1. The need to teach thinking
1.1. Chapter1 ~ Making America Smarter: The Real Goal of School Reform
1.1.1. 1. One's intelligence is the sum of one's habits of mind.
1.1.2. 2. Intelligence is something that changes and grows.
1.1.3. 3. Practices and principles based on cognitive research and on research organizations.
1.2. Chapter 2 ~ Thinking Skills for the Information Age
1.2.1. 1. In order for educators to prepare students for the future, we must anticipate the skills and knowledge students will need to be successful.
1.2.2. 2. Thinking in the new information age is different than it was in the industrial age and requires different teaching strategies.
1.2.3. 3. We no longer have to rely on our memories or on printed sources because we can easily access information stored electronically.
1.3. Chapter 3 ~ Thinking in Context: Teaching for Open-Mindedness and Critical Understanding
1.3.1. 1. The teaching of thinking is an integrated process that happens when one is confronted with a real problem.
1.3.2. 2. The whole-language approach encourages a love of thinking, an ability to reflect on one's thinking and be open to new ideas.
1.3.3. 3. Thinking in context gives students the opportunity to use their thinking purposefully and to experience the consequences of their decisions.
1.4. Chapter 4 ~ Five Human Passions: The Origins of Effective Thinking
1.4.1. 1. Efficacy involves the ability and willingness to make a difference.
1.4.2. 2. Flexibility requires a supple mind, receptivity to alternatives, and adaptable response patterns.
1.4.3. 3. Craftsmanship involves striving for mastery, grace, and economy of energy to produce exceptional results.
1.4.4. 4. Consciousness is knowing how we are thinking in the moment.
1.4.5. 5. Interdependence means participating in, contribution to, and receiving from relationships to our benefit.
1.5. Chapter 5 ~ Learning and Thinking in the Workplace
1.5.1. 1. Transformational learning requires struggle and periods of getting worse before getting better.
1.5.2. 2. People need to reflect on their work and behavior in an open and safe work environment.
1.5.3. 3. Learning organizations are emerging where people know how to generate knowledge, how to articulate and share it, and how to manage it in ways that produce powerful practice.
1.6. Chapter 6 ~ Standards-Based Thinking and Reasoning Skills
1.6.1. 1. similarities and differences
1.6.2. 2. problem solving
1.6.3. 3. agumentation
1.6.4. 4. decision making
1.6.5. 5. hypothesis testing and scientific inquiry
1.6.6. 6. use of logic
1.7. Chapter 7 ~ Teaching Thinking Skills- Defining the Problem
1.7.1. 1. Educators do not agree which thinking skills need to be taught.
1.7.2. 2. Many educators don't understand the skills that need to be taught.
1.7.3. 3. Most educators don't provide the type of instruction researchers recommend.
1.7.4. 4. School curricula too frequently suffer from skills overload.
1.7.5. 5. Assessment instruments may actually inhibit the teaching and learning of thinking skills.
2. Assessing growth in thinking abilities
2.1. Chapter 79 ~ To Think or Not to Think
2.1.1. 1.Thinking, as a cognitive process, cannot be directly observed.
2.1.2. 2. Performance assessment is the best way to construct such a thinking situation for students.
2.1.3. 3. The performance assessment requires a student to organize information and use it to solve complex problems within a real-life context is required.
2.2. Chapter 80 ~ State Exams Flunk Test of Quality Thinking
2.2.1. 1. Test-driven reform drives out the best teachers.
2.2.2. 2. Current tests are difficult because they demand memorization of masses of information , not thinking.
2.2.3. 3. Testing has many well-documented damaging consequences.
2.3. Chapter 81 ~ Building a System for Assessing Thinking
2.3.1. 1.Use Assessment that reveals qualitative differences.
2.3.2. 2. examples: checklists, portfolios, performance, anecdotal records, interviews, journals and logs
2.3.3. 3. Self-evaluations are the ultimate goal.
2.4. Chapter 82 ~ How Teachers Can Assess the Thinking Skills They are Teaching
2.4.1. 1. Elementary teachers can mesh several subject areas into one assessment.
2.4.2. 2. When educators ask students to demonstrate their best thinking, the student must be given adequate time to do so.
2.4.3. 3. Giving students a choice of assessment can produce a wide variety of authentic performances.
2.5. Chapter 83 ~ Performances to Assess Standards and Intellectual Growth
2.5.1. 1. Teachers often find it overwhelming to balance teaching with state testing mandates.
2.5.2. 2. Clustering the standards to create performance tasks, allow teachers to embed thinking skills in the context of real-life experiences.
