NCTT - The National Center for Teaching Thinking

Where Should We Plan Lessons to Teach Students Thinking in the Content Curriculum?
Kevin O'Reilly, a high school American History teacher from the Hamilton-Wenham School system in Massachusetts, is interested in helping his students develop skill in judging the accuracy of information they get by judging the reliability of the sources of that information. He begins his initial lesson on this skill by staging a scuffle in the corridor outside his classroom and asking student witnesses in his classroom what happened. He compares the conflicting accounts his students give to the conflicting accounts that were given about the Battle of Lexington in 1775, the battle that started the hot fighting in the Revolutionary War in Colonial America. As students attempt to determine which of the 20th century history writers, and then which of the eyewitnesses, gave the most accurate account of the battle, they reflect on why one historical account may be more accurate than another. This yields a checklist of factors to take into account in judging skillfully the accuracy and reliability of sources of information which they use again and again in O¹Reilly's classroom, and which enables them to back up their assessment of the accuracy of information with supporting reasons. These skills relate to the accuracy and reliability of eyewitnesses, of observation, and of secondary sources of information in general -- skills that are very important in our life outside the classroom. In the immediate context of the Revolutionary War, O'Reilly's students use these skills to make informed critical judgments about the accuracy of various textbook accounts of the Lexington incident that students who are simply directed to read these texts to "get the facts" cannot and do not make.

Besides developing very important critical thinking skills, O'Reilly's students learn a tremendous amount about the context for the battle and the biases that people might have had in describing what happened during the battle (it occurred right after the Boston Massacre trials, and some colonists wanted to use it as a rallying cry to the uncommitted against the British). They also gain a critical perspective on the role of such reports in the construction of a history and on the way that histories themselves can be written from different points of view.

Infusion is not restricted to American History or to high school. Another lesson I have written about extensively speaks to this today just as well as it did fifteen years ago. Cathy Skowron, a 1st grade teacher in the Provincetown Elementary School, uses the same technique. She follows the tale of Henny Penny (which she has just read to her students) with a discussion, prompted by her questioning, of whether the other animals should have trusted Henny Penny, and how they could have determined whether she was a reliable source of information. After all, it might have paid for them to consider this question. Believing her without raising these questions is one of the primary reasons they were led into the fox's den.

Many primary grade teachers use such stories to help students build listening skills and/or vocabulary only. Skowron appreciates this, but wants to do more. Helping her students develop some initial skill at determining the reliability of sources of information is the additional goal she now has in teaching this story. This, in fact, makes it easy for her to extend her content objectives in this lesson. Integrating questions that help students consider the reliability of Henny Penny as a source of information helps them to understand the story at a different level. They now begin to grasp the "moral" of the Henny Penny story: that uncritical thinking can be dangerous. This allows Skowron to begin to teach them what the moral of a story is.

Skowron's lesson differs from O'Reilly's 9th grade American History lesson in the sophistication of content, the level of the vocabulary, and in the expectations that she has about the background knowledge of her students. Nonetheless, like O'Reilly, she tries to help her students consider factors that are often overlooked in making judgments about the reliability of sources of information. Students not only learn to raise questions of reliability in appropriate contexts, but think more thoroughly about how to answer these questions.

The same critical thinking skill can be taught, reinforced, and elaborated in many other contexts, subjects, and grade levels. For example, one 5th grade teacher helps her students with library research by referring them to a variety of books on the same topic and then helping them draft questions they need to answer in order to decide which source is likely to give them the most accurate information about a topic. In so doing they focus on relevant factors such as the date of the books, the expertise of the authors, whether the account is firsthand or secondhand, whether the book is fictional, the reputation of the publisher, and so on. She reports that students' interests in the topic they are researching are piqued, and better research skills result.

