Techniques For Teaching Thinking

Originally published in 1989 the purpose of this title was to provide information and ideas for: Staff Developers and Teacher Educators, as they consider program content to prepare teachers to teach thinking skills. Teachers, as they assess their own abilities to create classroom conditions for thinking and their readiness to implement a curriculum for developing thinking skills. Curriculum Developers, as they decide how the curriculum should be organized and sequenced according to children’s developmental levels. Administrators, as they assess and provide leadership for improving the conditions in their schools and classrooms, which allows the stimulating teaching of thinking. Although written some time ago the information is still valid today.

Originally published in 1989 the purpose of this title was to provide information and ideas for: Staff Developers and Teacher Educators, as they consider program content to prepare teachers to teach thinking skills. Teachers, as they assess their own abilities to create classroom conditions for thinking and their readiness to implement a curriculum for developing thinking skills. Curriculum Developers, as they decide how the curriculum should be organized and sequenced according to children’s developmental levels. Administrators, as they assess and provide leadership for improving the conditions in their schools and classrooms, which allows the stimulating teaching of thinking. Although written some time ago the information is still valid today.

Teaching our children to think and reason mathematically is a challenge, not because students can't learn to think mathematically, but because we must change our own often deeply-rooted teaching habits. This is where instructional routines come in. Their predictable design and repeatable nature support both teachers and students to develop new habits. In Teaching for Thinking, Grace Kelemanik and Amy Lucenta pick up where their first book, Routines for Reasoning, left off. They draw on their years of experience in the classroom and as instructional coaches to examine how educators can make use of routines to make three fundamental shifts in teaching practice: Focus on thinking: Shift attention away from students' answers and toward their thinking and reasoning Step out of the middle: Shift the balance from teacher-student interactions toward student-student interactions Support productive struggle: Help students do the hard thinking work that leads to real learning With three complete new routines, support for designing your own routine, and ideas for using routines in your professional learning as well as in your classroom teaching, Teaching for Thinking will help you build new teaching habits that will support all your students to become and see themselves as capable mathematicians.

This teaching guide provides an integrated framework for teaching thinking skills which involves both teaching thinking in a separate program or course and infusing the teaching of thinking into standard subject area instruction across the curriculum. Individual chapters deal with the following topics: (1) the nature of thinking skills and evidence that people can learn to think better; (2) the improvement of thinking; (3) kinds of thinking (broad categories, specialized kinds of thinking, metacognition, and some thinking frameworks); (4) the infusion of teaching thinking into regular subject-area instruction; (5) choosing and using separate instructional programs designed to teach thinking; (6) program development and selection of thinking skill goals; (7) lesson design and instructional strategies (structured thinking, teaching for transfer, and metacognition); (8) support systems for teachers and schools in the teaching of thinking; (9) approaches to evaluation; and (10) types of tests (objective and interpretive). (Individual chapters contain references.) (DB)

Is thinking a matter of intelligence or a skill that can be taught deliberately? Can thinking be taught directly as a curriculum subject in schools?

Originally published in 1990, this title attempts to provide for the educational practitioner an overview of a field that responded in the 1980s to a major educational agenda. This innovative ‘agenda’ called for teaching students in ways that dramatically improved the quality of their thinking. Its context is a variety of changes in education that brought the explicit teaching of thinking to the consciousness of more and more teachers and administrators.

Teaching and Learning Strategies for the Thinking Classroom is a practical guide to lively teaching that results in reading and writing for critical thinking. It explains and demonstrates a well-organized set of strategies for teaching that invites and supports learning.