Reading: Skills for the 21st Century: Teaching Higher-Order Thinking

I thought that this reading was very interesting. As a Kindy Teacher, I like to think that I place importance of teaching higher-order thinking through my weekly plan for my students.

I love how the reading gave examples of how we teach higher-order thinking, Bloom's Taxonomy being the most widely used. Bloom divided learning into three domains of educational activity.

1. Cognitive (Knowledge)
2. Affective (Attitude or self)
3. Psychomotor (Skills)

The reading about Higher Order Thinking related to the domain of Cognitive development. Bloom listed the abilities and skills and separated them into 6 different categories (see table).



Lorin Anderson then revisited the cognitive domain and made a slight change of changing the categories from nouns to verbs.



What I took away from this article was the framework available to us that allows us to scaffold children's learning and scaffold teaching thinking skills in a structured way through these stages.

1. Teaching the Language of Higher Order Thinking - Tell the students what they are doing and why it is important for them to use Higher Order Thinking Skills.

2. Planning discussion time about Higher Order Thinking- Carefully planning lessons, having discussions and getting students to reflect on their learning so they understand their thinking strengths and weaknesses.

3. Teaching subject concepts- Making students aware of the key concepts they must learn and deciding what kind of process their learning is e.g. Concrete, abstract, verbal, nonverbal or process.

4. Providing Scaffolding- Giving the students temporary support without giving too much scaffolding as this could be detrimental to their learning.

5. Encourage Higher Order Thinking- Encouraging students to think about the thinking strategies they are using.

A part of the reading that stood out to me was the following:

Brookhart (2010) argues that if teachers think of higher-order thinking as problem solving they can set lesson goals to teach students how to identify and solve problems at school and in life. This, she says, involves not just solving problems set by the teacher but solving new problems that ‘they define themselves, creating something new as the solution’.

I look forward to improving on teaching Higher Order Thinking in my Kindy classroom as well as teaching it in a grade when I am a qualified teacher. I will use the process that was explained throughout the article as well as using effective language and reflect on how the skills could be incorporated into every lesson.