Thinking Diagrams has been an exhilarating—and challenging—project.

I once took a graduate-level teaching class where we learned how to respond to students’ answers: correct answers, partially correct answers, and just plain wrong answers. We learned how to use wait time, how to call on different students and how to ask “higher-order questions.” Those were all good things to know and I have used most of those strategies from that point on in my...

Before we talk about teaching thinking, we should first think a little about what “thinking” is. Merriam-Webster (2002) says that thinking is “to believe that something is true, that a particular situation exists, that something will happen, etc.” or “to have an opinion about something or to form or have a thought in your mind.”

Mr. James’ class is beginning to give her real trouble. She is worried that she won’t have all of the answers for the questions on the upcoming AP test. They seem to be moving soooooo slowly, and none of her answers seem to be “right” or “wrong.” How is she supposed to know any of the answers? She goes in to talk to him about her frustrations.

While memorizing content is not the goal of Thinking Questions, content matters because thinking requires something to think about—and in most classrooms and learning opportunities that includes content. But if our education is going to act toward a purpose (the big picture/purpose being self-actualization, the small picture/goal being changing the way students tend to act in each...

On this particular day, Sara and the rest of the class are working on the question, “What are some common characteristics between the way all wars begin?” (an analysis thinking question). Mr. James is taking down their suggestions on the board. Ramone has just come up with “economic pressure,” when Sarah raises her hand and calls out:

Mr. James finishes talking about skills and looks around. Ramone is doodling. Mr. James notices. “Ramone,” he says, “you don’t look convinced.”

According to Merriam-Webster (2002) “experience” is defined as the “practical contact with and observation of facts or events,” which is a decent place to start talking about Thinking Questions (TQs).

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Each individual is genetically predisposed to use specific senses and multiple intelligences more or less frequently than others. The reality is that how we view any experience is even more complex than just those variables. We also bring our own personal Mental Models (Senge, 1990) or Paradigms (Kuhn, 1970) to those experiences.

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Our experiences matter. They include our senses, how we process those experiences, the mental models we carry with us and the emotional highs and lows that color our worlds (and our memories).

Analysis is one of the most common Thinking Questions. Teachers frequently ask students to List things, Classify things, or write the Steps of things. Unfortunately, most of the time those ideas have already been lectured on and the task becomes a re-call/memorization task rather than a Thinking task. Analysis means going from the whole, the concept itself, to the parts that make it up—by...

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This process of analyzing two wildly different ideas is called “insight.” It involves developing the pieces (analysis) of two separate ideas (wildly different) and then comparing the items on each list. Insight thinking provides for opportunities to develop a very sophisticated analysis of each concept—and maybe find similarities that had not previously been noticed.

Wiggins and McTighe (1998) appraise (rank) content information in terms of “enduring, important, and familiar with” rankings. They posit that some ideas in any content area are enduring—they are the “big ideas” of the field, and other information is important—and thus worth knowing. Other ideas are not so critical to know—but might be nice to know...

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While everyone might have and be entitled to their opinion, evaluations are a different type of thinking altogether.

Sometimes we have experiences but don’t think about them in powerful (thinking) ways or those experiences are not valued as important and powerful; therefore learning opportunities are missed or ignored. Those missed or ignored opportunities limit what we know, how we think, how we view reality—and what we ultimately can DO with those experiences.

A single, agreed-upon definition for “creativity” is hard to come by (in fact the dictionary uses the word creative in all the definitions it provides). One reason for that problem is that the word creativity is used interchangeably with other great words such as imagination, ingenuity, innovation, intuition, invention, discovery, and originality—all...

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Acting like an expert in any field includes: specific facts and knowledge, special skills directly related to what an expert actually does every day, and those dispositions that an expert would actually demonstrate on a daily basis. To DO something like an expert means to constantly Re-think, Re-visualize and Re-conceptualize what they think they know, can do and believe, using information as...

Art may be defined (Merriam-Webster, 2002) as the “conscious use of skill and creative imagination in the production of aesthetic objects.” While our students may not exactly be “aesthetic objects,” providing learning opportunities that help them learn how to think certainly requires skill and creative imagination.

Creating connected experiences for students with an explicit end-in-mind is art. It is a dynamic process, which means that it is always in flux, always changing and morphing into something else. One experience, one comment, one new insight can change the entire process (and product)—and that’s OK—and a fun way to teach!

Doing anything well requires that the individual: knows some stuff (facts and how those facts are connected); does some stuff (skills and techniques); and wants to do it (spend their Time, Effort and Resources on the task at hand—Dispositions). At the highest level of anything, experts in that area have committed themselves to “learning” those things.

1. List the parts of a fruit.

This idea is a modification of a TV show named Meeting of Minds with Steve Allen. Allen clarified at the time,

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Art

Published by Rowman & Littlefield