(I’m republishing my best posts from the first half of the year. You can see the entire list of them here)
Republica / Pixabay
I was very intrigued by this tweet I saw today about a fifty-year-old paper that listed ideas for what made a theory interesting. And, as the tweet suggests, it could also be used to formulate ideas for…interesting articles and blog posts, and I think it could also be used for just plain old critical thinking.
The 12 things that make a theory interesting, as classically listed by Murray Davis in a 1971 article, also can serve other purposes: like deciding what is a good topic for a popular article, or as a guide for finding disruptive ideas for the future. https://t.co/5zLLhBUShI pic.twitter.com/xI0dMiXmV0
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) November 2, 2023
It got me wondering if it could also be used in a classroom to get students to think outside-of-the-box (see The Best Videos Showing “Thinking Outside The Box” — Help Me Find More) on just about anything.
One lesson I do in my IB Theory of Knowledge class is to provoke students to try to think about “new paradigms (see The Simple “New Paradigm Project” We Did In Theory Of Knowledge Class (& Which Could Be Done In Other Classes, Too) ). I now wonder if this new-to-me paper could somehow be combined with that to push students’ thinking even further.
To make it workable, however, the “twelve things that make a theory interesting” would have to be made more accessible than what is on this tweet.
I went to the paper itself, That’s Interesting: Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology (by Murray S. Davis), to see how these twelve things were described.
Even the paper doesn’t describe them in a particularly accessible way, but it’s better than the tweet. I will have to revise them to work in a high school classroom. To help me, and others, to get a better handle on what they are, I’ve screenshot below how the author briefly describes one of them:
If you skim through the paper, he offers similar short summaries of each one.
It shouldn’t take too much time to summarize each one in a way high school students can get its gist.
I’ll keep you posted on what I do!
I’m adding this post to The Best Resources On Teaching & Learning Critical Thinking In The Classroom.
(I’m republishing my best posts from the first half of the year. You can see the entire list of them here) I was very intrigued by this tweet I saw today about a fifty-year-old paper that listed ideas for what made a theory interesting. And, as the tweet suggests, it could also be a look back Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
