"Talents Unlimited," a research-based model for teaching thinking at the elementary level, has proven to be an effective model for the secondary level as well at schools in New Mexico, Arkansas, and Alabama. The program emphasizes strategies that help teachers integrate practice in thinking skills with academic content. (TE)

"Talents Unlimited," a program developed in Mobile (Alabama) County Public Schools in 1971, nurtures students' abilities in five talent areas as the foundation for academic proficiency: productive thinking, communication, forecasting, decision making, and planning. (TE)

Teachers in Howard County, Maryland, are finding that project IMPACT, a critical thinking skills curriculum originally designed for remedial junior high school students, can be successfully adapted for elementary students also. (TE)

Tactics for Thinking is a comprehensive staff development program that can be adapted to specific curriculum needs in local districts. San Diego County (California) is training teachers in three categories of cognitive strategies: learning to learn, content thinking skills, and reasoning skills. (TE)

Teachers in Cherry Creek, Colorado, have selected a variety of programs for teaching thinking, according to the needs of their students and their own interests. A thinking skills framework modeled after ASCD's Dimensions of Thinking (Marzano et al., 1988) is now being proposed. (TE)

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)