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For students to feel empowered to use academic thinking skills, they need practice applying them in different content areas. The following instructional practice is designed for students to practice creating questions and answers corresponding to specific academic thinking skills in order to better develop their use of the vocabulary and terminology.
PREPARATION:
Select an article or textbook section that is moderately challenging but can also be read multiple times in 20 minutes.
Identify reading strategies that students are familiar with so that the focus of the lesson is on the thinking skills.
STEPS:
READ TEXT: Â Have students complete a first read and a second read of the text.
GROUP STUDENTS: Â After the second read-through, place students into groups of three or four.
PREPARE STUDENTS:Â Explain to students that they will be creating questions from the text that correspond to each of the four academic thinking skills.
DISTRIBUTE 8 SENTENCE STRIPS: Â Distribute eight sentence strips to each group so that they can write two questions for each thinking skill.
MODEL QUESTION BASED ON THINKING SKILL: Â Before the groups begin writing their questions, model for the class what an apply question would look like for the text.
WRITE AND SHARE AN "APPLY" QUESTION:Â Have each group write one apply question. After each group has written their question, have a student from each group stand and share their question with the class, checking to see that each group has understood what an apply question looks like.
ADVISE STUDENTS TO USE ACADEMIC THINKING SKILLS BEFORE HAND: Â Before releasing students to write their remaining questions, instruct them not to use the specific academic-thinking-skill words but to instead create questions that apply the meaning of those words.
REDIRECT CONFUSED STUDENTS:Â If students are struggling to write questions correctly, refer them to the academic thinking skills word bank or question stems to prompt original ideas.
EXCHANGE QUESTIONS: Â After students have completed their eight questions, have groups exchange their questions with another group.
ARRANGE QUESTIONS INTO THINKING-SKILLS PAIRS:Â First, have groups arrange the questions into their thinking-skill pairs.
ANSWER QUESTIONS:Â Once each group feels like they have accurately paired the questions, they will answer the questions on the back of the sentence strip.
REFLECT:Â To conclude the lesson, have groups explain their thought process behind the groupings and their answers to those questions.
SELECT BEST QUESTION: Â Finally, have different groups select the best question that they answered and have a student from each group share that question with the whole class.
VARIATION:
If introducing the academic thinking skills for the first time, start with just one skill and build up to all four over the course of reading multiple texts.
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