HOTs: Higher-Order Thinking Skills Tennis

According to eduscapes, 'Critical thinking involves logical thinking and reasoning including skills such as comparison, classification, sequencing, cause/effect, patterning, webbing, analogies, deductive and inductive reasoning, forecasting, planning, hyphothesizing, and critquing.'

Curiosity is only aroused only when higher-level questions are being asked, otherwise students will tune-out and switch-off.

Helen's esponse cards used in the 'game' of Higher-Order Questionning; a technique for chunking up or down Bloom's Taxonomy in Q&A session. The teacher holds up one of the three cards according to level of appropriate questionning for the learner ('because', 'therefore' and 'however' in that order).

The learner holds up the card that best matches the type of response; the teacher can easily see these cards. The teacher's job is to challenge the learner to aswer higher level questions based on cues picked up from previous responses and the cards being held up by the learners. If the learner is ready for higher order thinking, then the teacher will sense this and move to a higher-order card. This is a powerful tool for differentiated questioning.