Channel the power of the Ancients and get your learners sharpening their skills of evaluation every time you teach

A long, long time ago …

Back in Ancient Greece, philosophers of the time pressed each other for justification.

A claim could be made, but it would then face scrutiny.

Evaluation was necessary.

A requirement.

The precursor to deepening wisdom.

Here, we can think about how to prioritise evaluation in your classroom, the top level of Bloom’s Taxonomy:

Level 1: Knowledge
Level 2: Comprehension
Level 3: Application
Level 4: Analysis
Level 5: Synthesis
Level 6: Evaluation

And, therefore, an inherently challenging thing we ask learners to do.

Regular Evaluation: Expecting Justification

As part of your efforts to stretch and challenge learners’ thinking, you should aim to include evaluation in your lessons on a regular basis.

Doing so means you will always be encouraging learners to hit the top level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Evaluation can be included in the form of extension questions and tasks, tailored questions, sub-tasks forming part of a main activity as well as through the objectives and outcomes you plan.

However, there is another technique we have at our disposal.

One we can use as a supplement, and which is easy to apply to class as a whole.

Put simply, we can always, always expect justification from our learners when they provide us with an answer or make a claim.

Justification is the means through which we defend and support the things we assert.

It is the main method of persuasion on which arguments rely.

The main forms of justification are reason, evidence and examples.

Reason is the attempt at logically proving a point in relation to given premises.

Evidence is where we call on things that are known and which can be said to show why our assertions ought to be accepted as true.

Examples can be abstract of concrete demonstrations of what we are asserting.

Sometimes they overlap with evidence, sometimes they don’t.

You can communicate that you expect justification by always calling on learners to provide reasons, evidence and/or examples to support what they say.

You can do this when learners answer questions, when you engage them in discussion and when you mark their work.

In each situation, you will be making it clear that an answer or response only meets your standards if it comes with sufficient justification.

To help learners achieve this, you should provide clear models of what justification looks like – including specific examples pertaining to each of the three key areas: reason, evidence and examples.

In terms of using the technique to challenge your more-able learners, you can expect more justification from them than from other learners.

You can also expect their justification to be more detailed and more nuanced.

So, for example, you might discuss a problem with one of your more-able learners during an activity and then press them to fully justify the solution they suggest to you.

As part of this pressing, you might choose to focus on one of the three areas – evidence, say – to focus their minds on something specific.

Another option is to set additional success criteria for your more-able learners connected to the level of justification you expect them to provide, either verbally or in writing, depending on the nature of the task.

These can be general, or they can be like those outlined above, with specific reference being made to one of the three types of justification.

Consistently pushing your learners to provide more detailed or more nuanced justification than they would otherwise posit will result in them quickly developing a more critical engagement with the topics you teach.

You can further develop their skills by drawing attention to the process in which you are engaged.

Through this you can highlight what justification involves and why it is always to be welcomed.

This will help to increase the extent of learners’ metacognition – the thinking they do about the thinking you ask them to do(!).

Refining Judgements

This is a development of the previous point, yet a technique sufficiently different to warrant a separate entry.

Consider the following judgements:

Goldilocks should be given a certain degree of leeway because it is difficult to resist porridge when you are very hungry.
Goldilocks should be given a certain degree of leeway because it is difficult to resist porridge when you are very hungry. However, the leeway should be limited because Goldilocks needs to understand the limits of acceptable behaviour. If she does not, she is likely to face more serious consequences in the future.

The second judgement is more refined than the first.

By refined we mean that it has been thought through in greater detail.

This leads to a more developed final product.

Compare this point with the use of the word refine in the context of food.

Refined food has been through more processes than food that is unrefined.

More thought has been given to it, resulting in something arriving on your plate in which a greater sense of refinement is clearly visible.

(Though, that doesn’t necessarily mean it tastes better!)

If we refine something, we improve it, purify it or do both.

In terms of judgements, those that have been refined rest on greater prior engagement with what is being judged.

A learner who presents you with a refined judgement has done more intellectual work than one who gives you an unrefined judgement.

So how does this play out as a classroom technique?

We can indicate to more-able learners that we do not expect them to present judgements – either verbally or in writing – that are unrefined.

To help them meet our expectations, we can provide them with a set of questions or a model they can apply whenever making a judgement, using the questions or model to improve the quality of their assessments.

So, for example, we might give more-able learners in our A Level sociology class the following set of questions to apply:

What does my judgement assume and should it assume this?
Is my judgement too broad? Am I making claims larger than I can justify?
Does my judgement consider arguments with which I disagree? If not, should it?

These questions will help our learners to make more refined judgements.

If they use them repeatedly – every time they assess a sociological idea, theory or study – they will be continuously improving their ability to evaluate.

Over time, we might then replace the questions with more challenging ones – or invite learners to suggest their own.

As ever, the idea can be applied across the board.

Simply adapt the questions or model you provide to fit the age-group and/or subject you are teaching.

I’ve seen this work as well with eight-year-old learners as with eighteen-year-olds.

The key is to pitch it at the right level for your audience.

Defending Unfavourable Positions

We tend to pass judgements that accord with our more deeply held beliefs.

This is not always the case as, for example, when we attempt to remain disinterested during the passing of judgement (and, in fact, one definition of good judgement is that we judge each case on its merits, avoiding the temptation to let our proclivities bias our perspective).

However, it is certainly true that for all of us – learners included – connecting judgements to our own biases is a common habit.

The corollary of this fact is that defending unfavourable positions – positions with which we disagree, or for which we cannot see a great deal of evidence – is challenging.

Here are five ways you can use it to stretch learners’ thinking:

When a more-able learner has completed a piece of work in which they make an assessment, read through what they have done and challenge them to effectively justify a contrary position.
Assign arguments at random to more-able learners in your class and insist that they develop a means through which to justify whatever they have been assigned.
Write down a series of unfavourable positions connected to the topic, each on a separate slip of paper. Fold these up and place them in a cup. Invite more-able learners to select one at random. They must then justify their selection.
Ask more-able learners to mount a defence of a position they don’t agree with by thinking from the perspective of somebody else. For example, if a learner doesn’t believe that fossil fuels should be used indiscriminately, ask them to consider how an executive working for a multinational oil company might argue against this.
Challenge learners to argue something they know to be untrue. For example, you might ask learners to argue that black is in fact white, or that Little Red Riding Hood did not actually get eaten by the Big Bad Wolf. Here, the exercise is about pure argumentation, rather than anything else.