Overview: Many experts in the field of creativity and higher-level thinking skills have developed a variety of strategies and techniques to help students, young and old, improve their use and effectiveness with various higher-level thinking skills. Examples that may be familiar to you include the brainstorming and SCAMPER techniques, as well as de Bono’s Six Hats strategies.
The first assignment for Module Four asks you to read five digital sources to learn more about a few of these published strategies so that you can compare each strategy’s steps or components with your own cognitive process when you execute the same higher-level thinking or creativity skill. In addition, your review of these strategies is designed to support your development of similar strategies for the higher-level thinking skills you listed in your W1A1 assignment as being important for your students to learn or improve. Lastly, you are asked to find and share the most important ideas and details from these readings.
When a skill strategy is discussed in this set of three modules, we are referring to a specific sequence of clearly described steps that lead to the successful execution of a given higher-level thinking skill. For example, this is a teacher-created strategy/heuristic for the higher-level thinking skill of making an inference:
1. Create or name a question you have about a topic.
2. Figure out if this is a question that can’t be answered with your opinion or by reading a book or talking to people. If so, it is probably an inference question.
3. Remember what an inference is – your best logical guess using information from your memory and from your research.
4. Think about what you already know about the question.
5. Look for any new information to is easily available to you ( “right in front of your eyes”) about the question.
6. Select the information from Steps 4 and 5 that is related to your inference question.
7. Use both sets of information as “clues” to help you take a big leap from what you know to what you don’t know for sure.
8. Make your best guess. (A best guess has some evidence and a lot of logic behind it. You will know it is your best guess if you think you can do a good job explaining why your guess is probably true.)
Direction: Access and read the digital resources listed below, Analyze the way in which each strategy attempts to mirror the thinking of a person who successfully uses the select skill to solve a problem, propose a solution, answer a question, or apply the skill to a real-world situation. Consider how you might be able to use the sample strategies as exemplars for your own work in developing strategies for your ten selected higher-level thinking skills from W1A1. ( My ten higher level thinking skills need to use or referenced in paper are as followed comparing and contrasting, determining cause and effect, determining bias, identifying missing information, judging the credibility of a source, determining the strength of an argument, summarizing, problem-solving, decision-making, and creative problem-solving.)
– https://www.niu.edu/citl/resources/guides/instructional-guide/brainstorming.shtml#:~:text=Brainstorming%20is%20a%20strategy%20used,follow%20when%20developing%20brainstorming%20sessions. This link explains the brainstorming strategy for eliciting a fluent, flexible, and original list of possible solutions for a given problem.
– https://www.ideou.com/blogs/inspiration/7-simple-rules-of-brainstorming This link simply lists the brainstorming steps or rules. Consider which of your ten higher-level skill processes could be explained with a set of rules that you develop as part of your teaching and instruction.
– https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/learn-how-to-use-the-best-ideation-methods-scamper This link explains the various components of the SCAMPER strategy that was developed by Robert Eberle over 70 years ago to teach imagination skills to young children and to teach older children how to creatively solve a problem or improve a product
– Planning is also one of the higher-level thinking skills. https://www.hugo.team/blog/how-to-make-a-plan This article is about how to make an effective plan is written for an adult readership. Consider how you might extract the basic steps of planning for use with a student audience.
– Decision-making is another higher-level thinking skill that might be useful for students to learn or improve. https://www.umassd.edu/media/umassdartmouth/fycm/decision_making_process.pdf This article was written for Dartmouth University students. It describes the decision-making process as a set of steps. Again, consider how you might simplify the language for use with your students.
– Draft a list of 6-8 complete sentence bullets that describe the key content you gleaned from these resources. Add another 6-8 complete-sentence bullets that describe the conclusions, inferences, and connections you made while reading about these thinking skills strategies.
– Reference Page APA