Integrating Instruction in Higher Order Thinking Skills ~ Guest Blog Post

by The GATEway Gals

Emily Hollett and Anna Cassalia, aka The GATEway Gals, recently contacted me with exciting news! They have just completed work on a five-book series on thinking skills targeted toward gifted learners in grades 3-5 and published by Prufrock Press (Routledge /Taylor & Francis). If you are a fan of the P.E.T.S. curriculum, you will not want to miss this! These gals are award-winning gifted educators and instructional differentiation coaches, and they created the curriculum with older and more advanced students and content in mind. A big thanks to to the Gateway Gals for writing another guest blog post to share about these resources.

The term “21st Century Thinking Skills” is widely used in education today, and while definitions vary, most educators agree: we need to be teaching our students not just what to think, but how to think.  Twenty-first century learners must encompass an array of thinking skills.  They must be inquisitive about the world around them; willing to ask questions and make mistakes.  They must be logical and strategic thinkers.  Logical thinkers clarify problems while analyzing and making inferences based on the given information.   Strategic, or deliberate thinking, requires students to think about where they are now in the learning process versus where they want to be in the future, and then determine action steps to achieve their goals. 

Gifted and high-ability students require specialized instruction which is organized by key concepts and overarching themes.  They need content which requires abstract thought on a higher level as well as time to grapple with meaningful problems and derive defensible solutions.  Most general education elementary curriculums do not provide the rigor necessary for gifted students. To help address this need in our own classrooms, we developed a five-book series of complete curricula with the aim of teaching these skills explicitly. Our thinking skills units are guides to help teachers implement explicit instruction with targeted problems and activities to teach gifted students how to think using convergent, divergent, analytical, evaluative, and visual/spatial reasoning.  This curriculum provides cohesive, focused, scaffolded lessons to teach each targeted skill followed by authentic application activities and problems for students to apply each newly developed skill set. Each major type of critical thinking is addressed in a book with lessons broken down into sub-skills.

The Divergent Thinking book was designed to teach students specific creative thinking skills. While we know the importance of creative thinking, it is often left behind the “testable subjects” such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. This resource was created to merge divergent thinking skills and academic content. These lessons teach students to approach problems with an open mind. Students will learn to flexibly look at problems from multiple perspectives and fluently generate many and varied ideas to solve problems.  Students will learn specific strategies to elaborate and combine ideas to create something new and original.  Students will learn that to make ideas come to life they need an intentional purpose and a targeted plan of action.

Convergent Thinking helps students approach problems with a critical and evidence-based mindset. Convergent thinking is a skill which helps students arrive at defensible solutions. It encompasses observation, logical reasoning, and inferencing. Working through the lessons in this book, students will learn strategies and specific academic vocabulary in the sub-skills of observation, using evidence, considering perspectives, reflection, and deduction to find accurate solutions. Developing convergent thinking skills helps students learn to be critical and thoughtful in their approaches to novel problems.

Analytical Thinking develops students’ ability to think scientifically, systematically, and logically about questions and problems.  Thinking analytically is a skill which helps students break down complex ideas into smaller parts in order to develop hypotheses and eventually reach a solution. It encompasses sub-skills like observation and categorization, inquiry, research, and logical reasoning. Working through the lessons in this book, students will learn strategies and specific academic vocabulary in the sub-skills of noticing details, asking questions, classifying and organizing information, making hypotheses, conducting experiments, interpreting the data, and drawing conclusions. Developing analytical thinking skills helps students learn to be scientific and systematic in their approaches to researching and solving problems.

Evaluative Thinking develops students’ ability to think critically about values, issues, and ideas to make defensible arguments. Through the lessons in this book, students will examine difficult and ambiguous questions from a subjective and balanced perspective. Evaluative thinking is a critical 21^st Century Thinking Skill and helps students learn to weigh values and facts in making judgements. This unit is unique in that it allows students to engage in productive struggle with ambiguous problems and scenarios where several answers could be considered ‘correct’.

Visual-Spatial Thinking teaches students how to perceive and represent visual information and mentally manipulate objects within space.  Visual-Spatial thinking is one of the best early indicators of future academic success.  The ability to mentally manipulate visual information correlates with both specific academic skills as well as general critical reasoning including flexibility in thinking.  Working through the lessons in this book, students will develop spatial language, learn to visualize and mentally manipulate visual information, look at objects from varying perspectives, explore dimension, and seek structure in organizing visual information.

Each of the five Thinking Skills units provide students ways to develop problem-solving skills which require both creative and critical thinking.  Our students will be faced with unforeseen challenges which they must be able to think creatively, critically, and strategically to solve.  Learning to utilize and apply thinking skills to curricular content will prepare students for their future.  As Albert Einstein once said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.”  Our curriculum trains the students to use their minds to think divergently, convergently, analytically, evaluatively, and spatially. We hope you find these units as helpful as we have.

From Emily and Anna: We are excited to be able to offer readers of Big Ideas 4 Little Scholars 20% off of our books! Use code FLA22 for discount.