Other types of thinking have also been made the focus of infused lessons with the goal of helping students learn strategies for doing those types of thinking more skillfully than they usually do. I mentioned decision making earlier, a more complex thinking process. Traci Whipple and Gina Blaisdell, 3rd and 4th grade teachers from Naperville, Illinois, ask their students to "become" Sarah in the book "Sarah Plain and Tall" and, given the information in the book, think through the best thing to do when she has to decide whether she wants to stay with the family she has joined in the state of Oklahoma from her home in the state of Maine, close to two thousand miles away, in the later part of the 19th Century. They don¹t try to predict what she will do; rather they consider what her options are, trying to come up with come unusual and creative ones, and then consider the consequences of these various options, rating them as pros or cons, and giving them appropriate weight relative to their importance to Sarah. Then they can compare these and chose which one is best. These students are guided by a strategy for skillful decision making that they reflect on and assess as a strategy for making decisions once they try it out in the context of Sarah¹s decision. But, of course, they get practice with their reading comprehension skills as well as they work through this lesson, one of the primary content objectives of the lesson.

Skillful decision making, like determining the reliability of sources of information, can be taught in the primary grades as well. The Dr. Seuss book Horton Hatches the Egg is the basis for another decision making lesson for first grade students first developed by Sandra Parks and now used in a multitude of first grade classrooms. The students become little Horton, sitting on Maisie's egg after she goes off on a vacation for herself, just as he spots some hunters. What should he do? He's promised Maisie to take care of her egg, but these hunters pose a real threat to him. The students develop a set of options (e.g., run away without the egg, fight the hunters, tell them what he is doing and ask them not to harm him) and then consider their pros and cons in terms of what would result if they adopted a specific option. then they compare them and decide which is best. These students learn how to explain why they think that the option they have chosen is best when asked for their reasons.

Just like the technique of "becoming" a fictional character who has to make a decision, students are asked to "become" historical characters who have important decisions to make. In a high-school History lesson, for example, students become President Harry Truman in July of 1945 after the atomic bomb has been tested trying to decide how to bring World War II to a close. They develop and consider options like invading the Japanese mainland, demonstrating the bomb, using the bomb on a populated city, negotiating peace, etc., and then project the consequences of each, being as thorough as they can. In determining the consequences of these options the students have to explore in some depth the historical situation surrounding this period. Would heavy casualties result from an invasion? Why? Would negotiations secure a lasting peace? Why? In each case answering "Why" requires a deep understanding of the historical situation which the students get through research orchestrated in cooperative learning groups each of which works on a specific option.

Similarly, Rita Hagevik, a middle school teacher from the Ligon Middle School in Raleigh, North Carolina, helps her students learn the same strategy for skillful decision making in 7th grade science. She asks them to imagine that they have been asked to serve on a commission to report to the President about what would be the best energy source for the United States to rely on as its dominant source of energy over the next 25 years. They develop options including standard sources like nuclear, wind, solar, fossil fuels, and hydroelectric, but also include such sources a geothermal, and then some innovative sources like "human power" (Imagine that a law was passed requiring every person in earth to push a tread mill for an hour each day.²) They determine what factors are important to take into account in making this decision (cost, safety, environmental impact) and then, once again through collaborative group work, they divide the task and search for relevant and reliable information about what the consequences would be when we consider each factor. They learn how to get information on the internet, through library research, etc. The results are decisions that each student makes that they can support with hard scientific information about the energy sources they have studied.

Skillful decision making (and its mate problem solving), as taught by these teachers, involves students in an integrated set of thinking activities that engage them in the creative generation of ideas, an analysis of those ideas, and the exercise of critical judgment in determining what the best idea is. In essence, skillful decision making is a complex thinking task integrating a number of different and complementary thinking skills like the quartet often referred to as "fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration" by those many who have specialized in creative thinking, predicting likely consequences, focused comparing and contrasting, ranking/prioritizing, and determining the accuracy and reliability of sources of information. If students have difficulty with any of these it is always an option for a teacher to teach lessons that focus just on those specific types of skillful thinking. For example, Rebecca Reagan, a 5th grade teacher from the Lubbock Independent School District in Texas often teaches students a lesson in which they brainstorm ideas about how they might communicate with people in their community about educational issues that might arise in their school. In doing this Reagan teaches students a number of enhancement strategies that go beyond simple brainstorming and can dramatically increase the number of ideas they generate but also guarantee originality in the generation of ideas they never would have though of had they not used these strategies. Stephen Fischer, a high school science teacher from Millville High School in Millville, New Jersey, teaches a lesson on the population explosion in which students learn how to determine, collect, and assess evidence about likely scenarios for mankind as our population grows during the 21st Century.

