Buncombe County (North Carolina) has launched a "Wednesday Revolution" that uses Socratic seminars based on Mortimer Adler's "Paideia Proposal" to develop students' critical thinking skills. (TE)

Teachers in Irvine, California, are using questioning and responding strategies with students in classrooms and with each other in peer coaching. Teachers learn to match questions to three sequential levels of thinking: input, processing, and output. (TE)

Teachers and administrators at Tanana (Alaska) City School District have designed activites to increase students' thinking skills through problem-solving strategies designed to help students assume responsibility for learning and transfer their knowledge to community needs. (TE)

Developing elementary students' critical thinking abilities and cultural awareness through direct instruction is the goal of McRAT (Multicultural Reading and Thinking), a three-year collaboration of teachers and state department reading specialists in seven Arkansas school districts. The program involves direct instruction in thinking strategies…

Teachers at Patapsco Middle School in Howard County, Maryland, are using a process model to help them introduce and then integrate thinking skills in all content areas. The model provides an eight-step framework that enables school systems to incorporate selected thinking skills into their instructional programs. (Author/TE)

Teachers at Bernards High School in Bernardsville, New Jersey, have developed their own approach to the development of thinking skills through a writing program that focuses consecutively on exploration, expression, and refinement of ideas. (TE)

Teachers at the Calverton School in Huntingtown, Maryland, have developed their own K-12 program for teaching thinking through writing in the content areas. (TE)

"Connections" is a program to help teachers infuse thinking strategies such as decision making, problem solving, communicating, and understanding into all subjects. Students work in small groups to apply each strategy to what they are studying, and these strategies are transferable not only between subjects but to the real world. (TE)

Approaches to teaching thinking such as direct teaching of thinking skills and metacognitive approaches, if applied thoughtlessly, can backfire and inhibit thinking, especially with students who are already able, but unconventional, thinkers. We do not know enough about the nature of thinking processes to warrant a mandated thinking skills…

A response to the opinion by John Baer that teaching thinking puts able thinkers at risk. The chances are greater that educators may retreat from teaching thinking if they are uncertain about the importance and possibility thereof than that able students will be harmed by efforts to help them. (Author/TE)

Evidence from the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) program suggests that at-risk students show little understanding of content without first receiving concentrated instruction in understanding itself. Teaching thinking skills to at-risk students requires a thinking environment, consisting of exploratory conversations, stimulation of curiosity,…

This posthumous paper attempts to clarify curriculum fundamentals such as boundaries, conceptual units, relationships, principles, and ethical dimensions. Presents an ontological approach viewing curriculum as a highly complex and dynamic interaction of events and acts and stressing the importance of the learning environment. (MLH)

To overcome learner dependence when modeling cognitive processes, one teacher used direct teaching of specific thinking skills with her middle school language arts students. The teacher introduced the skill of analyzing for personification to her students. The class experimented with the skill, completed the task, and applied the skill to…

Defines education's new paradigm as schooling based on decision making, the critical thinking skills serving it, and the knowledge base supporting it. Outlines a model decision-making process using a hypothetical breakfast problem; a late riser chooses goals, generates ideas, develops an action plan, and implements and evaluates it. (4 references)…

Explains the merits of "brain-compatible" learning, especially Proster Theory. Describes a pilot program at a New Jersey elementary school that transformed conventional, graded classrooms into "multi-teacher interactive learning units" that promote thinking in terms of programs and patterns. Summarizes pedagogical changes and…