New discoveries about the brain and how it functions and significant findings from process/product research have major implications for the teaching profession. Connecting these discoveries and findings with classroom methods was the focus of the second annual Making Connections symposium. These proceedings from the symposium provide four…

This curriculum has been designed to provide high school students with an increased awareness of the importance of responsibility in their own lives and its place in contemporary society, and to encourage their capacity and inclination to deal with issues of responsibility wisely and effectively. Students are asked to examine and make decisions…

This document summarizes discussions held at a conference of the National Institute on the Assessment of Experiential Learning, which is concerned with prior learning assessment (PLA), a process developed for awarding college-level credit for out-of-class experiences. The conference consisted of two tracks, beginning and advanced; this format…

This practicum was designed to incorporate critical thinking skills instruction and practice into a fourth-grade curriculum to increase fourth-grade students' ability to recognize and apply critical thinking strategies to appropriate situations. This program concentrated on the increasing of six critical thinking skills: classification, sequence…

This guide was designed for teachers to help students recognize and develop their responsibilities to society. The concepts focused on include: respect for citizenship, respect for people of other cultures, respect for people of all ages, respect for people who have a handicap, respect for work, respect for being a wise consumer, and respect for…

Because it has been overworked, underanalyzed, and undefined, critical thinking has come to mean anything or nothing. The best work on critical thinking imagines it as an act of composing and revising. Definitions of critical thinking have undergone a historical evolution--from general problem-solving "skills" to a complex of…

Many of those working to improve science and mathematics education have a vision where all students are successful and the celebration of success constantly presents the challenge to push the edge of the vision outward. The National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics established standards that some science educators are attempting to emulate.…

This curriculum supplement is designed for high school juniors and seniors to augment the edition designed for freshmen and sophomores. The document is divided into 18 units. Unit 1 is on critical thinking, and serves to help the student distinguish among values, feelings, fallacies, and facts. The next five units are grouped together under child…

Three books represent the recent work of leading U.S. proponents of critical approaches to pedagogy: "Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education," by Peter McLaren; "Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching," edited by Ira Shor; and "Teachers as…

This practicum report describes a program in which strategies for improving self-managing behavior skills of second graders were designed and implemented. The goals of the Self-Management and Responsibility Training (SMART) Program were to improve students' behavior and encourage development of students' critical thinking skills. The four basic…

The problem addressed in this practicum was multifaceted: how to alleviate feelings of isolation experienced by hospitalized and homebound (H/H) children and their families; how to increase professional understanding of H/H teachers' sensitive and demanding roles; and how to increase the sensitivity of middle school students and faculty to the…

Writing courses which incorporate the tenets of "critical literacy" (such as the "difference" curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin) not only often fail to make students more aware of the role ideology plays in their culture, but also create profound new silences in the classroom--silences caused by political…

This study describes the rationale and activities developed and tested by a project in Israel entitled Biology Critical Thinking (BCT). The BCT project aims at developing a pool of activities that can be incorporated within the regular course of study without investing too much extra time. The purposes of the study are: (1) to present the…

An attempt is made to synthesize the diverse perspectives on the teaching of thinking, especially in the area of social studies. A conception is developed that incorporates major theoretical orientations as well as the views of teachers. The conception emphasizes interpretation, analysis, and manipulation of information to solve problems that…

Originally developed for the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS) system, this learning package on using skills and strategies for effective learning is designed for teachers who wish to upgrade or expand their teaching skills on their own. The package includes a comprehensive search of the ERIC database; a lecture giving an overview on the…