How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

As a teacher, I wonder if it is possible to instill this skill into students the skills of rationality and critical thinking.

It seems easy to disincentivize it. I'm not sure it's that easy to instill it. This is relevant, but targeted at college students.

One of the big things mentioned in the education literature for gifted children is "encourage asking questions," which is different from the default result for most people. A relevant Sagan quote:

But there’s something else: Many adults are put off when youngsters pose scientific questions. Children ask why the sun is yellow, or what a dream is, or how deep you can dig a hole, or when is the world’s birthday, or why we have toes. Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else. Why adults should pretend to omniscience before a five-year-old, I can’t for the life of me understand. What’s wrong with admitting that you don’t know? Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys many adults. A few more experiences like this, and another child has been lost to science.

There are many better responses. If we have an idea of the answer, we could try to explain. If we don’t, we could go to the encyclopedia or the library. Or we might say to the child: “I don’t know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you’ll be the first to find out.”

For science problems that involve math, always add more number in the question than necessary.

"A 1.80m tall man runs 100 meter in 8 seconds. What's his speed in m/s" is a better question than "A man runs 100 meter in 8 seconds. What's his speed in m/s"

This is just throwing an idea out there...

I think the issue might be a matter of context. Ideally, you want the students to use information to complete a challenge instead of answer trivia questions. Video games, in particular, tend to be very good at this - this video [NSFW for language] demonstrates just how much the game Mega Man X teaches players within the first few minutes of playing, and none of it is "password" knowledge, because it gets reused almost immediately in slightly different ways.

Further reading: Digital Game Based Learning by Marc Prensky. Chapter 1 is available online and is probably enough that you won't need to buy the book.

Professor James Paul Gee has also written extensively on the subject of video games and learning.

John Holt (a founder of home schooling) thought that guessing the teacher's password was caused by grading.

What started him on the path to home schooling was seeing third and fourth graders (9 and 10 year olds) so concerned with getting the right arithmetic answers that they weren't thinking about arithmetic.

There a lot of learning where students need to give a specific answer to a specific question. It's useful to learn multiplication tables by heart. The most efficient way to teach that stuff is spaced repetition. Every kid should use Anki for those problems.

If you solve those topics with Anki you have more time for teaching critical thinking.

Let students evaluate the work of other students. Every student writes a text. Alice gives her text to Bob. Bob reads Alice's text and searches for spelling errors. Afterwards the two students discuss the erors that Bob found in Alice's text.

If Alice and Bob can't agree on whether something is an error they ask the teacher.

In art class students should evaluate and discuss the work of other students. To prevent concerns of bullying I would advocate to randomize groups and use mostly groups of two students.

Create a enviroment where the kids can give each other constructive feedback.

Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.

Then how about increasing the amount of experiments?

Experiments in itself are however not without issues. One of my worst experiences in school was where we did an experiment about gravity. In our group we didn't reproduce the official results, It would have been quite trival for me to change the value to match reality as it's supposed to be. I sticked with the values that I measured and got a bad grade. The teacher didn't explain to me why I did get the results I did.

I think nearly all physics experiment had a "correct" result and the result that the formula predicts overrules the result of the experiment. That style of making experiments doesn't teach believe in empiricism.

Young children often do not the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.

What's the goal of that religion class? It's probably not to let the children ask critically whether or not god exists ;)

Teaching by negative example addresses all your concerns.

1. No basic knowledge required. Logical guesses will serve.
2. Short answers are the right answers.
3. No writing required.
4. Story-problems can hold attention longer.
5. Experiments can be described as well as shown.
6. Opportunity to disagree with the teacher, a lesson in critical thinking in itself.

Here is what I mean in the abstract by teaching by negative example. Set up a situation that can be resolved or addressed using logic. Suggest or demonstrate the wrong answers. The students will (with gusto) tell you you are wrong. What's left is the logical correct answer.

I have used this technique thousands of times when I was an interpreter / tutor for deaf students in mainstream K-12 schools. Most deaf young people have parents who do not sign. No ambient information from radio, little ambient information from television, the Internet is generally in English (a spoken / written language) not sign (a movement / time language). Sometimes the lack of background information is profound, all the way up to senior class in high school.

There is a challenge in presenting a new concept for which there is no equivalent sign. I sometimes succeeded in comparison (this new idea is similar to that known idea). I always succeeded in negative / opposite examples (this new idea is the opposite of that old idea, or is what this other thing is not, or is what remains when X Y and Z are not the case).

How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

By making it impossible to guess!

When I was in school, questions were 100% memorization. You were supposed to remember the answer, not understand it. Math required calculation, but that just meant remembering the algorithm of calculating. I never needed to think about how to solve a problem, just to recognize it as one of a very few known types and remember the method that was taught to solve it. (If I used a different method to get the right answer I would get points deducted.)

If you ask questions that can't be answered from a repertoire of remembered facts and require understanding and thinking, you will force your students to think for themselves.

Of course you will probably also cause a student and parent revolt against unorthodox teaching methods that make class harder than it has to be.

Young children often do not the basics

You're missing a word here.

