Are you igniting your student’s high order thinking skills or are you stuck at the basic recall of information questions?
If you are attempting to create opportunities for Bloom’s Taxonomy of questions giving a range and depth to what we are requiring for students how are you supporting this development?
As a speech and language pathologist, we see children who have language difficulties. Often we cheer that they have been able to understand the question form and remembered the information that we are requesting. However, when we are teaching higher order thinking then, we need to give them the ‘instructions’ on how to process these.
One way to do this by creating visual graphic organizers that help them understand the thought process. So for example, it is not enough to know the characters name you need to know about the character’s appearance and their personality to be able to make predictions and inferences. Create a graphic organizer that allows the student to record these as they read.
If you are working on opinion writing you can create sentence starters and transition words to assist the student in understanding how to create their paragraphs. Use a graphic organizer and brainstorming prior to having the student write or say their opinion this gives them a structure to respond.
If the child is a visual learner, demonstrate, illustrate, map out the problems.
If the child is an auditory learner, explain, talk through the process, create a story to illustrate the concept.
If the child is a tactile or motor learner have them ‘do’ something that allows them to discover or experience the concepts. ( act out the story).
You can talk to the child about making pictures in their minds or to think of the action in the story as if it were in a movie so that they are visualizing the storyline.
There is an excellent presentation from Steve Buono that details the process that teachers and others can incorporate higher order thinking into your lessons.higher-order-thinking-presentation
Read!
Read, thank you!