If you’ve been teaching for a while, you can probably predict the flaws in thinking that your students will have for each new concept or topic. How do we use this as a teaching tool?
It can be difficult to cultivate the habit of examining our own thinking — but a good first step is to examine the faulty thinking of someone else. It’s safer and easier.
Try this: Put fictional or anonymous shoddy thinking in front of students and ask them to examine the errors.
You can choose which problem you want to focus on (e.g. partial, confused or confusing, illogical, etc.). Once they get good at examining others’ thinking they can more easily apply it to their own. Or you can head off shoddy thinking before it happens if you start a unit with this activity.
Let us know how it goes!