Thinking Ahead Engaging All Teachers in Critical Thinking [Hardcover]

To foster success for their students in our chaotic world, teachers must model deliberative reasoning and critic-creative thinking. Across a range of subjects, Wagner, Johnson, Fair and Faskos book highlights effective instructional practices that infuse deep cognition and dialogue into classroom learning. A valuable resource for pre-service and in-service teachers.What is the purpose of education? What is education for? Why do we teach what we do? & the way we do? These bedrock questions are topics Wagner, Johnson, Fair, and Fasko pose, answer, and ?notably ?invite you and your students to consider. Their tack is novel. Using what they term scripts, they guide thought and summon explanations originating in questions such as whether the American system of checks and balances in government is fragile. With commitment, this can hone 21st-century skills and generate resources needed to wrestle with deep issues about education. My advice: Engage!This is an extremely important topic for education. I particularly like the treatment of critical thinking as dually important for both intellectual and social/moral aimsfor exploring the great questions of human existence and also for developing caring/understanding relations with those with whom we converse. Ill look forward to seeing more on this.As a college professor for four decades, it is a great irony that we are never required to take even one course in How to Teach. If I had read Thinking Ahead before I started teaching, I would have been a much more effective teacher. ?But, even as I approach the end of my teaching career, it is not too late to apply many of its lessons.Many educators and policy makers advocate for instruction in critical thinking and related higher-order skills in K12 classrooms. But as Wagner, Johnson, Fair, and Fasko rightly point out, K12 teachers cannot effectively nurture and model skills that they?themselves?havent yet mastered. In?Thinking Ahead,?Wagner et al. provide concrete guidl„