W06 Reflection for Ron Ritchhart

Ritchhart explains the nature of curiosity in the student and how you effectively create a culture of thinking. Getting kids to think in an efficient way is the most important part of being a teacher; you have to understand that the knowledge learned is less important than the whole learning environment left for the students to build on. You need to find ways to teach your students in a way that makes them great thinkers, not ways that they can study and get good grades on tests. In that regard, my definition of "The culture of thinking" in my area of STEM is the ability to visualize math problems before you even begin to solve them. Since my area is mostly physics and math, the most important part to understanding higher level coursework is to build the foundation first, and that's something I will definitely stress to my students to develop.