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with it requires that we need to re-conceptualise what we mean by education and
particularly education for higher order thinking skills.
A Dialogic Reconceptualisation of “Higher Order
Thinking Skills”
Bakhtin, the main source of contemporary dialogic theory, is sometimes referred
to in support of the claim that cognition is socially situated because for Bakhtin
cognition occurs within dialogues in which all utterances are spoken by someone
and have a specific addressee. However, it is interesting that for Bakhtin dialogic
was also about escaping from what he referred to dismissively “the narrow space of
small time” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 167). He writes that:
In order to understand it is immensely important for the person who understands to be
located outside the object of his or her creative understanding - in time, in space, in culture
(Bakhtin, 1986, p. 7)
Utterances in a dialogue, he pointed out, are never only directed at a specific
addressee but also at a superaddressee, the ideal of a third party to the dialogue
who has a capacity to understand what is really meant by the utterance even when
the specific addressee cannot understand it due perhaps to his or her limitations
(Bakhtin, 1986, p. 126). The superaddressee evokes for some the idea of God as a
person who understands everything, but it is also similar to the ideal of an unsituated
universal perspective aspired to by science and often referred to as a “God's eye
point of view”. This ideal of an unsituated perspective is understood by Bakhtin
not as a real unsituated perspective but as a projection out of situated dialogues.
The superaddressee mechanism in dialogues whereby every dialogue generates a
“third” or “witness” position can help us to understand how dialogues teach thinking
through an expansion of awareness. It is only by externalizing my thoughts to you
on paper now, for instance, that I am able myself to see them clearly, question them,
and move beyond them.
The phrase “Higher Order Thinking” originated in a distinction made between
lower order skills such as remembering and higher order skills such as evaluat-
ing (Bloom, 1956). The sort of distinction being made by Bloom is suspect, but
the phrase “Higher Order” is still useful to distinguish distinctively human cre-
ative thinking from the kind of “cognition” which has been ascribed to animals and
to machines. The essential dialogicality of normal human thinking is increasingly
pointed to by developmental psychology as a contrast to the more algorithmic cog-
nition found in psychopathologies such as autism and in non-human contexts (e.g.,
Hobson, 2002; Tomasello et al., 2005).
The potential relevance of engagement in dialogue as shared enquiry to the tra-
dition of teaching higher order thinking is evident if we adopt Resnick's definition
of higher order thinking. Resnick chaired a US government commission into the
teaching of thinking skills which took evidence from many practitioners and other
experts. Her main conclusion was that:
