High order thinking skills are becoming more and more a focus of the curriculum, but how do we keep ourselves focused on including these in our teaching.

Reasons for keeping these skills included in the curriculum include:

• The need for strategies to solve complex world and national problems;
• The need for strategies to solve personal problems;
• The rapidly changing face of information;
• The importance of reflection in relation to difficult ethical dilemmas;

Teachers frequently will say that although such needs are important, they do not know how they could possibly find the time to focus on such areas due to the pressure for the students to cover the content and skills required by the curriculum.

Why the change?

Since 1960 knowledge has doubled at least every 5 years and more quickly in recent years. By the year 2020, it is projected that knowledge will double every  73 days (Teacher Education for the 21st Century, 1992).  We can be skeptical of this projections, however, the trend is apparent. It is already impossible for anyone to know everything about everything, and that has been true for many centuries. With the growth of the Internet, we must accept the growth of this trend even if we are uncertain of the actual numbers. This means that instead of an emphasis on acquired knowledge of facts alone – although facts continue to be important we must think with something – it is equally and more important for tomorrows students to know how to find information, how to create it; how to criticise it and how to evaluate it.

The inclusion of a thinking skills programme in the curriculum contributes to the overall success of our students across all areas of the curriculum. Many of the activities in a structured thinking skills programme provides students with the important cognitive prerequisites for achievement in the various areas of the curriculum. These include sequencing, reflection, finding alternative solutions to problems, others points of view and the like.

Course of Action

The following are a sample of the criteria that could be applied to the investigation of a thinking programme for schools:

• A comprehensive programme in which a variety of thinking strategies are applied to a variety of media;
• The thinking programme is grounded in some defensible cognitive theory;
• The approach requires some kind of inservice training for teachers, this reflects the fact that teaching thinking is a truly different way of teaching in that the teacher is a constructivist rather than a giver of knowledge.

Taking these steps recognises the truth of the often quoted Confucian proverb:

Give me a fish and I shall eat tomorrow; teach me to how to fish and I shall eat for a lifetime.

References:

Teacher Education for the 21st Century [chart]. (1992). Washington, D.C. American Association of State Colleges and Universities.