Critical Thinking Strategies

Providing high-level cognitive tasks is a major strategy for supporting gifted students, whether in the regular classroom or through other services. However, only about 40 percent of high-level tasks are actually implemented at a high level. Research reveals common patterns in how teachers inadvertently decrease the cognitive demands through their methods of questioning, scaffolding, allocating class time, and more. In this workshop, participants will experience high-level collaborative tasks; learn to identify the differences between tasks that are merely hard versus those that require critical thinking skills; and explore the common factors that maintain cognitive demands of a task as well as those that decrease rigor. They will then work with an implementation strategy guide to plan for classroom facilitation of a high-level task.