Announcing the Extending Thinking Strategies Student Book

Carol Gardner
Mar 29, 2010

Teachers have long been asking for a resource to support their students in using Extending Thinking strategies. Now it is here from LEARNING-FOCUSED. The just-released, exciting and fun Extending Thinking Student book provides students with tools and scaffolds for becoming proficient with the 8 Extending Thinking strategies.

For each thinking strategy "Professor Bright Idea" provides guiding questions to help students build expertise with the strategy. Steps in each thinking process are described verbally and graphically giving students a handy reference whenever their assignments require them to use a particular type of thinking. In addition, several graphic organizer templates for each strategy give a visual model of the type of thinking involved. Signal words are provided for each strategy in a format that allows students to interact with the vocabulary and write their own descriptions and memory cues.

An exciting section is the Questions to Remember component featuring questions aligned to each strategy. These are great models for questions that go beyond answers that are "right there" in the text. Questions such as these expand students' thinking and help them develop a deeper understanding of the content they are learning. For example, under Analyzing Perspectives some of the questions include:

• How do these perspectives compare?

• What motive might someone have for this perspective?

• What are different positions related to _______?

The questions have a variety of uses. Students might reference them as they develop their own before-during-after questions about a reading passage or content area topic. Particular questions can be assigned for students to respond to as an independent assignment perhaps in a literacy center, or as classroom or homework assignments. Exposure to the language of these types of questions over time will assist students in recognizing the thinking strategies being called for in their assignments and on standardized tests.

Undoubtedly you will come up with even more ways to utilize this great resource with students. Be sure to share these creative ideas with us by emailing them to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)!