Thinking Tools Lessons

Thinking Tools Lessons is a user-friendly guide to help any teacher make productive thinking a part of classroom instruction for all students. This book provides nine carefully designed, classroom-tested sample lessons to start students on the road to creative and critical thinking. Each lesson includes a practical, ready-to-use plan, but also allows you to modify the lesson easily to meet your students' interests and needs. Each lesson guides you in preparing instruction, carrying out the plan, closing and debriefing the session, and conducting follow-up activities. The lessons in this book deal with "tools for thinking." These materials will help you learn the tools and then apply them with your students. And, the lessons make productive thinking lively and exciting! Book jacket.

In her new book, bestselling author and professional developer Carol Booth Olson and colleagues show teachers how to help young readers and writers construct meaning from and with texts. This practical resource offers a rich array of research-based teaching strategies, activities, and extended lessons focused on the “thinking tools” employed by experienced readers and writers. It shows teachers how to draw on the natural connections between reading and writing, and how cognitive strategies can be embedded into the teaching of narrative, informational, and argumentative texts. Including artifacts and written work produced by students across the grade levels, the authors connect the cognitive and affective domains for full student engagement. “This book seamlessly bridges the gap from research to everyday practice.... You get an extremely well-organized set of overarching instructional principles that are right for our era and brought to life through well-explained instructional guides and classroom activities.” —From the Foreword by Judith Langer, University at Albany, SUNY “I have always admired Carol Booth Olson’s work with secondary students and teachers. She now applies those essential principles and practices to elementary and middle school students. Bravo!” —P. David Pearson, professor emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

Educators need to empower learners to be prepared for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, to be thinkers with the ability to pioneer the future. This book cracks teaching and learning myths that led to learners being perceived as knowledge duplicators instead of being knowledge creators. Thinking tools move the focus of learning from mastering content to critical thinking. This requires the critical thinking toolkit, which is the mothership of all thinking. It engages learners’ forever-wandering minds with the learning task at hand, which is the substitute for the traditional expectations of “paying attention” and “memorising”. When employing thinking tools, learners become thinking engineers—taking ownership of what they must discover, create or solve. Within this paradigm of teaching, teachers directly engage with learners’ brains, which goes beyond learner-centred teaching and defining learning as visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. The book is based on examples of thinking tools sessions.

Thinking Lessons for Thinking Classrooms will help primary schools looking for ways to promote children's thinking. Focusing on skills such as: information processing, reasoning, enquiry, being creative, evaluating, problem-solving, decision-making and working with others, the book shows teachers how to design and teach thinking lessons across the curriculum.

Why take a cognitive strategies approach to helping young readers and writers to think big? -- Best practices in reading and writing instruction for students in grades 2-8 -- Reading and writing narrative texts -- Reading and writing informative/expository texts -- Reading and writing opinion, persuasive, interpretive, and argumentative texts.

Now in its third edition, this classic text remains the seminal resource for in-depth information about major concepts and principles of the cultural-historical theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, his students, and colleagues, as well as three generations of neo-Vygotskian scholars in Russia and the West. Featuring two new chapters on brain development and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development, as well as additional content on technology, dual language learners, and students with disabilities, this new edition provides the latest research evidence supporting the basics of the cultural-historical approach alongside Vygotskian-based practical implications. With concrete explanations and strategies on how to scaffold young children’s learning and development, this book is essential reading for students of early childhood theory and development.