Teacher: “What do you think is the most important thing you have read about Abraham Lincoln or about what he did?”
Several students contribute ideas: “He was poor, but grew up to be president.” “He freed the slaves.” “He won the Civil War.”
Teacher: “I agree with all of you. I also really admire what a great speaker he was. He could really give a speech! And everyone loved him and his ideas, isn’t that right?”
There were a few nods, but no responses. There is about ten seconds of silence.
Teacher: “Let’s think about what I just said. I told you something that isn’t true, but my question at the end maybe stopped you from thinking deeply about what I said. Or maybe it stopped you from telling me I was wrong. What was my question, and how did it trick you?”
During the discussion that followed, the teacher explained: “My question, ‘isn’t that right?’ is a way to get you to agree with me. We read about the deep divisions between the North and South, but we read nothing that said everyone loved Lincoln. Even if he was widely loved, it couldn’t be possible that everyone loved him.”
The teacher then led a discussion about types of misleading statements, about ‘facts’ and ‘opinion’ relating to Lincoln. which was enlivened when several students shared their disagreement with the teacher’s answers. Next, the students were given the challenge to write three statements about Lincoln, one which was ‘true’, one which was ‘false’, and one that was an ‘opinion’. They wrote these independently and then, in small groups, informally discussed them each other.
In my experience, the strategies to develop higher order skills in this scenario can be used for any content area – from math to music – and questions can easily be made age-appropriate in order to develop skills such as inference and the close reading of source material.
A balanced approach to thinking skills
We can identify the various thinking skills the teacher elicited from the students using the taxonomy below as a guide. This lists and categorizes a range of thinking skills on a continuum from concrete/practical (bottom) to abstract/conceptual (top). In addition to being an aide memoire for understanding and conceptualizing thinking skills, it is a useful tool for checking that our questions and assignments prompt as much – or more – higher-order skills as middle- and lower-order thinking.