The Shaping of Thought: A Teacher's Guide to Metacognitive Mapping and Critical Thinking in Response to Literature

The Shaping of Thought: A Teacher’s Guide to Metacognitive Mapping and CriticalThinking in Response to Literature provides a strategic and structured approach to the use of cognitive mapping in response to literature. The allied metacognitive strategy of ThinkTrix, incorporating seven basic thinking types, or mind actions, has emerged from elementary student-created cognitive maps known as ThinkLinks, a student friendly term. Students had labeled their thinking on the ThinkLinks and from the hundreds of work samples, the seven types of thinking were identified. Placed in a matrix with focal points, the thinking types became the ThinkTrix. Originally thought to be cues for teacher questioning, students soon took on the mind actions for their own questioning, responding, and mapping. The book offers a procedural and exemplified guide to metacognitive mapping and is built upon the central purpose of student-generated connections between life and literature.

Once teachers and students have adopted or adapted the suggested framework and strategies in The Shaping of Thought, they will always have visual andaware representation of thinking as a learning tool. Problem solving, decision making, inquiring, and creating will have joined with an indispensible means to lifetime learning and to the goal of constructing what Jerome Bruner called “structures of knowledge”.

Along with a teaching strategy, the book includes strong philosophical underpinnings with “The Kaleidoscope of Learning”, teacher/student tools, numerous activities, and samples of student work. Taken seriously, the Guide will deepen the understanding of literature and life in the direction of the “Big Ideas”, as envisioned by McTighe and Wiggins and by so many teachers.

Frank, Lyman, Jr. PhD, is a teacher educator and educational consultant. He is along with Arlene Mindus the originator of Think- Pair- Share, arguably the most used every- student- response, cooperative discussion design at all educational levels in the US and abroad. He was the first American elementary teacher to make comprehensive use of cognitive mapping with students in 1965. His innovation of the ThinkTrix as a student- owned thinking typology promises to place the thinking/questioning initiative with students, and usher “metacognitive mapping” into classrooms.

Charlene López is a former elementary school teacher who provided the structure for the ThinkLink strategy, focusing on student understanding of literary characters through analysis of their traits and feelings, thus leading students to a deeper under-standing of literature and of themselves. Toward these purposes, she developed with students an Idea Book to help them make a personal connection with the characters, stressing universal themes and creating in her classes a community of learners and a unity of ideas.

Arlene Mindus is a former teacher, university supervisor, elementary school principal, and a pioneer in cooperative learning. She was co-inventor with Frank Lyman of Think-Pair-Share and helped to develop ThinkLinks and ThinkTrix.