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Imagine a classroom library showcasing books by Gail Gibbons and Eric Carle, selections from the Curious George series, nonfiction trade books about animals, and science magazines. Although the books appear to be disconnected, they are part of a unit of study called Fact or Fiction in which students investigate how authors use factual information about animals in fictional stories. By carefully selecting these texts within the context of a meaningful unit of study, the teacher has taken the first step in helping students be successful with complex informational text.

"This web site provides personal, practical, and published materials collected to help you cultivate critical thinking skills in your students, especially first-year students. How these materials are organized These materials are contained in 14 modules--ten focused on specific critical thinking skills, and four on specific teaching methods. These modules are then categorized using Halpern's (2003) framework for teaching critical thinking skills across disciplines. According to this framework, well-rounded critical thinking instruction helps students acquire: 1. a critical thinking attitude or habit of intellectual deliberation; 2. individual intellectual skills like analysis and inference; 3. the ability to use these skills in new contexts, and 4. the ability to reflect upon and evaluate one's own thinking (metacognition)."

"Craig Nelson spent a day guiding the faculty through reflective critical thinking activities, making the point that education is changing radically with universities such as MIT making online courses public and with paper-grading services provided in countries such as Bangladesh. After discussing William Perry's stages of intellectual and ethical development in the context of critical thinking, he concluded with this reminder: "If we are only teaching for content, then we can be replaced by computers and graders in Bangladesh. If, however, we are teaching to transform our students, then teachers are indispensible.""

"But it is heavy lifting for teachers, administrators, parents, and students to dump high school structures that inhibit reasoning and sustain those changes over time. In the face of actual or threatened budget cuts, there is even less determination to touch those taken-for-granted organizational routines. Yet the lessons of earlier reforms are clear: trying to get students to think without altering basic high school structures, will be no more than washing and waxing a jalopy."

"A SUPER-STREAMLINED CONCEPTION OF CRITICAL THINKING Robert H. Ennis, 6/20/02"

Theories of Learning in Educational Psychology John Seely Brown: Cognitive Apprenticeship

An approach to teaching that leads with active questioning.