Teaching Thinking Skills in the School Curriculum

Abstract

It has been argued in an earlier paper that thought is treated by psychologists not as a product which has been learned but as a process, a set of skills which may be learned; and that the study of thinking is central to teacher education. It was suggested that the central objectives in teaching are to help the pupils think efficiently and to communicate those thoughts succinctly whilst subject knowledge and skills form the substrate upon which these processes are developed. All of this takes place within the developmental and social context (Montgomery, 1981). It is these thinking skills, and how they may be fostered across the school curriculum, which are now the subject of attention. A model of the central objectives in practical teaching is given in Figure 1.