Lessons on these types of thinking, of course, can stand on their own as well as becoming enhancers of skillful decision making. This is especially true of the cluster of types of thinking the skillful use of which yields greater and deeper understanding of what is being taught. We compare and contrast options, but in order to do so skillfully it is important not to just list some similarities and differences between them. We should sort out the important similarities and differences and draw conclusions from them, perhaps after we have thought about any patterns they display. Such an enhanced strategy for comparing and contrasting makes it more skillful and yields a deeper understanding of what is compared and contrasted. Classroom teachers from the primary grades right through high school now use infusion as a technique to help students learn this enhanced strategy for comparing and contrasting. They teach initial compare/contrast lessons, for example, in which two characters in a story are the subjects of the comparison and contrast (Rebecca Reagan's 5th grade lesson on Matt and Attean, two characters from a novel read extensively in United States schools, The Sign of the Beaver), or two phenomena in science like the production of fruit and cones by plants for reproduction, or plant cells and animal cells, or RNA and DNA. Historical events like the American and Russian Revolutions are also materials for such compare/contrast lessons, as are two historical figures, like Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

Other types of thinking skills that enhance deep understanding (and hence fall into the thinking category of "analysis") include parts/whole analysis in which students don't just list the parts of things but formulate statements about the function of these parts and put their ideas together about such functions to conceptualize how the parts work together to make the whole object operate as it does. Good examples of such parts/whole infusion lessons that enhance deep understanding range from lessons on the systems of the human body (Stephen Fischer, Millville, New Jersey, High School) to the parts of a short story (Rebecca Reagan, Lubbock, Texas, Public Schools ), to a first grade lesson on simple machines in which students analyzed the parts of a screw and explained how it worked by putting their ideas about the function of these parts together (Beebe Elementary School, Naperville, Illinois). This list could go on and on. In many of these cases the reports of enhanced content learning and increased test scores testify to the depth of understanding they generate about concepts and ideas in the standard curriculum.

Good writing built on good thinking can also be a goal of infusion lessons. Traci Whipple's and Gina Blaisdell's students don't just make decisions about what Sarah should do in their lesson on Sarah. Plain and Tall. They also have them write a persuasive letter to Sarah explaining why she should do what they think is best. In doing this they make use of a version of a writing "template" for persuasive writing that was first developed by Rebecca Reagan, from Lubbock, Texas, who, in teaching her own infusion lessons on decision making, extended her lessons by building a writing component onto the lessons that would enable the students to communicate the thinking the students do in making their decisions (and not just the decisions themselves). Similarly, as an extension of the lesson on the bombing of Hiroshima teachers who teach this lesson often ask students to write a persuasive letter to President Truman about what they think his best choice is. They, too, use a version of Rebecca Reagan's templates. These templates provide students with a paragraph-by-paragraph/ sentence-by-sentence guide to writing such persuasive prose that is tied to the thinking results they have in the lesson. A similar technique is used by Rita Hagevik in extending her lesson on alternative energy. All of these teachers report that the quality of student writing in their classrooms improves commensurate with great improvements in their students' thinking .

These examples show what can be done to infuse the teaching of how to engage skillfully in a number of key types of thinking into the curriculum by finding natural curricular contexts in which they can be used by students. Imagine the richness of a curriculum and the depth of learning possible when a school decides to infuse all of the major thinking skills into its educational program in similar ways. There now are such schools. Their teachers and students continue to provide living examples of this richness and depth for others to learn from.

How Should we Teach Students Thinking in the Content Areas?

Provide Explicit Structure for Students' Thinking. Teachers are often told to stop asking only "what" questions and ask more "why" questions -- questions that prompt more than simple recall. This is one of the main uses that practitioners have made of the insights of the early educational researcher on thinking, Benjamin Bloom. The infusion lessons I have described seem to be examples of this sort. Indeed, some who use the term infusion mean just this by that term -- asking more challenging "higher order questions" in the context of content instruction. And, in fact, a comparison of textbooks of the 90s with those of the early 80s reveals this tendency as well. Nonetheless, there are important subtleties in the lessons I have described that go beyond the mere asking of higher-order questions. And when we think about it, it is pretty clear that doing just this is too weak a peg to hang our hopes of reaching all of our students to help improve their thinking in thinking-oriented content instruction.

