Core Thinking Skills
I’ve been reading about core thinking skills as described in Dimensions of Thinking: A Framework for Curriculum and Instruction. I believe the information could be helpful to us in the future as we attempt to refine our alignment process.
Marzano, et al make it clear that although their core thinking skills are presented in list form, they believe the skills to be discrete. They posit “highly able thinkers” use these skills recursively and in clusters.
Here’s the breakdown:
Focusing Skills
1. Defining problems
2. Setting goals
Information Gathering Skills
3. Observing
4. Formulating questions
Remembering Skills
5. Encoding
6. Recalling
Organizing Skills
7. Comparing
8. Classifying
9. Ordering
10. Representing
Analyzing Skills
11. Identifying attributes and components
12. Identifying relationships and patterns
13. Identifying main ideas
14. Identifying errors
Generating Skills
15. Inferring
16. Predicting
17. Elaborating
Integrating Skills
18. Summarizing
19. Restructuring
Evaluating Skills
20. Establish criteria
21. Verifying
Especially in terms of ELA, student assignments could be tagged with one or more of skills- similar to what we’re doing now with Bloom’s.