Order these shapes by similarity:
Chances are you didn’t actively think too much about the order to put them in or what made them similar or different.
Students at Sackett Educational Center and Rensselaer Academy, however, are learning strategies to approach tasks like this in a different way – something that also encourages them to think independently and develop problem solving skills.
It’s all part of Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment (FIE) – a program developed through research by Reuven Feuerstein in 1978. FIE is designed to enhance the basic thinking skills necessary for academic learning and achievement. Rather than teaching specific skills, it helps students learn how to learn. Those teaching the class took the course themselves for a week over the summer.
Much of the program consists of ordering, comparisons and organizations, but teachers Chris Carioto and Erin Madigan at Sackett say the strategies their students are learning in this class can easily be applied to their other classes.
“It’s all about improving basic thinking skills. We’re not working on the super academic skills. We’re not working on making inferences, or how to read a text, how to write a certain way or use evidence, it’s developing strategies to think differently,” Madigan says.
“This research has shown that you can actually improve your IQ through this program by changing the way you’re thinking,” says Carioto.
FIE is also about being aware of your mindset and the belief that your intelligence can change. Madigan says students’ mindset and attitude are a large part of the class, and says like anything, what you put in is what you’ll get out of it.
“We work with them to be able to develop strategies in simpler tasks that you can apply to more complex tasks,” says Madigan.
Rensselaer CSD student Kayleigh Hutchinson says the strategies she’s learned in FIE help her in other areas when she has problems to solve or answer.
“Looking for a new angle is helpful, not just focusing on one specific thing, looking at it in a different way or moving and trying to find a new strategy to finish it.”
There are three main parts to each area of the program: gathering all the needed information (input), using the gathered information (elaboration), and expressing the solution to a problem (output). In the above example, one must decide several things to answer the question.
- How will the shapes similarity be ranked? Color? Size? Angles? Edges?
- What ranking system will you use? 1,2,3,4,5 or 5,4,3,2,1?
- Will you order most similar to least similar or least similar to most similar?
These are just a few examples of the steps students in the FIE class work through to develop thinking and problem solving skills. Students also complete dot organization pages, where they must find shapes in a group of dots. At the beginning, some dots are larger or different colors to make it easier to find them. As students’ progress, that assistance diminishes. To begin solving these problems, Madigan said they start with the very basics- like defining a square.
Madigan said when the students were asked to describe a square, at first they struggled getting back to such a basic conversation.
“They would give a definition and I would draw it on the board based on what they said and it obviously wasn’t right. So they had to keep getting more and more precise and that’s how we got into this need for precise language,” Madigan says.
“It’s a learning process. Initially, they were not very independent thinkers. Now, I think they’re at the point where they are – they’re moving towards being more independent,” says Carioto.
These are also skills that will serve the students after high school, whether or not they go to college.
“They have to be able to have those problem-solving skills because they’re always going to run into issues and we’re not always going to be here to help them,” says Madigan.
Hutchinson says it’s more than completing tasks – it really is about taking a step back and seeing things differently.
“It goes beyond what’s on the paper. You need to be able to see other people’s view and not be so stubborn and stuck on what you think.”
There are currently seven FIE students and two teachers at Sackett, and 11 students and three teachers at Rensselaer Academy. To learn more about Feuerstein’s research, visit the Feuerstein Institute’s website.