There is no doubt that a lot of thinking beyond simple recall occurs in classrooms where many "why" and "how" questions are asked. But is this enough to teach skillful thinking. If a teacher asks "Why did Huck Finn's father abduct him?" this, indeed, gives students the opportunity to think beyond simple recall. But if they are in the habit of guessing or making hasty judgments about what causes things to happen, all that usually happens is that we give such students another opportunity to do the same. And that does not constitute helping them improve their thinking. To use an early but powerfully useful conceptualization, this constitutes teaching for thinking. Its claim to provide instruction that will improve student thinking is very weak. To be sure, some students do pull themselves up by their bootstraps and meet this challenge, but many do not. Questioning of this sort doesn¹t teach students who are generally unaware of how they think to modify any bad habits they have in thinking when they respond to questions of this sort.

What Kevin O'Reilly, Traci Whipple and Gina Blaisdell, Rebecca Reagan, and indeed all of the teachers I have mentioned in this chapter do, on the other hand, is what has come to be called the teaching of thinking. This involves the use of some very specific instructional strategies designed to make the lessons they teach more effective in achieving their thinking objectives as well as their content goals. This revolves around the notion of making explicit and guiding students to follow reflectively explicit thinking strategies. For example, Rita Hagevik works with her students to develop a list of specific focus questions, like "What options do I have?" and "What short and long-term consequences are there of these options?" that can be combined into an organized, though by no means rigid, way of thinking about decisions before they are made. She posts this set of questions -- this "thinking strategy" -- on the wall of her classroom to serve to guide for her students through the thinking process. I call this a "thinking map" of skillful decision making. When students use it they may modify it by rewording some of the questions or adding others, so it is a flexible guide, but nonetheless a guide. She also uses a set of graphic organizers to provide students with places to "download" their ideas for further reflection, structured in a way that is consonant with this thinking map. This is what I mean by an explicit thinking strategy. One important thing that we have all learned in the thinking skill movement is that the more explicit the thinking we are trying to help students with is, the more likely it is hat they will learn to change and improve their thinking habits. Such thinking maps and graphic organizers are prime examples of techniques used for this purpose.

Infusion teachers often supplement the use of such thinking maps and graphic organizers by guiding students through the thinking process when they are thinking about the lesson content using these maps. They often do so orally by asking such prompting questions like "What options does Horton have (in protecting himself against the hunters)?" or "What options does President Truman have (to bring the second world war to a close)?" This combination of techniques is an important distinguishing characteristic of "teaching of thinking", in contrast to teaching for thinking. This is one of the central innovations of the thinking skills movement of the 1980s. During the early and middle 80s the primary use of this technique was in instructional efforts that were separate from the regular curriculum. From the mid 80s on this emphasis started to shift until now a vast amount of explicit thinking skills instruction takes place in infused lessons, the subject of this chapter.

Help Students Reflect on Their Thinking

Using focusing questions that make explicit use of the language of thinking has a specific function in the lessons of teachers like O'Reilly, Whipple, and Fischer. It helps to cue students and focus their attention on certain ingredients in their thinking (like the consideration of evidence) that they often miss. This shades into the use of another important technique that these teachers incorporate into their lessons: prompting students to become aware of how they are engaging in their thinking so that they can reflect on it in ways that better enables them to monitor and direct it themselves, rather than relying on the teacher to do so. This is metacognition. Metacognition -- thinking about thinking -- requires that we have a conceptual apparatus, and language to express it, that enables us to articulate what is going on in our thinking.

All of the teachers whose work I have commented upon have found it extremely important to build metacognitive prompts into their thinking skills lessons. What is the rationale for this? Actually, the idea behind this practice is very simple. Our goal in teaching thinking is for students to internalize strategies that make their thinking more effective. These strategies can often be articulated in terms of questions that are important to ask as we engage in certain types of thinking, for example, "What are my options?" in thinking through a decision. These are the questions that the teachers I have described put on their "thinking maps" for particular types of skillful thinking. So, for example, one thing that we want to happen as a result of the teaching of thinking is that when no teacher is around to prompt a student who is trying to make an important decision to think about a variety of options, the students remembers to do this and, as it were, engages in an internal monologue like, "Wait a minute, before I make this decision I should think about what my options are." Metacognitive reflection prompted by the teacher in a thinking skills lesson is a necessary and powerful transition to this type of internalization.

