New Resident Sees Improvement Possibilities In National School System

By Eliza Hallabeck

Education seems to be on the mind of many lately, and new Sandy Hook resident Rudy Magnan said recently he sees the scope of national education practices having room for improvement.

For Dr Magnan educational improvement is all a state of mind, or Mindsight, Dr Magnan’s first published book on a design system of thinking that involves a series of skills and strategies to improve the quality of thinking.

“I was always interested in cognitive development,” said Dr Magnan during a recent interview.

Dr Magnan recently moved to Sandy Hook with his wife, Maria, from Armonk, N.Y. During his teaching career, Dr Magnan said he worked at Adelphi University, in Garden City, N.Y., teaching social sciences, and also taught at the high school level. Now, Dr Magnan said, he lectures overseas once to twice a year, and has plans of getting involved in the local school system.

“I like getting up in the morning and being involved in something,” he said.

 While many school districts nationally may think a strong focus is on critical thinking, Dr Magnan said the scope of teaching critical thinking involves training students to judge and evaluate situations that may or may not be obvious.

“In the school content book situation, you could learn critical thinking,” Dr Magnan said, but added, there is a gap in transferring that knowledge of critical thinking into real life situations.

While studying at Columbia University, in New York City, during the 1970s Dr Magnan said he became fascinated with the work of Edward De Bono, the originator of lateral thinking, which treats creativity as the behavior of information in a self-organizing information system, according to Mr De Bono’s website.

Lateral thinking is taking something out of left field, said Dr Magnan, and using that concept to solve a problem. An example he used was astronauts attempting to use ball-point ink pens in space. Instead of focusing on the use of pens, another group of astronauts solved the problem by using pencils.

“What I believe we need now, more than ever, is for students to learn skills that can apply to real life situations,” said Dr Magnan.

He said critical thinking skills increase self-esteem, and help students’, or anyone’s, mind to generate its’ own information.

“Students and adults are bombarded with thousands of messages a day,” he said, “and, unless we have the ability to sort it out, we can easily fall pray to other people.”

Such a situation is especially dangerous for young people, Dr Magnan said. Some thinkers make poor students, while some of the best students may not be good thinkers. Content-based learning creates the environment that enables students to study and remember, but not to generate information for themselves, he said.

“A lot of countries all over the world get better results with their instruction than the United States,” said Dr Magnan.

One problem Dr Magnan pointed out in the national education system is that change is difficult. Change creates insecurity, and, in a school system, one thing that everyone wants is security, he said.

“The future is about generating new ideas and concepts,” Dr Magnan said, “and not reacting to situations. And thinking skills do exactly that by allowing the person to extract new ideas and concepts.”

As a teacher Dr Magnan said he applied the same critical thinking skills he studied while working toward his doctorate degree at Columbia University in the classroom, and the high school students responded positively. Because, he said, they felt they were learning something that would help them beyond the classroom.

Dr Magnan’s first book, Reinventing American Education, was copyrighted in 1993 and focused on “applying innovative and quality thinking to solving problems in education.”

Now, with a recent trend toward “21st Century Skills,” Dr Magnan said it is still important to focus on training students for situations they will face in the real world. Dr Magnan cited recent articles and studies to confirm a growing support of critical thinking in the national school system. A recent science journal made the case that across a number of fields a new field should be created on how brains work and combined with how classrooms work into a new kind of learning research, according to USA Today. The 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study found United States fourth through eighth grade students trailing Asian and European peers in science and math. And in April President Obama called on National Academy of Science members to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering and announced an initiative to raise those scores, according to USA Today.

In the United States, he said, there is a focus, and hope, that students will learn to make good decisions from their families. Instead, he said, the focus should be on what skills they can implement to help them make the best decisions in their home life and community.

“We develop intelligence in school,” he said, “but we do not develop thinking in school.”

In order to bring critical thinking in the classroom, Dr Magnan said holding teacher training programs would be a good place to start.

Dr Magnan said he has spoken to the Newtown High School about potentially starting a teacher training program in Newtown, and, until then, he plans on possibly substitute teaching in the district. He has also started working on a new book, which will be called Intelligent Design Thinking, and will focus on the development of nature and what can be learned from it.