Teaching Thinking Skills

Thinking, language, and content learning are symbiotic. They strengthen one another and depend on one another. Teaching thinking is very effective when teaching engaging content matter--and teaching content matter is effective when students are engaged in rich academic thinking. How often have we seen "lazy" students suddenly become engrossed in a project that interests them and outperform the rest of the class? When a topic is interesting or taught in an engaging manner, students are more likely to put effort into actively thinking about the information--often without realizing that they are putting extra thought into the tasks (Stipek, 2002).

Thus, if we can get our students “into” the activity to the point where their sense of interest and motivation takes over, then their thinking skills and language develop as they work to accomplish the task. In contrast, the all-too-common use of worksheets, grammar-centered seatwork, and “answer 10 questions after reading” methods tend not to be active or engaging. Such passive drill-and-kill methods have become boring and ineffective for many students long before they reach our classrooms. Students desire to be challenged in their thinking, and they are ready to think more and more about the world and their roles in it. Most desire to produce genuine products of learning beyond the required lab report and five-paragraph essay. Very few consider a multiple choice test to be a motivating product of learning. Hence, the stronger the foundation of thinking skills that students have, developed in the context of authentic and engaging experiences, the more solid their understanding becomes of the many facts, concepts, and big ideas they are supposed to learn in all classes.

Research abounds on the benefits of integrating the development of academic thinking skills into the curriculum (Ivie, 1998; Ackerman & Perkins, 1989; Costa, 2001; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001; Ruggiero, 2001). Most of the benefits appear in the form of increased motivation to learn and participate, as well as increased achievement on teacher-created and state-required assessments. Of course, as is the case of much educational research, we can never be completely certain whether the thinking skills interventions were the main causal factors or not. Nevertheless, in the vast majority of the studies, the measured and perceived results were positive when a thinking skills program was integrated into content area teaching in the ways described here.

Analyze
Synthesize
Interpret
Empathize
Compare and contrast
Identify cause and effect
Categorize & classify
Evaluate
Solve Problems & hypothesize
Communicate
Persuade

(Condensed from Developing Academic Thinking Skills in Grades 6-12: A Handbook of Multiple Intelligence Activities)