Cognition, Thinking & Understanding

Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education

Make learning more meaningful by teaching the whole game. David Perkins, a noted authority on teaching and learning and senior co-director of Project Zero, introduces a new, practical, and research-based framework for teaching. He describes how teaching any subject at any level can be made more effective if students are introduced to the whole game, rather than isolated pieces of a discipline. Using real-world examples, Perkins explains how learning academic subjects should be approached like learning baseball, or any game, and he demonstrates this with seven principles for making learning whole: from making the game worth playing (emphasizing the importance of motivation to sustained learning), to working on the hard parts (the importance of thoughtful practice), to learning how to learn (developing self-managed learners). ISBN: 978-0-470-63371-7

A Typology of Classroom Questions

A Typology of Classroom Questions: A look at the types of questions teachers ask and the answers/logic that they produce.

Recalling and reviewing of Knowledge and information

• Terminology

• Procedures

• Content

• Events and context

Procedural: Directing the work of the class

• Going over directions and assignments

• Clarifying

• Checking for attention, agreement.

• Task completion

• Organizational and management related

Generative: Exploring the topic

• Authentic questions or wonders that teacher doesn’t know the answer to.

• Essential questions that initiate exploration of a topic

Constructive: Building New Understanding

• Extending & Interpreting

• Connecting & Linking

• Orienting and focusing on big ideas, central concepts, or purpose

• Evaluating

Facilitative: Promotes the learner’s own thinking & understanding

• Requesting elaboration, reasons, evidence, justification

• Generating discussion among the class to hear different perspectives

• Clarifying and Uncovering

Zooms: Promoting Schoolwide Inquiry and Improving Practice

Abstract: A group of teachers and the program director describe a powerful collaborative and interactive teacher research process they developed at their school. The process engages teachers in generating new insights about teaching and learning. This article provides a road map for creating Zooms—documentation panels that are snapshots of classroom life—as unique, concrete models of teacher research. The authors illustrate how constructing Zooms helps teachers focus on children’s learning when so much is going on in a lively classroom. Ben and his colleagues show how they created a professional learning community—a culture of inquiry in their early childhood school that also enhanced staff collegiality. The teachers evolved from individual, reflective practitioners to collaborative, schoolwide teacher researchers. A real strength of the project is its emphasis on the teachers as knowledge creators. The Zooms process builds collaboration in concrete and structured ways and makes schoolwide inquiry key in teachers’ professional development. —Barbara Henderson

Five Minds For the Future

We live in a time of vast changes, and those changes call for entirely new ways of learning and thinking. In Five Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead:the disciplinary mind: mastery of major schools of thought (including science, mathematics, and history) and of at least one professional craft;the synthesizing mind: ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others;the creating mind: capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions, and phenomena;the respectful mind: awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups; and the ethical mind: fulfillment of ones responsibilities as a worker and citizen. World-renowned for his theory of multiple intelligences, Gardner takes that thinking to the next level in this book, drawing from a wealth of diverse examples to illuminate his ideas. Concise and engaging, Five Minds for the Future will inspire lifelong learning in any reader as well as provide valuable insights for those charged with training and developing organizational leaders: both today and tomorrow. ISBN-13: 978-1422145357

Uncovering students’ thinking about thinking using concept maps

Abstract: A method for uncovering students’ thinking about thinking, specifically their meta-strategic knowledge, is explored within the context of an ongoing, multi-year intervention designed to promote the development of students’ thinking dispositions. The development of a concept-map instrument that classroom teachers can use and an analytic framework for interpreting students’ responses is presented. In a preliminary study, the concept map instrument is piloted to evaluate changes in students’ conceptions of thinking after a year’s participation in classrooms where their teachers actively sought to make thinking more visible by noticing and naming the thinking observed as well as introducing and using thinking routines (Ritchhart and Perkins. Educational Leadership, 65(5), 57–61 2008). Concept maps from 239 students from grades 3 through 11 were analyzed. Results suggest that students’ conceptions of thinking do improve with age but also can be substantially developed through a classroom culture where thinking is modeled and rich opportunities for thinking are present. The concept map instrument itself proved to be a robust instrument for uncovering students’ thinking about thinking.