How to lead students to engage in higher order thinking — from edutopia.org by Karen Harris
Asking students a series of essential questions at the start of a course signals that deep engagement is a requirement.
Excerpt:
Essential questions—a staple of project-based learning—call on students’ higher order thinking and connect their lived experience with important texts and ideas. A thinking inventory is a carefully curated set of about 10 essential questions of various types, and completing one the first thing I ask students to do in every course I teach.
Although a thinking inventory is made up of questions, it’s more than a questionnaire. When we say we’re “taking inventory”—whether we’re in a warehouse or a relationship—we mean we’re taking stock of where things stand at a given moment in time, with the understanding that those things are fluid and provisional. With a thinking inventory, we’re taking stock of students’ thinking, experiences, and sense-making at the beginning of the course.