Inspiration for Extending Thinking Tasks

Carol Gardner
Jan 11, 2010

"I know how crucial it is to go beyond acquisition to tasks that require my students to extend their thinking, but I just need more ideas for doing so. Where do we find these types of assignments?" This is a common question often asked in workshops and through e-mail to our website. There are several options.

Choosing or creating good Extending Thinking tasks depends first on being clear about what we want students to understand more deeply as a result of completing the assignment. Once this decision has been made we then select a thinking strategy that will best help us meet that objective. For example, if students need to have a deeper understanding of the causes and effects of a particular event, we might consider a task that requires students to analyze perspectives related to the event. If we want students to carefully analyze the particular steps in a process, then error analysis would be a good choice. Often we want students to learn content that has a pattern that is similar to other information. In this case abstracting would work well. If we want students to recognize distinctions among topics, then comparing and contrasting would be a logical choice.

Once the desired outcomes of the lesson and the appropriate thinking strategy have both been identified, we can begin getting ideas for tasks. It's not necessary to always develop these from scratch. Connecting Extending Thinking includes many extending lessons easily adapted for multiple concepts. For example, a lesson looking at Westward Expansion from multiple perspectives could be adapted for another period of history. An inductive lesson related to language devices in a particular text could easily be used as a model for developing a similar task tied to another text. A lesson using deductive reasoning to solve long division could certainly be adapted to apply to another operation.

Textbooks and other teacher resource materials also typically offer higher level thinking tasks, often labeled as extensions. Again these can be used as they are or adapted for a particular context. For example, a fourth grade teacher wanted to deepen his students' understanding of fractional relationships. He selected deductive reasoning as an appropriate thinking strategy. He discovered an idea in his teacher's edition that asked students to use clues to solve riddles to determine a particular fraction. He adapted the task by giving students several examples to solve and then had them create their ow n riddles.

The WritingFix website sponsored by the Northern Nevada Writing Project (writingfix.com) has a wealth of teacher ideas and lessons for extending thinking through writing across the curriculum. For example, in the lesson Are Artists Good Neighbors?, students write letters comparing and contrasting conflicting artistic styles. In another lesson, Your Glorious Gene Pool, students write a poem for two voices describing their genetic makeup from their own perspective and from that of a geneticist.

Finally, since the best inspiration comes from fellow teachers, LEARNING-FOCUSED Connections invites you to share descriptions of the great Extending Thinking assignments and lessons you have used successfully with your students. We look forward to hearing from you. Please send ideas to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Insert Extending Thinking ideas in the subject line.