Thinking-Skills Strategies

Today’s blog continues the posting of more teaching, learning, or instructional strategies which I began last week. Please see Page 1: Evolving Glossary of Teaching/Learning Strategies. Today’s listing focusses on thinking-skills strategies as a teacher resource for effective curriculum design. 

However, when it comes to thinking strategies, I am of two minds in defining terms and promoting such a resource. 

On the one hand, most teachers believe that “higher-order” thinking is a bedrock of their work with students. So, in the hustle and bustle of daily delivery, I'm hoping that teachers might enjoy reviewing the variety of strategies from different disciplines to supplement their usual subject-oriented toolkit.

On the other hand, a few teachers might reformat these strategies into a instant assessment spreadsheet and superficially track evidence of student “thinking,” as if they were shopping for groceries.  Even worse, after a cursory study of “thinking-based curriculum,” some teachers might point to their checked lists and make bloated claims of improving the cognitive nutrition of their students.  

When it comes to thinking skills and cognitive development, there are no short cuts. I remember Grant Wiggins’ seminar in Geneseo, N.Y. when my feeble assumptions about what constituted an effective seminar were questioned by his razor-sharp mind. To teach thinking well, we must be prepared continually to develop our own. 

Grant’s insistence in Understanding by Design on probing the essential and recurrent ideas that structure inquiry in a subject or discipline is a strong reminder that at the heart of deep curricular design is a continuous focus on deep thinking and feeling. 

However, the blog goes forth with good intentions. My work with school libraries and interdisciplinary studies curriculum in Ontario convinces me that teachers who are aware of the diversity of thinking-skills strategies are better able to

• model clear and effective thinking processes 
• assess student cognitive development over time
• motivate students to transfer recurrent thinking strategies across the curriculum
• encourage interdisciplinary metacognition (i.e., thinking about thinking)

By the way, it is tempting to separate those thinking-skills strategies that concentrate on organizing data and analyzing information in graphic or visual ways. Current curriculum in many jurisdictions has encouraged teachers to create and share a growing variety of “organizers” in order to help students

• collect prior knowledge about topics and ideas
• jump-start an inquiry into essential discipline learnings
• gather and sort subject-based data
• initiate higher-order thinking such as comparing similarities and differences

The visual display of information is one of the trends for teachers to watch, particularly in traditional media such as newspapers and text books. Take a look at Amanda Cox’s work at The New York Times, which Nora Young's  Spark January 9 podcast highlights. In a later blog I will be discussing visual display of information as a vital interdisciplinary theme.