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Why Don't Students Like School? Chapter 3. This isn't exactly what was meant by utilizing stories, but this site had a very clear thought process on the strategy of incorporating a story, so I thought it could be beneficial for keeping in mind for the classroom.

Here is a collection of activities for learning Spanish. When critical thinking in a second language, it's important to consider how background knowledge may not bee in the target language, but you can help students produce language by studying grammar in conjunction with reading or listening. A lot of second language acquisition scholars are debunking the notion that learning grammar is the pre-requisite to critical thinking in the target language. They can develop side by side with lots of structure and support from the teacher!

"The researchers calculated how much of the variation in MCAS scores was due to the school that students attended. For MCAS scores in English, schools accounted for 24 percent of the variation, and they accounted for 34 percent of the math MCAS variation. However, the schools accounted for very little of the variation in fluid cognitive skills - less than 3 percent for all three skills combined."

This is a video that breaks it down into more simple means for the students to understand how we categorize our memory when learning.

I liked the point in chapter 2 that while we all want to encourage deeper thinking, that's not possible without knowing the facts. I've been pondering what are the best ways to encourage deeper thinking WHILE learning the necessary facts. This page has a lot of good ideas within.

With regards to the necesity of background knowledge and factual knowledge in learning, here are some pre-teaching strategies that might be helpful.