Planning to Incorporate Thinking Skills

1. Planning to Incorporate Thinking Skills Presented by Denise Tarlinton

2. Presentation Outline • Creating a “Culture of Thinking” • Productive Pedagogies • What is Higher-order Thinking? • Thinking skills in the classroom • Thinking skills in a student reading program • Planning documents • “Smarts” in the classroom

3. “There is … an art of thinking” (Isaac D’Israeli)

4. Creating a “Culture of Thinking” Essential elements in developing a whole-school thinking culture: • EXPLICIT teaching of thinking skills to all students. • Teachers who design teaching and learning activities that will: • engage • create • provide • promote • assist • encourage (Pohl, M. 2000).

5. “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.” (Author Unknown)

6. A guide to Productive Pedagogies: Classroom reflection manual lists three degrees of incorporation of Higher-order thinking skills in a “Continuum of practice”: • Students are engaged only in lower-order thinking; i.e. they receive, or recite, or participate in routine practice. In no activities during the lesson do students go beyond simple reproduction of knowledge. • Students are primarily engaged in routine lower-order thinking for a good share of the lesson. There is at least one significant question or activity in which some students perform some higher-order thinking. • Almost all students, almost all of the time are engaged in higher-order thinking. • (Department of Education, Queensland, 2002, p. 1)

7. What Is Higher-order Thinking? “Higher-order thinking by students involves the transformation of information and ideas. This transformation occurs when students combine facts and ideas and synthesise, generalise, explain, hypothesise or arrive at some conclusion or interpretation. Manipulating information and ideas through these processes allows students to solve problems, gain understanding and discover new meaning.” (Department of Education, Queensland, A guide to Productive Pedagogies: Classroom reflection manual , 2002, p. 1)

8. What Is Higher-order Thinking? Continued…. “When students engage in the construction of knowledge, an element of uncertainty is introduced into the instructional process and the outcomes are not always predictable; in other words, the teacher is not certain what the students will produce. In helping students become producers of knowledge, the teacher’s main instructional task is to create activities or environments that allow them opportunities to engage in higher-order thinking.” (Department of Education, Queensland, A guide to productive pedagogies: classroom reflection manual , 2002, p. 1)

9. “He who learns but does not think is lost.” (Chinese Proverb)

10. Higher-order Thinking • Critical thinking Interpreting, testing, judging, justifying, critiquing, testing, concluding, speculating, disputing, evaluating, deciding. • Creative thinking Hypothesising, designing, reconstructing, creating, modifying, developing, imagining, brainstorming, generating, solving, devising. • Analytical thinking Comparing, contrasting, relating, choosing, determining, interviewing, identifying, combining, categorising, researching, experimenting, specifying, deducing.

11. Thinking Skills in the Classroom We have a variety of thinking strategies and approaches to draw from: · DeBono’s Six Hats · Tony Ryan’s Thinker’s Keys · Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences · Graphic Organisers · Bloom’s Taxonomy/ Revised Taxonomy (Just to name a few)

12. These Strategies Can Be Incorporated Into Planning Through: · Contract activities · Learning centres/ rotational activities · Enrichment/ extension tasks · Small group activities · Whole class activities · Diary/ journal writing · Homework · Reading program • Across all KLA’s all the time

13. Thinking Skills in a Student Reading Program • Understanding and comprehension are essential to a student’s success with reading (i.e. Interpreting, summarising, comparing, explaining). • BUT higher-order thinking should also play a part. “Planning to use Thinking Skills in your Student Reading Program? Booklet”

14. “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” (Albert van Szent- Gyorgyi)

15. Planning Documents • Why include thinking skills? • Cater for student’s individual learning styles and multiple intelligences. • Encourage students to construct knowledge for themselves, participate in higher-order thinking and facilitate divergent thinking. • Documents should be simple and include a variety of strategies and approaches. “Planning to Incorporate Thinking Skills Booklet”

16. “Smarts” in the Classroom • A multiple intelligence approach is one way we can drive higher-order thinking in the classroom. • Junior E’s Monster Smarts is an example of a multiple intelligence approach to program planning where children have used thinking skills to design, create, interpret and evaluate. Monster Smarts

17. “A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread out in all directions.” (Dorothy Day)

18. “Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.” (Will Cuppy)