Wesleyan University – Philippines

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija

MASTER OF EDUCATION IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION

Lecture Note for

Principles, Strategies, and Practices in Literature Teaching

Prepared by

FERDINAND BULUSAN, PhD

Course Facilitator

LESSON 5 : Developing Critical Thinking among Literature Learners

Developing higher-order thinking skills is one paramount aim of the current K to

12 curriculum in the Philippines. DepEd Order No. 21, s. 2019 states that the curriculum
adopts inquiry-based learning, which puts “premium on questioning, probing, and
proving.” This will eventually lead to developing the critical thinking of the learners.

One way to ensure the engagement of the learners is by giving them the proper
activities that develop these skills. Critical thinking involves abilities like identifying a
problem, looking for assumptions, and trying solutions from inductive and deductive
logic (Kennedy, Fisher, & Ennis, 1991). Sometimes, critical thinking skills are equated to
higher-order thinking skills. The term “higher-order thinking skills” has stemmed in
Bloom’s taxonomy of learning.
 During the conception of the taxonomy, many educationalists believe that learning
is hierarchical; however, an ongoing debate is challenging this concept. Hence, some
educationalists agree to just classify the skills into lower and higher thinking skills. Lower-
order thinking skills allow the learners to plainly give back what the teachers provided
them or what the book gave them. The material learned goes through no changes at all.
For example, when the literature teacher just elicits the name of the character in the short
story read in class, the pupils just tend to give back the fact that is found in the piece. So,
purely parroting a fact or a piece of information from the text is considered a lower-order
thinking skill.
Higher-order thinking skills involve the use of the piece of learning given to
the learners in order to take concepts, combine the pieces of learning, evaluate something,
or create something out of the learning. Usually, the answers might not be based on the
book or the literary piece, even though they can use the book to arrive at an answer. In
other words, higher-order thinking is the result of the teacher giving opportunities to
learners the appropriate tools that they will need in order to meaningfully interact with
the content for them to remember the concept correctly.

Going back to inquiry-based teaching approach, we can say that questioning

matters in a literature class in order to immerse the pupils to use their higher-order
thinking skills. One adopted teaching strategy to achieve appropriate questioning and
ensuring class participation is the “Six Thinking Hats” by Edward de Bono in 1985. The
“Six Thinking Hats” can help you approach problems and inquiries from different
perspectives, but one at a time, to avoid confusion from too many angles crowding your
thinking. The following are some of the benefits of using the six thinking hats as a teaching
strategy to develop higher-order thinking skills:
1. It is a powerful decision-checking technique while promoting collaboration among
pupils.
2. It helps the learners explore the situation from each perspective at the same time.
3. It forces the learners to move outside their habitual thinking style.
4. It allows the learners to look at things from several different perspectives, thus,
teaching them to be critical thinkers.
5. It permits the pupils to get a more rounded view of the literary piece and the
context upon which the piece is related.

For example, as a literature teacher, you can ask your pupils to look at the “conflict”
in the “Three Little Pigs and the Wolf” from an emotional, intuitive, creative, or risk
management viewpoint. Not considering these perspectives could lead the learners to
underestimate people’s resistance to their plans, fail to make creative leaps, or ignore the
need for essential contingency plans. When you take the shoes of a children’s literature
teacher, you can use the six thinking hats to create questions, situations, and contexts
related to the piece. Then, the learners will approach the questions to exercise their
critical thinking or use of higher-order thinking skills.
 In primary grades, six thinking hats may be used with literal colored hats to
stimulate the pupils’ curiosity. One good technique is that, as you give the colored hats to
each group of pupils, each hat has one question inside it. You, therefore, allow them to
brainstorm, use the hats as a guide, and add a color of suspense. If you opt for
individualized learning, you may bring in class different colored hats. As you put on your
head a colored hat, you walk around the class and ask question/s reflecting the color of
the hat being worn.

Combining the manner of questioning with learner-centered and enjoyable

techniques like “passing the bouquet,” “trip to Jerusalem,” or “question-prompts wheel”
will ensure higher engagement of the learners while developing their critical thinking
skills. Here are the mini-steps to implement the following learner-centered techniques:
 Take note that asking the right questions can go a long way in helping the learners
to analyze the texts. The questions for analyzing a literary text should be varied. The
critical thinking questions should be given paramount consideration other than the
technique of giving questions to the learners. Hence, the questions can be used in several
ways:
1. They can serve as your resources to help the learners delve more deeply into
specific aspects of the text.
2. They can be used as guides for the learners to arrive at an answer or a decision.
3. They can be used as triggers for communication. Remember, using critical thinking
questions and combining them with interactive techniques can also develop
communicative skills and collaborative connections between and among the
learners’ classmates. At the same time, the class’ enjoyment to improve listening
and speaking literacies is heightened.