What If…

Many years ago, as the principal of a large elementary school, I walked into a kindergarten classroom. A young learner looked up from her center work and said with authority, “Go put on one of those aprons because I need some help and center helpers wear those aprons.” Needless to say, I stopped what I was doing and put on a center apron. While I no longer recall the precise question this eager learner had, I vividly remember the confidence with which she spoke, her engagement in her task, and—perhaps most of all—the personal responsibility she assumed for her own learning.

This kindergarten class was a thinking classroom. Evidence of student thinking was everywhere: children engaged in purposeful conversation with each other and with adults. The teachers who had designed this learning space trusted in their students’ ability to make meaningful connections that led to deeper learning. These students got a solid start as independent, self-directed learners. As their principal, I later watched many of them progress through elementary school confident in their ability to make meaning from their reading, eager to communicate their ideas in writing, and ready to apply mathematical thinking to real contexts. What if all classrooms were thinking classrooms?

The 2024 NAEP results, released earlier this month, reveal troubling trends: just over a third of 12th graders are proficient in reading, fewer than one in four demonstrate strong math skills, and less than a third of 8th graders reach proficiency in science. In some subjects, achievement has fallen back to levels not seen in three decades. Not a single state registered gains in 4th or 8th grade reading, and national reading scores for seniors declined three points since 2019. Often described as the “Nation’s Report Card,” NAEP underscores a critical question: how well is the U.S. education system preparing young people with the knowledge and thinking skills they need for college, careers, and civic life in a rapidly changing world? The trends suggest we are falling short of meeting the needs of students in our school.  But what if…?

What if we abandoned the conventional ways we have tried to solve this problem? What if we stopped relying on commercially produced programs that are big on promises but low on results? What if we listened to students and teachers, and created thinking classrooms where learners engage in self-directed, challenging, and relevant experiences that lead to deep learning?

This would be a radically different approach from what we have been doing—rigidly imposing prescriptive programs on schools without considering the context or the needs of the learners. It would allow teachers to diagnose students’ level of learning and design experiences that move them forward on a continuum of growth. Long before I stepped into that kindergarten classroom, I imagined what such teaching and learning could be. It was only when I became immersed in the pedagogy of systems thinking that I found the tools and capacities to translate those ideas into practice.

The Waters Center has spent more than 30 years engaged in research and development on how to create thinking classrooms. A systems thinking approach to learning offers concrete strategies and methods to help students learn how to think. In these classrooms, learning is not about rote memorization of information but about thinking, problem-solving, and applying knowledge in ways that matter for work, civic life, and lifelong learning. Better test scores become a natural byproduct—not because the focus is on tests, but because students are equipped to reason, question, and apply their learning.

In a thinking classroom, students are encouraged to ask questions, not just answer them. Mistakes are welcomed as part of learning. Student voice is central: learners regularly explain and justify their ideas. I once received a call from a parent whose child had moved on to the next school. She shared that her child was struggling because the teacher no longer asked what he was thinking. This was not a case of a student being disrespectful or disregarding authority, but of a child who had grown accustomed to his ideas being valued as part of the teaching learning process.

A systems thinking classroom also includes specific teacher behaviors that promote thinking. Teachers regularly use open-ended prompts like, “How do you know?” or “What caused you to ask that question?” Students engage in purposeful conversations in pairs and small groups, focused on reasoning. Teachers introduce habits of thinking that allow students to be metacognitive about their own learning. Students reflect on how they approached tasks, not just on the outcomes. Teachers model thinking aloud, demonstrating how to test assumptions and consider alternative perspectives.

Instruction in a thinking classroom is not confined to predetermined lessons or scripted units. Instead, teachers skillfully incorporate student ideas, questions, and experiences into the learning process. They act as facilitators, creating conditions for exploration and discovery. Here, the emphasis shifts from content coverage to cultivating thinking itself. After all, knowledge is expanding so rapidly that trying to teach all the content will always leave us behind—but teaching students how to think will prepare them to keep up.

The environment of a thinking classroom reflects this philosophy. Walls are filled with student work, maps, questions, and evidence of learning. Spaces are organized to support collaboration and independence, stocked with books, manipulatives, and materials that allow students to explore and demonstrate understanding.

Finally, the work students are asked to do reflects a deep commitment to thinking. Assignments require reasoning, analysis, and synthesis—not just recall. Tasks are designed to allow for multiple approaches and solutions, often tied to authentic, real-world contexts. Subjects are integrated when appropriate, and performance-based tasks are common. Teachers assess both the product and the process, providing feedback that highlights quality of reasoning, not just correctness. Peer and self-assessment are routine.

Perhaps before we can answer the question, “What if,?”  we need to ask “How?”  How can we ask over burdened schools, facing severe teacher shortages, increased public scrutiny and decreasing resources to adopt  significant changes to their programming.  While teaching students how to think may seem like a daunting task, our years of research and development in this area have produced some very specific principles for making a transition to a systems thinking focused school quite workable.

A change in approach starts with belief.  First a belief that teachers are capable of the kind of complex thought needed to truly teach students.  We can’t expect teachers to demonstrate a true trust in their learning when they have ample evidence that they are trusted to make important instructional decisions. Having observed educators in thousands of schools, we know that when teachers, of any age, trust their learners to make meaningful, relevant connections that learning increases.  The best way to enable teachers to demonstrate that trust is by trusting them.

The second key to this kind of radical transformation in education is to recognize that deep thinking and learning can be part of any curriculum.  Teaching thinking skills and Habits across disciplines allow students to learn materials and transfer that learning to a variety of content areas.  Transfer is essential to learning. Thinking strategies transfer between subjects.  When subjects become more integrated there are more opportunities for skill transfer.  

The other important part of  how to develop thinking classrooms is that when applying a thinning pedagogy, doing any part of it can help accelerate student learning.  Systems thinking has a variety of entry points for teachers and learners.  It’s not necessary to master all the nuances.  Using a behavior-over-tiime graph to increase retelling scores will enhance student comprehension.  Applying a few Habits to help students be more metacognitive about their problem solving will make a difference.  Using a graph to examine the level of difficulty of various steps in an academic task, will make a difference.  Clearly the more embedded these routines become, the more impact they will have, but student engagement has been shown to increase with even the smallest infusion of a systems thinking pedagogy to a regular lesson.  In other words, a simple introductory training, an activity embedded in a written curriculum or even a one-hour PD with appropriate follow up will equip teachers with skills needed to enhance student thinking and hence student achievement.

The latest NAEP scores show us where we are. But imagining what could be is the first step toward change. If every classroom embraced the principles of systems thinking and fostered environments where students learn how to think, not just what to remember, we would see not only stronger test scores, but also young people better prepared for the complexity of the world they are inheriting. The question is not whether we can afford to make this shift—it’s whether we can afford not to.