If it's meant to read "do not know" (or understand, etc), it's a true and unremarkable statement. But I suggest that it's also true that they do not get taught the basics - if by "basics" you mean the fundamental concepts of a field. In third grade, children aren't capable of really understanding most of them.

The basics of math are number and set theory, formal logic, etc. The basics of science is epistemology and the scientific method. The basics of biology and physics are perhaps the Modern Synthesis and the Standard Model. The basics of history is... a good overview of world history, I guess. The basics of religion are a whole lot of complex social, behavioral, and historical sciences.

These mostly aren't things third graders can understand. But most things they are taught really have very complex explanations. It's still better than nothing to teach them the what without the how and why; the results of science without the methods. The same applies to more advanced concepts taught at each later grade.

Children, at this age, are likely to take the words of a parent or teacher at face value, and naturally parrot it back. This may be a hard habit to break.

I'm not sure that third grade is an appropriate time to try to break that habit. That's an age where at least some of the students are probably still in the preoperational stage. Kids naturally start to question adults' reasoning more when they develop the capacity to manage those sorts of thoughts effectively.

Teaching students to grasp a complex topic will generally require walking them through various stages of simplification. Most third graders are probably still in the process of developing the foundational skills that they'll eventually need in order to effectively learn complex topics without guessing the teacher's password.

Are you familiar with Dan Meyer's "Math Makeover" Tedx Talk? I'd highly recommend it.

It covers almost exactly this topic on the subject of math. He's also got curricula on a link on his blog (though it is a bit hard to locate in the sidebar). Also, in his talk he mentions people send him all sorts of stuff for different subjects, and a cursory look at the blog shows a ton of links, so you may be able to do more than just math work with pre-made lesson plans that require minimal tweaking.

Well partially it seems that if they're just parroting stuff back, they haven't really learned anything, so it's not much of a loss if you change your methods and they still don't learn. Basically, you haven't got a lot to lose. Mind you, I'm an engineer, not a teacher, and this is just my impression. I would defer to the actual experts.

I'd say just burn them over and over for parroting, and reward them over and over for thinking. If you ask questions of the class as the normal thing, a student will feel good about themselves for saying what you want to hear in response, which trains the teacher's password reflex. If you instead throw them curve balls all the time such that they reward themselves for solving the tricky puzzle or feel slightly ashamed for blurting out a phrase which doesn't connect to reality, they will learn to think. Maybe.

For stuff like multiplication tables, you really do want to just memorize verbal patterns a lot of the time. So obviously keep that in mind.

See my from first principles essay for an example of a teacher who I think did it right.

Basically, make the exercises require application of what you are actually trying to teach, rather than just a verbal statement of it.

Some thoughts: Ask yes or no questions, or questions that have a finite answer set. Learn to ask the questions in a way that your vocal intonation doesn't give away the answer immediately. Call on a specific child and ask him/her to "take a guess" at the answer to the question if it's too hard for them to know (thinking about questions can be really useful even if you aren't going to find the answer), or say "here's a challenge for you: can you figure out...", or "given that X, what do you think Y is going to be". Find a system that spreads the embarrassment of answering questions evenly over the class. Emphasize this fact if it will mean children get made fun of less ("I'm going to ask you as many questions as it takes to get you to screw up too!", "If you laugh at someone else's answer, then you're next.")

The true/false or multiple-choice model could also help with the written prompt issue.

Also, this is pretty cool: http://web.archive.org/web/20090321202807/http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html

In response to other comments about math in elementary school:

Did anyone else watch the program Square One?

You could start off by overtly letting the kids know that "guessing the password" is how their success in school is measured and you're not going to be able to change that reality, but you could introduce "alternative" ways of thinking.

How about a game where each student writes down their answer to a passwordy type question and scores a point for every other student with the same answer. Lowest score wins. But they have to justify their answer.

If a teacher asks the question: "Who discovered America?" The password is: "Christopher Columbus"

But there are many more answers that are also valid responses. ( Native Americans, Rodrigo de Triana, the Norse, Vespucci, a US Founding Father, etc) that are mostly based on what the words "discover" or "America" means.

Unless you are dealing with unusually bright children, you are out of luck. Parroting is how most children learn. You might luck out and get an occasional Wiggin or HJPEV in your class, but they would hardly need your instruction to begin with. In addition, teaching young kids to question "because I said so" from parents and other teachers might land you in some hot water. I'm guessing that an average child would not be receptive to critical thinking training at least until adolescence.

I came here to refer you to John Holt, but since User:NancyLebovitz already did that, I'll just add that I'm amused that your handle is Petruchio.

I've been thinking about this a little bit and for math problems, making an activity of writing out what they did wrong and correcting their work might be more useful than just giving back a scored assignment. Maybe, for written prompts, you could have it span a few days or weeks? Like you give the first prompt and then they answer with something short, so then then you write them a message back and have them answer that? So it's like a written conversation! And then make assembling the sentences they produced into a paragraph into an activity as well?

Be genuinely interested. Since it is hard to be interested in the result of basic arithmetic operations, you need a proxy. So be interested in the kids’ learning process. Because there is no parental link and you don’t see them evolve long, eventually you will loathe the little never-learning idiots. Take a break then.