Facilitated by Amanda Dressing and Karen Green

CapabilitiesCultivates higher order thinking Facilitates substantive conversation

Monitors progress

Read page 2 of your handout.

Use the highlighters provided to match asmany sentences as you can to the teachercapabilities of this Domain.

Lower-order thinking occurs when studentsare asked to receive or recite factualinformation or to employ rules andalgorithms through repetitive routines.Students are given pre specified knowledgeranging from simple facts and information

tomore complex concepts.Such knowledge is conveyed to studentsthrough a reading, worksheet, lecture orother direct instructional medium.

Write a definition for high order thinking in page 2 of your workbook.

Higher-order thinking requires students to manipulate information and ideas in ways that transform their meaning and implications. This transformation occurs when students combine facts and ideas in order to synthesise, generalise, explain, hypothesise or arrive at some conclusion or interpretation.Manipulating information and ideas throughthese processes allows students to solveproblems and discover new (for them)

meanings and understandings.

At each table is a VELS level card.

Move to a table with the Level you choose to work with today.

A Taxonomy of Cognitive Objectives

Originally developed in the 1950sby Benjamin Bloom and colleagues.It is a means of expressing qualitatively different kinds of thinking.

This taxonomy continues to be one of the mostuniversally applied models.

It provides a way to organise thinking skills into

six levels, from the most basic to the morecomplex levels of thinking.

Original Terms New Terms

Evaluation CreatingSynthesis EvaluatingAnalysis AnalysingApplication ApplyingComprehension UnderstandingKnowledge Remembering

See pages 3 & 4 for background information

Imagine you have to teach someone aboutapples ...

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Thinking about Apples

Remembering List the health benefits of eating apples.

Understanding Summarise the health benefits of eating apples.

Applying Use the most appropriate baking apple to bake an apple pie.

Analysing Identify four different ways to use apples andanalyse which have the highest health

benefits.Provide references to support your statements.

Evaluating Consider this statement. ‘Serving apple pie foran after school snack for children is healthy.’Judge the value of this statement.

Creating Convert an ‘unhealthy’ recipe for apple pie to a‘healthy’ recipe by designing a new one with your choice of ingredients. Explain the healthbenefits of using the ingredients you choseversus the original ones.

In your group of four - develop some ‘Bloom’sTaxonomy’ level tasks that would help a personthink about the concept on your table.

Write your tasks on the strips of paper providedas well as recording them on page 3 of yourworkbook.

You will get some ideas on page 5 of your handout.

Match the tasks that another group has written

against the Bloom’s Taxonomy descriptors.

Then check your answers with the other group.

Survival Balance CHANGE Justice

Sustainability Power

Morality Systems Creativity

Community

Within the set of tasks you devised didany of them provide an intellectualchallenge?

You have achieved Level 1 status in the Domain

of ELABORATE in the teacher capability of‘Cultivating Higher Order Thinking’.

Was there a task that supports the transfer of

learning and assists students to applyconcepts from familiar to unfamiliar?

Maybe you had a task that involved thestudents finding out the school/council policyon Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

You might modify that as follows:Record the policy you have at home (writing

ordrawing) for RRR. Find out if/how the schoolcouncil policy differs from your own.

YEP?Level 2...YAY!

What about a task that requires students tomanipulate information and ideas to

generaterules and principles?

No? Have a go!Record your ideas in your workbookon page 4.

Now that we’ve examined the RRR policies, from home, school and our local council,

writea rule that you could apply to each of theseprocesses that would help people whenworking out what to do with their rubbish.

For example:If you can eat it, you can recycle it.

You are operating at e5 Level 3 inthe teacher capability of cultivating

higher order thinking.

Quite a challenge eh!

You need to be able to explain to your studentshow you scaffolded their learning and how itlead to them gaining deeper insights andunderstandings as they moved from low tohigh order thinking.

If your students understand this, they are morelikely to have a greater understanding of thedepth of thinking required when they arecompleting the assessment task.

Primary/Special: Choose those words from the Blooms list that students at your level would understand. Now highlight those words that YOU have used in your teaching this term.

Secondary: There will be many students that would understand all of the words in the Blooms list. Highlight those words that YOU have used in your teaching this term.

Refer to page 5 of your handout.

You can make an edible cake if you blend the ingredients and put it in the oven.

You’re a better cook if you beat the ingredients more because you know it will make the cake lighter.

