EDUC 451B: Week 1A Resource Annotation

 Crawford, Alan & Mathews, Samuel & Makinster, Jamie & Saul, E.. (2005). Teaching And Learning Strategies For The Thinking Classroom. 

Academic Source

This book offers a lot of research-based lesson structures to incorporate into your thinking classroom. The authors of this book make a point of teaching "small idea" learning rather than "big idea", i.e. the difference of thinking in terms of importance of difference competencies (big ideas) and instead the actual act of critical thinking and active learning (small ideas). 

There are 8 core lessons that the book explains: learning information from text, understanding narrative text, cooperative learning, conducting a discussion, writing and inquiry, writing to persuade, understanding arguments, and critical listening. Of these core lessons, I believe that cooperative learning and conducting a discussion will be the most helpful and applicable for me. 

Finally, this book also discusses assessment in the thinking classroom, which is something I am struggling with in my practicum placement and as I settle into the idea of building a thinking classroom of my own. I think that this is a great place for me to learn how to evaluate the abilities of my students to think critically.