Infusing the Teaching of Critical and Creative Thinking Into Elementary Instruction: A Lesson Design Handbook

This volume provides guidelines and activities for restructuring content lessons to infuse direct instruction into the important core skills and processes of critical and creative thinking. It combines text, graphic representations of important points, sample lessons in core content areas, and activity sheets. Teachers can use this lesson-design handbook in constructing their own infused lessons. Suggestions for a multitude of curriculum contexts in which to construct infused lessons are also included. Over 30 fully developed model lessons are featured including lesson plans, supplemental instructional materials, graphic organizers for student and teacher use, suggested answers, and assessment procedures. The featured skills and processes of critical and creative thinking are analyzed for use in lesson design. Verbal thinking strategy "maps" and graphic organizers for all of the skills are provided. The lesson-design process shows how these maps and the other lesson-design tools are employed in developing infused lessons. Techniques to teach for metacognition and transfer are illustrated, and their use in infusion lessons explained. Numerous instructional strategies, questioning procedures, and collaborative learning activities are analyzed as they appear in sample lessons, and users are shown how these, too, can be integrated into newly designed infusion lessons. The book also contains lesson-observation and lesson-planning forms along with detailed instructions for their use.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Preface. Part I: The Design of Infusion Lessons. What Is Infusion. Part II: Skillfully Managing Thinking Tasks. Decision Making. Problem Solving. Part III: Understanding and Retention: Clarifying Ideas. Section 1: Analyzing Ideas. Comparing and Contrasting. Classification. Determining Parts-Whole Relationships. Sequencing. Section 2: Analyzing Arguments. Finding Reasons and Conclusions. Uncovering Assumptions. Part IV: Creative Thinking: Generating Ideas. Section 1: Alternative Possibilities. Generating Possibilities. Section 2: Composition. Creating Metaphors. Part V: Critical Thinking: Assessing the Reasonableness of Ideas. Section 1: Assessing Basic Information. Determining the Reliability of Sources. Section 2: Well-founded Inference: Use of Evidence. Causal Explanation. Prediction. Generalization. Reasoning by Analogy. Section 3: Deduction. Conditional Reasoning. Part VI: Designing and Teaching Infusion Lessons. Instructional Methods in Infusion Lessons. The Role of Metacognition. Selecting Contexts for Infusion Lessons.