WHAT:
Teachers can promote critical thinking skills by using a variety of questions or tasks. Encouraging students to respond with higher levels of thinking requires teachers to consciously plan and incorporate questions or tasks at multiple levels. This can be accomplished by using Bloom’s Taxonomy, Hess’ Cognitive Rigor Matrices or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Levels.
WHY:
It is important that teachers ask higher-order questions and provide tasks which require extended responses beyond factual or recall responses. Responding to higher-order questions and tasks promotes language development and a deeper level of content understanding. Higher level questions and tasks require learners to elaborate and help improve their ability to use academic vocabulary. It is important to think of higher-order questions prior to the lesson delivery, as it may be difficult to think of them “on your feet.”
HOW: Below are examples of higher order tasks and questions created using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) chart:
DOK WheelDOK_Question_Stems.pdf
