Teaching for Thinking Today: Strategies, and Activities for the K-8 Classroom

These are turbulent times. We live in a climate of vigorous testing and memorization, so how can we both engage and challenge our children to learn and become thinking citizens in our society? In her invaluable new book, Selma Wassermann takes a step forward from Louis Raths’s seminal work and gives us some truly helpful answers to this modern dilemma. Using new data from her extensive field work, Wassermann (a co-author of Teaching for Thinking) provides a wealth of innovative classroom strategies that will enable and empower students to grasp the “big ideas” across virtually all curriculum areas and apply this knowledge to problem solving. Using a teacher-friendly style, this practical book:

• Provides the theoretical framework, tools, and teaching strategies to implement teaching-for-thinking programs in K–8 classrooms.
• Offers applications for classroom implementation in key curriculum areas such as science, math, language arts, social studies, computer studies, art, and music.
• Demonstrates how the standard classroom curriculum can be “tweaked” to emphasize higher-order cognitive skills.