Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Bertrand Tchoumi Baltimore Polytechnic Institute Baltimore City Doctoral student Urban Education Leadership Morgan State University

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Objective: Participants will discuss and develop ideas and strategies for creating activities that allow foreign language learners to engage in Higher Order Thinking by manipulating information and ideas in order to solve problems and discover new meaning and understandings

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson –I think, therefore, I am (Rene Descartes) – The effectiveness of language teaching will depend upon what is being taught other than language, that will be recognized by the learners as purposeful relevant extension of their schematic horizons. (Widdowson, 1990) – The term thinking skills refers to the human capacity to think in conscious ways to achieve certain purposes. Such processes include remembering, questioning, forming concepts, planning, reasoning, imaging, solving problems, making decisions and judgments, translating thoughts into words and so on. Thinking skills are ways in which humans exercise the sapiens part of being home sapiens ( Robert Fisher)

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson HOT stands for Higher Order Thinking H : Higher O : Order T : Thinking

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Blooms taxonomy and thinking skills What he calls cognitive goals of education has been used for instructional planning and outcomes. He identifies 2 types of cognitive skills: – A) Lower order cognitive skills – B) Higher order cognitive skills

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson A) Lower order cognitive skills – Knowledge – Comprehension – Application B) Higher order cognitive skills – Analysis – Synthesis – evaluation

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson The thinking skills instructional framework 1. Information Processing 2. Reasoning 3. Enquiry 4. Creative Thinking 5. Evaluation

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Types of thinking skills activities 1. Mysteries 2. Odd one out 3. Living graph 4. Use of images 5. Classification 6. Concept map 7. Memory map

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Types of thinking skills activities 1. Mysteries Question and a series of statements to support a discussion around this question.

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Types of thinking skills activities 2. Odd one out Focus on a specific item of grammar and other concepts to expose students to high level vocabulary on a specific topic or mix topics.

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Types of thinking skills activities 3. Living graph Re-build sequence of a story from a cut-out text. Plot a graph based on text read

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Types of thinking skills activities 4. Use of images *Find a title *Draw a line from the picture and label it *Speculate about it: when, where, what, who, why *Do a collective memory activity where students collaborate to remember the whole picture

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Types of thinking skills activities 5. Classification Brainstorming and sorting

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Types of thinking skills activities 6. Concept maps enable pupils to examine and explain the relationships between individual words, to make assumptions about unknown words based on their existing knowledge, and thus reinforce their prior learning

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Types of thinking skills activities 7. Memory maps Introduce a list of new vocabulary items and their meanings and at the same time help pupils develop their techniques for memorising new words.

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson Final thoughts…. 1. Learning a modern foreign language is already a critical thinking experience for students; We have to continue what we have been doing; however, we must be more explicit both for students and for observers about what we incorporating critical thinking; 2. Incorporating critical thinking activities may require the use of language other that the target language 3. It reinforces the mastery of structural concepts and help students understand the language process. 4. You dont have to have critical thinking in every lesson.

Serving It Strategies for Incorporating Thinking Skills into a Lesson REFERENCES 1. Thinking Skills in Languages Lessons to Develop Active Learners, 2. Thinking skills activities in French, sunderland/resources%20fr%20ts.htmhttp:// sunderland/resources%20fr%20ts.htm 3. Thinking skills activities in Spanish, sunderland/resources%20sp%20ts.htmhttp:// sunderland/resources%20sp%20ts.htm