College Courses and Higher Level Thinking

Within many of my classes here at SU, we use class discussion as a method of learning. The class that we have the deepest and most meaningful discussions in is my Forms of Writing: Poetry course.

This week, though we only had class on Monday so far, we used small and large group discussions to produce higher level thinking. One of the main focuses of the course is to learn what different forms of poetry are and their rules. We do that by first writing words on the board such as "meter" and "rhythm" and form word webs to define them. This way, instead of getting just a straight definition, we can connect lots of different words, phrases, and meanings, to these words, which is important since most poetic language is symbolic.

We did this word web the previous Monday with the word "meter." We used higher level thinking by linking meter not only to poetic meter, but also to running, distance, goals, and Europe. By making all these connections, we then went into example poems, and started analyzing why a poet would choose certain meters, what they added to the poem, and what was lost if you took the meter away. This obviously involved a plethora of higher level thinking, and also incorporated Bloom's Taxonomy and 21st Century skills since all of our opinions were communicated with the rest of the class, so that they could build on eachother. And when people did disagree, they were expected to defend their points.