An Ode to Criteria

August 7, 2014

By Donna Phillips

I love criteria and always have, but I didn’t always know it. Why do I know now?

Let me begin with a story about a recent unit.

I was starting my last unit of the semester in my government class on public policy and I wanted to open up the unit by piquing the students’ interest in current issues; the kind of personal issues on which students might have an opinion. Before getting into the intellectual tools for analyzing public policy, I asked students to name some issues or problems for which we had a policy or needed one. Students listed topics such as school lunches, cell phone policy, drones, gun control, the metrobus schedules and a local tax on plastic bags.

We decided to use the tax on plastic bags as a starting place. They all had opinions about it and wanted to debate and argue. Some students complained about times when they didn’t have enough money to pay the bag tax. Others didn’t like having to remember to bring reusable bags when shopping. On the other side were students who thought the bag tax was a good idea because it helped the environment, but there was lots of disagreement. It was a lively, in fact, sort of raucous discussion. Every student in class was either contributing to the discussion or taking to their neighbor about it. One student had commandeered the tablet and was writing ideas on the board!

But, it wasn’t really going anywhere. After a while, I made them stop. They complained. “But Dr. P., we are ALL involved. This is fun arguing. Why do you want us to stop?”

I tried to explain to them that while they were all engaged and very vocal and passionate about their opinions, it was not leading us anywhere new. The students were puzzled.

“But we care about this issue and we want to debate it!”

I could see their passion and interest but it drove me crazy to hear them all shouting out their opinions and personal stories. Yes, that was a start but they were not listening to each other or considering other points of view. The only lens they had for “debating” this issue was their own experiences and pre-formed opinions. As much as I was excited about the level of engagement, it was not the kind I sought to foster. The discussion was missing something. Criteria.

Thinking back to my decision to start by engaging students before teaching the intellectual tools for inquiry, I recognized there is a tension in critical thinking. Teachers have to balance encouraging engagement and the intellectual component for inquiry. Criteria that provided that grounding.

So, I had their attention. I had found a hook to get them engaged in a public policy issue. My students were interested but the lively discussion did not promote critical thinking. My goal had been to develop an inquiry around the compelling question, “What is ‘good’ public policy?” I hoped that framing the unit around the question of good policy would help students make connections among multiple public policies. The inquiry required that we develop criteria for good public policy. But, in my rush to get students interested, we skipped over the intellectual question of good policy. So, I was left with the question of what should come first, generating student interest or establishing the intellectual context for the inquiry?

The next day, students timidly asked me if I was still mad at them for their behavior in the debate on the bag tax. I told them no, of course not but today we were going to use better tools for our debate. After we categorized the different policies as good or not good I asked students what the good policies had in common. From there, they drew out qualities such as they all protected or expanded rights, they were economically sound, and the good policies benefitted large groups of people. We narrowed down our list of eight qualities and synthesized them down to four essential criteria for good public policy. Next we returned to the bag tax and I asked students if this was good public policy based on our new criteria and an amazing thing happened. The noise reached the same level as the day before, but the students were all speaking a common language.

“The bag tax is not good because it takes away our right to property by making us pay.”

“But it’s good because it is for the common good of the environment.”

“Yeah, but how much change has it made in the environment?”

“It affects everyone who shops, but not always in a good way.”

And this was all before I even gave them articles and resources on the policy!

Criteria framed the inquiry and discussion and gave it new meaning. Using these criteria, we analyzed dozens of public policies throughout the remainder of the unit. At the end of the unit, students chose one issue for which they wanted to see a policy change. Using the criteria for good public policy they were able to justify their policy suggestions and advocate for a change. The criteria we developed even gave the students’ an avenue for taking informed action.

I am still puzzling over how much to let the students’ natural enthusiasm guide a lesson before intervening and refocusing their work. At the end of the day, the criteria we established for our inquiry took the students’ learning to a deeper level and pushed them to think critically. Given the C3 Framework’s call for more rigor in social studies, isn’t this exactly what we want students to be able to do? And it works. The students didn’t ruin any more lessons, at least not that week 🙂