRT, and Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children.

After a bit of a pause, he kindly let me into a secret. I say a secret because at the time there were lengthy and complex debates about the uniqueness of these three different strategies.
With his thorough knowledge of the field and generous turn of mind, he said: “Well first you have to have language to describe the features of what you’re describing. That then allows you to compare them. And that finally equips you to achieve the major goal of thinking, categorisation.”

I probed him to check I had understood clearly. But each time he repeated the same phrase back to me. “Yes, Oliver, it’s that simple” he reassured me.

“But what about Bloom’s taxonomy and all that?”  I stammered back, stunned by the directness of his summary.

“Oh, in essence that’s just a compilation of comparing and categorising”.

And from that day on, I have approached thinking skills with a clarity that has stood the test during my participation in the above three courses.

In Mike’s book Top Ten Thinking Tactics, he went on to write that Feuerstein considered comparative behaviour to be an elementary building block of his programme and that Lipman thought connection–making (sameness) and distinction–making (differences) were the foundation for all subsequent reasoning (p.68).

Yet most thinking skills taxonomies, including the National Curriculum thinking skills (in whatever format it currently lives) still downgrade categorization to a lowly information handling.

But ask any teacher how to execute the so–called higher–order skill of evaluation and they would have to drill down to the act of comparing. Mike Lake would be smiling.

References:
Lake, M. & Needham. M, (1990), Top Ten Thinking Tactics, Questions Publishing