Infusing the Teaching of Critical and Creative Thinking Into Elementary Instruction

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.