How Can One Specify and Teach Thinking Skills?

Abstract

By conceptualizing thinking as a form of behavior, the methods of learning theory become applicable to the teaching of thinking skills. Most thinking skills can then be defined and specified as heuristics that are useful in diverse situations. The many situations and problems, social and other, that a student encounters throughout the day, can be described in terms of the heuristics that would help the student to make the many required small decisions. Such heuristics generally take the form of identifying these situations, as, for instance, “I’m uncomfortable,” “I’m faced with a problem,” “I’m trying to understand something,” and for each such type of situation, to invoke a set of applicable questions like, “Have I seen a similar problem?” “Is the problem worth solving?” “Do I need help?” Each of these heuristics would have follow-on heuristics, thus forming trees that branch. Learning theory provides effective procedures for teaching such decision trees. Once learned and applied repeatedly, heuristics become automatized and increasingly covert until they have turned into habitual thinking patterns. A practical approach to teaching a wide range of thinking skills, including creativity, is to treat thinking skills as heuristics that are learned in overt form and then made covert and automatized by dint of extensive repetition.