2.5.3. 3. Authentic assessments evaluate students' mastery of the content, the standards, and the thinking processes.
2.6. Chapter 84 ~ A Format for Assessing Thinking Skills
2.6.1. 1. Six-task assessment makes clear the importance of the thinking skill being assessed.
2.6.2. 2. It provides information about the level of student proficiency in the skill.
2.6.3. 3. This type of skill test format provides information useful for planning instruction..
2.7. Chapter 85 ~ Assessing Thinking Skills
2.7.1. 1.To assess students' critical thinking skills or higher-order thinking skills, teachers must be clear about what they're looking for and ask the right kind of question.
2.7.2. 2. types of questions: essay/constructed response and multiple-choice
2.7.3. 3. Critical thinking skills include identifying and evaluating arguments, decision making, problem solving, creating analogies and metaphors, judging credibility, clarifying ideas, extracting and evaluating assumptions, constructing and evaluating explanations, comparing and contrasting, classifying and so forth.
3. Strategies for teaching thinking
3.1. Chapter 70 ~ Thinking for Understanding
3.1.1. 1. To truly understand something, a student must practice it, struggle with it, make mistakes and corrections, watch others and try to pick up tricks and insights.
3.1.2. 2. To demonstrate understanding, a student will be able to explain it, do it, solve problems around it and teach it.
3.1.3. 3. We need to understand to act well, and through those actions, if they are thoughtfully considered, we advance our understanding.
3.2. Chapter 71 ~ Teaching Problem Solving as a Way of Life
3.2.1. 1. Infused problem solving versus separate teaching of problem solving is an active part of an existing curriculum and my actually be incorporated into a textbook.
3.2.2. 2. Best practice is to use domain-specific problem solving versus domain-general strategies.
3.2.3. 3. Implicit problem solving versus explict teaching and learning allows students pick up the problem solving skills by using them directly.
3.3. Chapter 72 ~ Cooperation and Conflict: Effects on Cognition and Metacognition
3.3.1. 1. Cooperative learning provides the context within which cognition and metacognition best take place.
3.3.2. 2. In order to be productive, cooperative efforts must be structured to include the essential element of positive interdependence, individual accountability, promotive interaction, appropriate use of interpersonal and small group skills, and group processing.
3.3.3. 3. To promote higher-level reasoning, critical thinking, and metacognitive skills, teachers are well-advised to first establish cooperative learning and then structure academic controversies.
3.4. Chapter 73 ~ The Art and Craft of "Gently Socratic" Inquiry
3.4.1. 1. Gently Socratic inquiry creates a particular place, time, and context in the classroom within which the teacher becomes a co-inquirer in dialogue with the students.
3.4.2. 2. Tools and criteria enhance the quality and rigor of the discourse and inquiry, but always within the context of an intellectually safe place.
3.4.3. 3. As a final step, the inquiry community reflect on how well it has done on any given day.
3.5. Chapter 74 ~ Teaching Cognitive Strategies for Reading, Writing, and Problem Solving
3.5.1. 1. Supporting cognitive strategies instruction for struggling students should improve their reading, writing and problem solving abilities.
3.5.2. 2. Special education teachers should include teaching of cognitive strategies as a prominent part of their curriculum.
3.5.3. 3. Thinking aloud is one strategy good problem solvers use.
4. Thinking across the curriculum
4.1. Chapter 41 ~ Developing a Scope and Sequence for Thinking Skills Instruction
4.1.1. 1. First identify the thinking operations that will constitute the curriculum.
4.1.2. 2. Next the thinking skills and strategies selected for instruction need to be arranged by grade level and subject area.
4.1.3. 3. Then the skills need to be practiced in succeeding grades in the given subjects, elaborated where they appear a second or third time and then transferred to other subject areas at later grade levels.
4.2. Chapter 45 ~ Infusing Critical and Creative Thinking into Content Instruction
4.2.1. 1. Help students reflect on their thinking.
4.2.2. 2. Give students more guided practice for transfer.
4.2.3. 3. Help students develop dispositions to engage in skillful thinking.
4.3. Chapter 46 ~ What Research Says About Teaching Thinking
4.3.1. 1. Research demonstrates that modeling and metacognitive reflection are effective strategies to introduce a thinking skill.
4.3.2. 2. Research indicates that teachers can effectively use either constructivist or didactic teaching strategies to organize the application of techniques.
4.3.3. 3. Frequent practice over an extended period has been shown to be essential for developing thinking skill proficiency.