Higher-order thinking, or using complex skills to understand a learning topic, is a hot topic in educational circles these days. Higher-order thinking encourages kids to not just memorize math facts, for instance, but to understand how those math facts connect to other concepts.
Today’s centerpiece article on TeachHUB.com, penned by frequent contributing writer Janelle Cox (a seasoned educator based in Upstate New York), takes a look at 10 teaching strategies that will bring about higher-order thinking in your students.
Janelle’s teaching strategies include:
- Connect Concepts
- Teach Students to Infer
- Encourage Creative Thinking
- Use Mind Movies
- And More!
Janelle sums up her article thusly, in a paragraph entitled, “Teach QARs”: “Question-Answer-Relationships, or QARs, teach students to label the type of question that is being asked, then use that information to help them formulate an answer. Students must decipher if the answer can be found in a text or on the Internet, or if they must rely on their own prior knowledge to answer it. This strategy has been found to be effective for higher-order thinking because students become more aware of the relationship between the information in a text and their prior knowledge, which helps them decipher which strategy to use when they need to seek an answer.”
How do you enhance higher order thinking skills in your classroom? Do you have any tips that you would like to share? Please feel free to leave a comment.
Effective Communication via a Classroom Newsletter
In this day and age where every classroom has a blog, enewsletter, and website, it’s easy to forget that an old-fashioned paper newsletter is one of the most-effective ways to maintain school-to-home communication.
Yesterday on TeachHUB.com, frequent contributing writer Janelle Cox extolled the virtues of the hard-copy newsletter, nothing that parents are almost guaranteed to read it.
Janelle’s tips on designing and writing a useful newsletter include:
• Announce only new content
• Use spiffy graphics
• Create a theme
• And more!
