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.

ROBERT SWARTZ received his B.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard and studied as part of a Fulbright Scholarship at universities in Oxford and Cambridge in England. He is a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is director of the National Center for Teaching Thinking. Through the Center, he provides staff development to educators across the country on restructuring curriculum by infusing critical and creative thinking into content area instruction. He has authored numerous articles and books on critical thinking and has acted as a testing consultant for the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

SANDRA PARKS received an M.A. in Education, specializing in Curriculum Development, for the University of South Florida and pursued doctoral studies at Indiana State University. She also received a certificate of advanced study from Harvard University. She has conducted National Curriculum Studies Institute workshops annually for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development and provides staff development to schools across the country. Sandra served as co-director of the National Center for Teaching Thinking.