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Encourage Students to Make Hypotheses

Tags

^21st Century Skills All Ages Strategy

Skills

Flexible Thinking Verbal Reasoning Abstract Reasoning

Encourage Students to Make Hypotheses

If your student hesitates to make mistakes and you want to strengthen their critical thinking skills

How To Apply It!

  1. Giving students opportunities to make hypotheses (not just in science) helps them develop their thinking processes and problem solving capabilities.
  2. Pose a question during the lesson to which most of the class will not know the answer or it is a question without a single right answer.
  3. Encourage all students to make an educated guess, emphasizing you don't expect a right answer. Reinforce their courage and thinking processes.
  4. For reluctant guessers help them think about what they already know and connect it to the question asked.
  5. Avoid going back and crediting the student who got it right. It is the thinking process and courage that should be celebrated.

Why It Works (the Science Of Learning)!

Comfort with ambiguity is a mindset that can be learned and cultivated in the classroom. Many of the brightest students struggle with ambiguity as they get older because they never needed to develop these skills -- they always knew the answer because the questions were not beyond their knowledge base. Students might be uncomfortable, but this is a key skill that becomes increasingly important.