This is supported by a considerable amount of research about metacognition as an effective tool in enhancing learning. When we think about our thinking we can become aware of how we are doing it and modify it. We can do this by setting goals, developing a plan to meet those goals, and then acting on this plan. This is not an unfamiliar technique for taking charge of our actions. The great insight about metacognition as a tool for good thinking is that thinking itself is not just something that happens to us, rather it is subject to our deliberate control just as overt behavior is. By taking charge of our own thinking we can reorganize it to counter shortfalls we may detect in the way we ordinarily think.

This is what is behind the metacognitive practices brought into the classroom in the infusion lessons I have described. O'Reilly often asks his students to list the factors they considered in reflecting on the reliability of type eyewitness accounts of the battle of Lexington after they have gone through the process of judging their reliability. This helps students monitor their thinking. O'Reilly then asks his students to share these and to develop, as a class, a comprehensive list of factors that should be considered in assessing the reliability of any eyewitness report. They craft this list into a set of guidelines that they can use whenever they need to assess the reliability of eyewitness reports. When students use these guidelines they may see that they may not have considered all the relevant factors (evaluating their thinking) and they can decide to broaden the way that they think about reliability in the future (planning their thinking). Similar descriptive, evaluative, and projective episodes of metacognitive reflection are prompted by teachers of infusion lessons that focus on other types of thinking like comparing and contrasting, predicting, and decision making.

There are, of course, a myriad of other strategies that have been introduced into instruction to promote metacognition. These range from very directive strategies like giving students an explicit plan or a graphic organizer to guide their thinking in the lesson to techniques like "Think-Pair-Share" in which students "think out loud" so that other students can help them directly while they are doing their thinking. But whatever techniques are used, keeping in mind the goals of metacognitive instruction is crucial for making these techniques effective in infusion lessons.

Giving Students More Guided Practice for Transfer

Helping students to reflect on and plan their thinking through various metacognitive activities in the classroom seems hollow unless they have a chance to actually follow the plan a number of times so that they get used to thinking this way. This is the motivation behind practices employed by O¹Reilly, Skowron, Reagan, Whipple and Blaisdell, and the other teachers whose works I have described in this chapter. They explicitly teach for transfer as the follow-up and build on their initial infusion lessons on specific types of skillful thinking. Research supports explicit transfer activities as an important ingredient in teaching thinking. Such transfer activities usually build directly on the kinds of metacognitive activities described above.

Shortly after the lesson on Sarah's decision based on the book Sarah Plain and Tall Whipple and Blaisdell worked with their 3rd grade students on the landing of the Pilgrims in what was to become Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. They highlight the fact that when the Pilgrims arrived they found natives already living on the land. They asked their students to use their plan for decision making to guide them through a decision making process about this situation. What should the Pilgrim's do? And after a number of other reliable sources activities regarding information his students get in their studies in American history, and a number of months after the lesson on the Battle of Lexington, Kevin O'Reilly has his students read several eyewitness accounts of conditions under slavery in the United States before the Civil War -- accounts from slave holders, abolitionists, Northern newspaper articles, and so on. -- He then asks them to certify which of these are likely to be the most reliable using the checklist they developed in class when they worked on the Battle of Lexington. These are examples, respectively, of immediate transfer activities after a specific thinking skill lesson, and reinforcement of the skillful thinking later in the school year. Teachers report that it usually takes only three or four of such transfer activities for students to apply their plan for thinking much more automatically and without the need for teacher-prompting.

Many teachers also supplement this with some sort of explicit engagement with the question: "What are the sorts of situations in which the kind of thinking we have practiced would be a good idea to engage in?" Students may make lists of sources of information, types of situations calling for serious decision making, etc. They can write these in student journals or on charts posted on the wall of the classroom. As they practice the types of skillful thinking they are being taught and assimilate these lists they become more and more proficient in identifying situations in which a specific kind of skillful thinking is called for and in doing it on that occasion.

