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Excellent article from Teachers College Review. Here is passage from abstract that captures the focus: "But what exactly is "teaching thinking"? Do the many theories and programs of teaching thinking speak of the same "thinking," "good thinking," and "teaching thinking"? I claim here that there is actually not one approach to "teaching thinking" but three-three approaches to teaching thinking that compete with each other for control of the field. A conceptual mapping of the approaches to teaching thinking will, I hope, enable further theoretical development of this field and its more effective application in teaching."

The Yale Grand Strategy Program offers a compelling instructional model for 6-12 to consider in both English and Social Studies classes. One might compare it to a literary/text-based think tank used to hone critical and political thinking.

Chicago Shakespeare Theater has printable handbooks for many of Shakespeare's plays. "Each of our entirely original teacher handbooks includes active, engaging teaching activities, 400 years of critical thinking, synopses, and much more. Teaching activities-all aligned with the Common Core State Standards-are designed to draw upon some of the same practices and techniques that actors use in the rehearsal process to break open Shakespeare's challenging language."

As the United States continues to compete in a global  economy that demands innovation, P21 and its members provide tools and resources to help the U.S. education system keep up by fusing the three Rs and four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation).

Participating in an online discussion on events and issues in the news not only gives students a forum, but it also helps them build critical thinking, writing and news literacy skills and provides an opportunity to write for an authentic audience.

Create historical twitter character then tweet based on history research  Quote from Mark Rounds Web-Ed Tools Paper.li, "Participants choose a historical event, create Twitter accounts for individual characters, pore over primary source documents and think critically about the times, dates, and durations of events to create hundreds of Tweets as they might have been broadcast had Twitter existed before the 21st century. They then submit all those Tweets to the engineers at TwHistory, specifying a start date for their event, and then watch it unfold - over a day, a week, a month or more - reflecting the event's actual duration."

Adam Gopnik discusses the appeal of high fantasy in YA. He misses the mark, I think, in not discussing Joseph Campbell's influence in all of this, and he's condescending throughout much of the piece, but it's an interesting analysis aside from these two admittedly major issues.