Thinking Skills Instructional Strategies: Teaching Students with Additional Needs to be Better Thinkers

Abstract

Thinking is a learnable skill that has been emphasised in curricula internationally. However, there are few resources available to teach thinking skills to students with additional needs. The aim of this study was to develop a measure of thinking skills to provide teachers with an integrated system of assessment, reporting, planning, and instructional advice.

This chapter describes a phase of the research in which teachers collaborated to propose and review a bank of thinking skills instructional advice for students with additional needs. Participants (n = 16) were leading teachers with experience teaching thinking skills to students with additional needs from specialist settings for school-age students (5–20 years) or mainstream primary schools. Teachers were provided with a partially completed individual learning plan (ILP) for one de-identified student representing one of eight learning levels of a thinking skills progression. Included in the partially completed ILPs were strategies assembled from a review of evidence-based instructional strategies for thinking skills that were matched to the case study student’s level of learning. The teachers reviewed and drafted learning goals and strategies. These reflections were collected in the form of annotated ILPs which were analysed for applicability and appropriateness for students in both mainstream and specialist settings. Next, the resulting intervention strategies were piloted with teachers from a mainstream primary school and a specialist setting to further establish the suitability of the proposed teaching strategies for use in the classroom. Ultimately, the aim of this phase of the study was to develop intervention strategies to further teacher understanding of how to teach the skills of thinking.