College Prep

High school students must hone their thinking skills

By gwendolyn H. Middlebrooks

Photo by Caroline Joe

I've always believed the most talented teachers are in the preK to 12th grades of public schools, because they must effectively teach every student they get from the community and prepare them to become contributing citizens in this society.

I was fortunate enough to teach for more than five years at two urban public high schools. During those years, I was always excited to interact with the students. Their individual differences were daily challenges. No two days were the same, nor were there ever any dull moments. I recall wondering as I entered the school, and watched students interacting with each other as they surged with energy through the open doors, "What excitement will today bring?"

Now that I am a college teacher, however, I find that, while many high school graduates come to college well prepared, others display poor study skills, weak communication skills, and the inability to perform higher-level cognitive tasks. These even include some students who have taken Advanced Placement courses.

While their high school academic records may be impressive, these first-year college students have difficulty functioning as independent learners. College work requires that they tackle multiple high-level cognitive tasks such as application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, and many seem ill-prepared for this. They experience a great deal of stress when they realize they must accept academic support services at their colleges or universities.

College teachers expect high school graduates to value education, to have a broad knowledge base, and to have appropriate cognitive, social, computational, and communication skills. The high school must provide students with a rigorous curriculum to meet these expectations.

To learn more about how high school teachers prepare students for success in college, I designed a research project that required me to observe teachers in urban public high schools in Atlanta and New York City. This project, funded by the Faculty Resource Network at New York University, became one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional life, for it gave me practical insights into quality teaching and laid bare some common misperceptions.

Media stories lead the public to believe that teachers in urban schools are distant from their students and fearful for their lives. But quite the opposite was true during my school visits.

As I watched two physics teachers teach a lesson on "Sound Wave Theory" to 10 students at Benjamin Banneker Academy in New York, I realized the urban public high school environment is often a source of excitement and adventure in learning.

The room had excellent equipment, and the lesson was structured around the use of concepts rather than the memorization of facts. The students were obviously intrinsically motivated, actively involved, totally immersed in a problem solving experiment, and encouraged to use their higher-level cognitive skills. The epitome of excellence in teaching and learning, found in an urban public high school, in a class in which all of the students were African American.

The only disappointment was that there were only two female students in the class. I would have been happier if the females had outnumbered the males--my admitted gender bias.

Unfortunately, not all instruction reaches this level, and the teaching environment may be becoming worse as pressure for higher test scores pushes teachers to spend enormous amounts of time lecturing and helping students memorize large volumes of information.

I urge high school teachers to resist this pressure, and instead, strive to present interesting content and instructional activities that promote higher-level thinking skills. Your students will thank you, and so will their college teachers.

Gwendolyn H. Middlebrooks is associate professor of education at Spelman College in Atlanta and a member of the Georgia Association of Educators.