My philosophy of education is simple. Whether acting as an administrator or a teacher, I am committed to developing students' cognitive abilities to enable them to think critically.
To me, critical thinking specifies active rather than passive learning: It implies mastering more that a body of knowledge; it also implies understanding the principles that underlie the discipline or skill being studied. Students should be able to solve new problems by analyzing, integrating, and synthesizing information they have learned, to make critical judgments on their own, and to develop and test hypotheses. In my own discipline, the end result of teaching critical thinking skills is students who can read, write, and think independently and who are able to evaluate the worth of various possibilities in creating their own texts and in interpreting the texts of others. In summary, I believe that students should learn the importance of process(es) within a discipline as well as the "facts" of that discipline; in the words of David Foster, they should learn not simply the "know-what" but the "know-how."
These beliefs are not ones I came to recently; I have held them for as long as I can remember. Of course, they were easy to hold when I taught high-level-SAT students at the University of Michigan and Babson College. As I began to oversee writing courses taught in three departments at Norwalk Community-Technical College, however, the obvious finally occurred to me: I began to see how vital it is that so-called "developmental" students are challenged intellectually, not only in so-called "content" courses, but also in those courses where they are wrestling with very basic demons, like syntax, grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation.
Too often, colleges and universities--even open-admission institutions--are satisfied with helping "remedial" or "basic" or "developmental" students simply survive. I have come to believe that my job, instead, is to enable them to thrive. Many of these students, it is true, need intense support, but support programs ought to elicit the best work that students can do, not merely competent work--and certainly not work that reflects the "dumbing down" of subject matter. They should be pushed and prodded. To paraphrase Robert Browning, their reach should exceed their grasp. Granted, there is the danger of overwhelming some; but almost all students, I believe, can do intellectually challenging work if they are challenged intellectually. Under the guidance of enlightened and talented teachers, all students can be led into and through sophisticated texts that deal with complex ideas--provided that those texts speak to their concerns and their lives.
When I first began my work at community colleges, I found a writing program that assessed competency at the end of writing courses by requiring students to produce extemporaneous essays developed by the rhetorical modes of comparison-contrast or classification; no requirements, however, were made on the subject matter or the level of thinking involved. During my first year at Norwalk Community-Technical College, I read hundreds of mind-numbing essays that discussed the similarities and differences between MacDonald's and Burger King or between "my dog" and "my cat" or that told how many different kinds of products are to be found on the shelves of a supermarket--essays that represented nothing but empty forms filled with empty content. Students were bored--and understandably so.
As that American sage Yogi Berra might put it, students need to begin where they are. But no student should be allowed to remain long studying or writing about subjects like those above. All students deserve an opportunity to succeed, not to fail. The role of all college programs--developmental or not--should be to expand, not shrivel (or even maintain), the level of students' cognitive skills. In any position I hold, I will do everything I can to make sure that textbooks and applied pedagogies push students to reach points in their intellectual development that surprise even them.