Planning to Incorporate Thinking Skills

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Planning to Incorporate Thinking Skills
Presented by Denise Tarlinton
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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

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There is an art of thinking (Isaac
DIsraeli)
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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).

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• Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.
• (Author Unknown)

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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)

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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)
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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 teachers 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)

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• He who learns but does not think is lost.
• (Chinese Proverb)

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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.

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Thinking Skills in the Classroom

• We have a variety of thinking strategies and
  approaches to draw from
• DeBonos Six Hats
• Tony Ryans Thinkers Keys
• Gardners Multiple Intelligences
• Graphic Organisers
• Blooms Taxonomy/ Revised Taxonomy
• (Just to name a few)

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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 KLAs all the time

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Thinking Skills in a Student Reading Program

• Understanding and comprehension are essential to
  a students 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

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

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Planning Documents

• Why include thinking skills?
• Cater for students 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

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Smarts in the Classroom

• A multiple intelligence approach is one way we
  can drive higher-order thinking in the classroom.
• Junior Es 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

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

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• 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)