Disciplining the Mind

In the article “Disciplining the Mind”, Veronica Boix Mansilla and Howard Gardner, firmly believe that students need more than a large information base to understand their ever-changing world. Instead, students need to master disciplinary thinking.

Many students currently learn subject matter in schools; however, another perspective emphasizes teaching disciplines and disciplinary thinking. The goal is to instill the disposition, or subject, in the students to enable them to interpret the world in distinctive ways that characterize the thinking of experienced disciplinarians, such as historians, scientists, mathematicians, and artists. Mansilla and Gardner believe education institutions have the responsibility of disciplining the young mind with this view of education, so students are prepared to understand the world in which they live today and to brace themselves for the future, which entails a necessary transformation in education.

Since most students’ today study subject matter, they come to see subjects as a collection of dates, actors, facts, and formulas found in textbooks and classrooms. This is often viewed as a very efficient way of teaching, since a teacher can quickly present large amounts of information to students and then easily assess this information. Many students also have little difficulty remembering information using this method. Students in recent decades; however, have demonstrated difficulty in applying knowledge and skills to new situations. Cognitive psychologists have stated how children early in life develop powerful intuitive ideas about physical and biological entities, the operations of the human mind, and the properties of an effective narrative or graphic display. These ideas can be powerful precursors of sophisticated disciplinary understanding.

According to Mansilla and Gardner, subject matter learning does not challenge the mind, but rather enables students to temporarily retain the information presented and over simplify it, which needs to change. To develop a fundamental perspective, there are four key capacities that must be developed. First, students must understand the purpose of disciplinary expertise, where students must know their area of expertise and be able to analyze how it affects their lives today. The next capacity is called understanding an essential knowledge base, which embodies concepts and relations central to the discipline and applicable in multiple contexts. It equips students with a conceptual blueprint for approaching comparable novel situations. In other words, students have a foundation to compare and contrast within their discipline. The third capacity is that students must understand inquiry methods. A disciplined mind considers forms of evidence, criteria for validation, and techniques that deliver trustworthy knowledge abut the past, nature, society, or works of art. The last capacity is that students must understand forms of communication. All disciplines communicate in preferred forms and genres. For example, historians prefer narratives, while scientists prefer data-heavy research reports. Students develop a disciplined mind when they learn to communicate within their discipline.

Teachers can help students to develop a disciplined mind in several ways. To begin, teacher can identify the essential topics within the discipline. In other words, select a few topics of focus. They will spend a considerable amount of time on these topics and study them deeply. By encouraging students to examine multiple perspectives on a topic and study them in depth, teachers help students become young experts in different topic areas. Teachers can also approach the topic in a number of ways. For example in history, students can read biographies and short stories, analyze data, interpret artwork of the time period, and debate questions regarding the time period. This allows teachers to reach more students and invites them to think about important problems in multiple ways. Teachers can also develop performances of understanding. This invites students to think with knowledge in multiple novel situations, and demonstrate whether they can use the information outside the classroom.

Given today’s technology, information in readily accessible. Students will need to know how to think with the information they have and develop the capacity to think like an expert. While there are benefits to subject based learning, I believe our students need to be able to apply their understandings by disciplining their mind and becoming experts in areas of personal interest. Students must be able to integrate disciplinary perspectives to understand new phenomena in various fields. A disciplined mind resists over simplifying and prepares students to embrace the complexity of the modern world.