Most teachers, of course, hope that the habits of guided thinking according to a plan stick with students outside their classrooms and the walls of the school as well. Some teachers reinforce this habit more directly as extensions of their subject area instruction. Helping students apply the specific critical and creative thinking skills being taught in infused lessons to examples from their own lives, as all of the teachers I have commented upon do, is an obvious way to carry this out. Once again, making this an up-front question and explicitly practicing it is what has been most successful.

Helping Students Develop Dispositions to Engage in Skillful Thinking

John Dewey, in his landmark book How We Think remarks that we can teach students what constitutes good thinking but that without their being motivated and disposed to engage in good thinking when the occasion arises, such instruction comes to naught. Most teachers who infuse the teaching of critical and creative thinking into content instruction as I have described it recognize this. They rely on a combination of three things: (1) students reflecting on what ways to do specific types of thinking (e.g. decision making, parts/whole analysis) are good for them to practice, and what plans are the best one for them to adopt in doing these kinds of thinking; (2) practice directed at building the habit of doing specific types of thinking like decision making and parts/whole analysis specific ways that involve skillfulness; and (3) familiarity with occasions on which such thinking is appropriate or called for. I have described these techniques already in this chapter. The important point to note is that the kinds of lessons that I have described in which the teaching of specific forms of skillful thinking is infused into content instruction already build in instructional techniques that speak to the disposition to engage in these forms of thinking as well as how these forms of thinking can be done skillfully.

Some have suggested, however, that besides teaching specific forms of skillful thinking and helping students to develop the disposition to engage in these when needed, there are other things, which they call thinking dispositions, which must also be taught. In the extreme case some have suggested that that is all we have to do to teach thinking -- teach students these "dispositions". They give as examples open-mindedness, deliberativeness, and adventurousness in thinking. What is the role of these in instruction that infuses the teaching of specific thinking skills into content instruction as I have described in this chapter?

First, let me comment that in my experience such things as open-mindedness and deliberativeness should not be described as thinking dispositions in contrast to thinking skills, and treated as things that, because they are dispositions, require different instructional strategies to teach. Practicing open-mindedness, for example, involves not just a disposition to do something, but actively doing various things. An open-minded person seeks alternative points of view before making up his or her mind; takes alternative points of view seriously by listening or reading them carefully, and considers their force, value, and reliability. Similar behavioral descriptions can be provided for the other so-called dispositions. Hence, these are not merely dispositions, they are forms of skillful thinking like decision making, determining the reliability of sources, and comparing an contrasting, except that they are very general in character and have application to any of the more specific forms of thinking that I have reported on. So, like these other forms of thinking, they can be taught using the same techniques, and they should be taught so that students don¹t just learn how to engage in them skillfully, but develop the disposition to do so when it is called for.

Some teachers of infusion lessons combine instruction in these broader and very important kinds of intelligent behaviors with the instruction they provide in specific types of skillful thinking in infusion lessons. For example, in a 5th grade lesson, as part of their study of the Revolutionary War in the American Colonies, when students are learning how to analyze and evaluate arguments, they are given an argument by Thomas Paine from his Common Sense promoting independence from Britain. However, before they make up their mind on this issue, they are asked to imagine that they are "on the fence" about it and wanting to hear other points of view before making up their minds. So they seek other arguments and find one that favors loyalty to Britain. They have to "reserve judgment" on this issue until they assess both arguments, and if they think that neither of these supports their conclusions well (as many students find when they do this lesson) they have to search for information and construct their own arguments, taking a stand only when they feel it is well-supported. This is not easy for students to do, but it is extremely important to those teachers who practice teaching it, that they feel it is well worth helping students respond to the challenge. And, like any of the more specific thinking skills that I have discussed earlier, metacognitive reflection on how to be open-minded, whether it is worthwhile to do so, and the development of a plan for being open-minded next time it is needed, is coupled with repeated practice for transfer, and logging occasions when open mindedness is important (e.g. when trying to decide who to vote for), build this so that it becomes a habit of mind of the students who are being taught it.

Helping Our Students Become Good Thinkers

There are no pat formulas for constructing the more elaborate types of infused lessons, and their follow-ups, found in the work of the teachers I have commented upon in this presentation. They use a variety of practices to serve their goals as teachers of thinking. What stands out, however, is that these practices include five basic components that make a great difference in the success of these lessons: