Action Guide for Thinking through Dispositions
- Look for opportunities in your curriculum where students can or should think deeply about certain topics, ideas, or concepts – a place where a decision is made, evidence is or should be evaluated, alternative explanations are called for, or another perspective taken. Find ways to help students become sensitive to these occasions.
- Teach the skills of good thinking while helping students learn about the topic or issue at hand. Introduce and explain the skills associated with thinking performances like generating alternative options, seeking multiple perspectives, problem-finding, looking for hidden assumptions, and pro/con reasoning. Students often lack the skills to think critically and creatively. Students need clear explanations and direct instruction about how to think critically.
- Explore thinking occasions that are based on classroom interaction as well as those that are curriculum-based. It will help students see that opportunities for good thinking live all around them.
- Vary student interactions. For example, one day students might work collaboratively on a thinking problem. Another day, they might work one-on-one with you or another educator. And another day, students might work independently. The key is to provide a varied array of thinking occasions and learning formats across the curriculum.
- A big part of cultivating thinking dispositions in the classroom, is to assess for it. Many teachers and students find infusing a range of formal and informal thinking-centered assessments (e.g. informal feedback, rubrics, self-evaluations, peer evaluation, portfolios, etc.) into their teaching as a practical and tangible way to begin to teach thinking dispositions. The idea is to make your expectations about your students’ thinking performances as explicit and concrete as possible.
- Introduce students to lots of thinking-centered vocabulary and find ways to infuse that vocabulary into your lessons. For example, rather than asking "What do you think?", you might ask precisely, "What do you suspect or surmise?" The better students’ thinking vocabulary is, the better they’ll be at articulating their thinking processes.
- Provide lots of models of good thinking. Decide as a group what "counts" as good thinking and then provide lots of examples of those kinds of good thinking in action. Some teachers like to invite, local artists, scientists, or writers into their classrooms to discuss the types of thinking they do. Other teachers provide models by talking aloud about their thinking process or they might brainstorm ideas aloud with another teacher.
- Encourage and cultivate the attitudes and inclinations that accompany good thinking. Skills don’t amount to much, if students do not learn how to invest themselves into their learning consistently over time. Find ways to value pro-thinking behaviors such as open-mindedness, reflection, organized thinking, inquisitiveness, wonder, perseverance, intellectual carefulness and honesty.
- Find ways to connect the good thinking values and attitudes and skills from one subject to another, from one context to another.
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