Hypotheses: They're Not Just for Science Anymore

Are you saying to yourself, "What on earth does a hypothesis have to do with English?" Or perhaps, "Hypotheses? You're kidding me. I need my kids to know the causes of the Civil War first." Read on, colleagues. Marzano [Chapter Four, Art & Science of Teaching] may surprise you. 

Summary:

You've set learning goals with your kids, presented the related knowledge, and worked with that knowledge. Hypothesis-generating and testing are the next essential step. There are four types of this kind of higher level work: experimental inquiry, problem solving, decision making, and investigation.

Stuck in My Head:

There's an innocent statement on the top of page 97 that goes like this: "Of course, students will be better able to address these questions if they have had some previous experience with experimental inquiry, problem-solving, decision-making, and investigation tasks designed by the teacher." My response, unfair as it is, goes like this: "And where is this going to happen, Dr. Marzano? Atlantis?"

It's not Dr. Marzano's job in this book to deconstruct school systems, but simply to suggest good teaching. I get that. Yet of all the chapters I have read so far, this is the one that strikes me as the most important—and the most difficult to implement. Why? Because aside from some very limited and teacher-directed applications in the sciences, hardly anyone teaches like this. Despite all our buzzwords like "differentiation", "higher-level thinking," and "student-centered learning," in practice, the majority of our educational culture is still crawling at a painfully slow pace away from the "banking" model of school: kids heads are empty, and we need to fill them.

The reasons for this are legion, running the gamut from a lack of effective models, to untrained teachers, to uneducated families and administration, to an overweening emphasis on standardized assessments that do not test critical thinking. A beautifully explicit treatment of these problems can be found in Mark Windschitl's article, "Framing Constructivism in Practice as the Negotiation of Dilemmas: An Analysis of the Conceptual, Pedagogical, Cultural, and Political Challenges Facing Teachers." Constructivism is a much broader concept than Marzano is addressing in the chapter, but at its heart is the same emphasis on authentic, critical, kid-driven inquiry— something that consistently finds very little room to thrive in our schools. No wonder no one wants to try it, even in the microcosm.

And yet we must. As Marzano demonstrates once again via his meticulous research, there is little pedagogy that is more effective than working with hypotheses. Beyond that, I would argue that there is nothing more important than educating our kids to be the best "crap detectors" they can be (to modify a phrase from Ernst Hemingway). The activities Marzano suggests in the Action Steps at the end of the chapter are an excellent place to start, and can be folded in to nearly any discipline.

Playing It Out:

I saw an opportunity for incorporating hypotheses into my own teaching—and killing two birds with one stone—in a recommendation that Dr. Marzano had already made earlier in the book: asking kids to set learning goals for themselves at the beginning of a unit of study. Earlier this year, we embarked on a theme unit combining fiction and non-fiction on survival: what is survival, who survives, and why. I previewed the concept with some especially—um—visceral clips from the popular TV show Survivorman, and then asked the kids in groups to do a "write-around": a silent activity in which they activate their previous knowledge on some leading questions I had written about survival. You can find instructions for write-arounds from their author, Harvey Daniels, at the bottom of the page here.

I've also included some pictures of what my kids' products looked like. We posted these in the room while we worked through the unit.

After we'd done the write-around, I asked kids to do two things. First, they chose a question they were interested in and write a hypothetical answer for it, based on their thoughts and the write-around. Second, I asked them to formulate another question/hypothesis about survival—one that they owned completely, and would be interested in learning about during the unit. They wrote these down on a worksheet I provided, and kept it throughout the unit. One of their personal learning goals then became the investigation and revision of these initial hypotheses. At natural break points in the unit (between concepts, for example, or just after an assessment), we would revisit these questions, discuss them as a class, and then "mess around" with them individually in writing. I've included a picture of their revisions.

It was marvelous. To watch a kid move from, "Survival is staying alive in a snowstorm with no clothes on," to, "Survival can happen in many situations, because everyone is suffering something nearly every day," was a pure gift. Plus, it's one of the first times I have had such explicit, hands-on proof of the evolution of a student's thinking. Themes, and investigating themes, are a cornerstone in English, and I plan to work with them via hypothesis from now on.

Take Away This:

Although hypotheses do represent a "next step" in teaching, don't be fooled into thinking (as I first was) that it needs to occur chronologically after setting goals and working with knowledge. As my survival unit demonstrated to me, hypotheses and other related critical-thinking activities can be successfully worked into a unit at any point.

How do you think critical inquiry might work in your curriculum? Does it already? Have you tried it and succeeded—or failed? Why? I'm especially interested in hearing from non-science teachers here. Leave a comment.

Dina Strasser is a middle school English/Language Arts teacher in upstate New York and blogs at The Line. Read her Chapter Three post in this chapter-by-chapter series on Marzano's Art & Science of Teaching.
 

Comments

[Steve K.]

It is wonderful that you are using hypothesis thinking in English. This is a stratagie that has been used in Career and Tech Ed. (CTE)for a long long time. As an Automotives instructor all the skills the students developed are challanged by problem solving seniarios that require anaylitical thinking. Developing a hypothesis to every problem also invovles synthisizing the information to draw upon a conclusion. People that can process information like this are always successful, from mechanics to surgeons Maybe we should be getting an AP credit for Automotives?

[Linda B.]

Hypothesizing in non-science situations? Isn't that what a Directed Reading and Thinking Activity (DRTA) is? Beginning in kindergarten with read-alouds, students should be hypothesizing their way through a text and revising/confirming those hypotheses according to the evidence-(explicit and inferred). The key is connecting the hypothesis to the evidence and encouraging revision(generating new hypotheses) as more information becomes available.