1. Chapter 10:Teaching Thinking Skills
July 12, 2010
Amanda Easton

2. Warm Up
Get in groups of two and answer one of the following questions:
If you could offer a newborn child only one piece of advice, what would it be?
Would you rather lose all of your old memories, or never be able to make new ones?

3. Three Basic Approaches
1. Indirect Approach: teaching thinking through practice and exercise
2. Direct Approach: helping students learn conscious and deliberate strategies for reasoning, problem solving, and critical thinking
3. Metacognition: increasing students’ understanding of their own and others’ thinking.
Break into three groups and each discuss an example of an approach. Back in large group discuss what influences our choice of which method to apply.

4. Should thinking-skills instruction be infused or separate subject (or both)?
Authors recommend both integration into existing subjects and teaching as separate topic or course.
Questions for discussion: What is your schools method for teaching thinking skills?
Reis recommended specific thinking skills in sequence (table 10.1 page 243).

5. Critical Thinking as Evaluation
Ronald Allen’s principles emphasize:
Evaluating inferences
Evaluating reasons for a claim
Detecting missing parts of an argument
Discerning the relevance of objections
Robert Ennis’ aspects of evaluation stress judgement of:
Ambiguity or contradiction
Whether something is an assumption
If an observation statement is reliable

6. Critical Thinking as Problem Solving
Budmen emphasized that critical thinking PS differs from objective scientific PS in that it involves values, emotions, and judgments. His four step process on page 251.
Dressel and Mayhew focused on five central abilities:
Define problem
Select information for solution
Recognize assumptions (stated/non)
Relevent hyphothesis
Draw valid conclusions

7. Indirect Teaching of Thinking Skills: Practice and Exercise
Asking:
Why?
What if
How
Compare, classify and evaluate.
logical reasoning

8. Direct Teaching of complex thinking skills
CoRt Program by Edward de Bono pg 257
PMI technique-Pluses, Minuses, Interesting. Lets use the PMI technique on “having a pull out program for gifted students” pg 255
CoRT Thinking Skills:
Considering all factors
Thinking of consequences
Thinking of alternatives, possibilities
Recognizing opinions vs. facts as two types of evidence

9. Metacognition: thinking about thinking
Self monitoring (Hong)Students being aware of their own thinking and how it differs from others.
Self-reflection (Leader) what did I learn? How?
Costa describes three components of thinking about thinking:
Metacognition
Epistemic cognition: the study of how knowledge is produced.
Brain functions: styles, right brain/left brain

10. Creative Pause (de Bono)
the shift from being fully engaged in a creative activity to being passively engaged, or the shift to being disengaged altogether.
a deliberate, self-imposed pause to consider alternative solutions to a problem.
How does the concept of the creative pause influence how we teach thinking skills to gifted learners? Discussion. Critical thinking vs creative thinking?

11. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives
Distinguishes between “lower level” academic knowledge and “higher level” thinking skills.
Was developed as a guide for writing instructional objectives.
Pages 252, 253, 254
Where is the instructional focus for gifted learners?
Get in three groups and discuss the challenges of providing opportunity for higher level thinking in your classrooms.
Is there a way to allow gifted students to use their abilities in higher level thinking skills to assist teaching the lower level skills?

12. Extentions/connections
What assumptions do we make based on our knowledge of gifted learners in relation to teaching critical thinking?
How does the habit of critical thinking relate to “good decision” making?

13. Closing activity
Pg 266 following directions activity