Supporting Student Thinking Skills

Yes­ter­day, I shared some ques­tions that I often use to help cre­ate an atmos­phere of think­ing in my class­room. Unfor­tu­nately, when I ask a stu­dent to explain their rea­son­ing, they often aren’t able to reflect back on their thought process and ver­bal­ize what took place. In some cases, the best they can come up with is “it just popped into my head.”

In order to train stu­dents how to do this, I scaf­fold the process for them at first to give them a struc­ture within which they can build their own responses. They need to learn three skills to allow this to happen:

1. Focus on the process before they start
2. Mon­i­tor their rea­son­ing as they are working
3. Reflect back and explain to some­one else what they were thinking

Each of these skills needs to be mod­eled and prac­ticed, and stu­dents need many oppor­tu­ni­ties to use them. These think­ing skills are learned best when they are inte­grated into the reg­u­lar flow of instruc­tion rather than explic­itly taught as dis­crete top­ics. One way to do that is to build one or more of these scaf­fold­ing activ­i­ties into every lesson:

• Think-​​Alouds
• Lev­eled problems
• Graphic orga­niz­ers (e.g. T-​​chart)
• Using “magic words” that stu­dents can use which require expla­na­tion of reasoning
• Ask­ing prompt ques­tions (such as those in yesterday’s post)
• Give part of the solu­tion, then have stu­dents com­plete it
• Give the answer, stu­dents write the solution
• Give the expla­na­tion, stu­dents write the solution
• Give the solu­tion, stu­dents write the explanation
• Check­lists or mnemon­ics to aid recall of processes
• Jour­nals to prac­tice infor­mal writ­ing about prob­lem solving
• Vocab­u­lary games to build lan­guage skills and improve com­mu­ni­ca­tion about reasoning
• Allow stu­dents to rewrite weak expla­na­tions to improve them
• Show sam­ple stu­dent papers that demon­strate good skills
• Teach stu­dents to score responses using a rubric
• Have stu­dents score their own work or a partner’s work
• Trade papers with another class and have stu­dents score