You become a chef when you do both of these, layer the cake and add the icing and the candle.

You’re a Master Chef when you can help someone understand how you made the cake and why you took the steps you did. Then they can go away and bakea great cake too!

NOW THAT’S A CAKE!

Substantive conversations can be aided by the development of high-order questions.

Pages 8 and 9 of your handout have questionstems for all of the levels of Bloom’s

Taxonomy.

Analysing Identify four different ways to use apples

and analyse which have the highest health

benefits. Provide references to support your

statements.

How is cooking with apples similar to and different from cooking with apricots?

Evaluating Consider this statement. ‘Serving apple pie

for an after school snack for children ishealthy.’Judge the value of this statement.

What could be the consequences of eating an apple pie every day?

Creating Convert an ‘unhealthy’ recipe for apple pie to

A ‘healthy’ recipe by designing a new one with

your choice of ingredients. Explain the health

benefits of using the ingredients you chose

versus the original ones.

How many ways could you market apples in order to increase sales and get more people eating them? These examples are replicated in your handout on pages 5 and 6.

Working with your concept, develop questions,(using only the question stems from page 9 ofyour handout) that may will be posed in orderto generate a substantive conversation withyour class/ between students.

These questions will deepen your students’individual and collective understandings.

Write them in your workbook on page 5.

Choose the question you liked the most.

Write 3 different ways that you can use the question with your students (individually and collectively) to :

Deepen individual understanding Deepen collective understanding Support students to critique one another’s ideas Record your thoughts on Page 4 of your workbook.

Also please record your ideas on the A3 paper provided so they can be shared among the whole group.

‘Do you think it is a good or a bad thing tochop down trees in our suburb?’

In groups of 6 (2 groups of 3) students debate this question based purely on their opinions.

I then facilitate ‘4 corner opinions’ Students then do a 180°. State their opinion

and justify, followed by stating an opposing opinion from another’s point of view.

See page 12 for Level 4 descriptors.

Consider the developmental continuum for this

teacher capability on pages 12 of the handout.

Consider any strategies that the people at your

table use to meet any of the statements against

this Teacher capability at any of the Levels.

On the A3 sheets provided at your table, explain(diagrams/words) at least 3 strategies. These will be displayed around the room and you can record those ideas

you like in page 6 of your workbook.For example:At a Glance: The teacher has a booklet that has each name

of the students in their class in the left hand column and space to write in the right hand column. When the class is working independent of the teacher, he/she roves and jots down their observations.

Traffic Lights: Each student has a set of laminated traffic lights (red, yellow and green circles). At the teacher’s call of “Traffic Lights”, students hold up the appropriate circle to indicate their level of understanding.

Form a random group of 4-8 and name your‘café’Nominate a recorder (who stays at the tablethroughout the activity).Have a chat about the issue that is on yourtable – factual information, opinions andpersonal experience. Recorder to record conversation as

accuratelyas possible.Whenever you want to, move to any othertable of your choice and continue discussion.

CapabilitiesPrompts inquiry

Structures Inquiry

Maintains session momentum

Read page 13 of your handout.

Use the highlighters provided to match asmany sentences as you can to the teachercapabilities of this Domain.

When is the last time you inquired intosomething that was meaningful or relevant toyou?

Complete page 7 of your workbook.

What skills, knowledge and behaviours did you

require?

Complete the brainstorm web on page 8 ofyour workbook.

What would you see in a classroom where theteacher working with students at your levelDOES NOT prompt or structure an inquiry?

Example: no student autonomy students all doing the same thing at the

same time

Complete page 9 of your workbook.

Take each dot point that you have written in your Reverse Key and identify ways that a teacher at your level may be able to attain a Level 4 e5 standard (see pages 14 & 15 of yourhandout) in these 2 capabilities of:

◦Prompting inquiry◦Structuring inquiry◦

Record your ideas on page 10 of your workbook.

‘Visual tools make thinking visible.

Much of the trouble students have withthinking is due to its invisible nature.

When people can see what they are thinking,

they immediately become better thinkers.

When thinking is visible, it also becomes public

and interactive.’ Thinking Skills and Eye QCaviglioli, Harris and Tindall

Graphic organisers can be used in many ways.

Read pages 16 and 17 of your handout and discuss in your table groups.

Refer to the graphic organisers on pages 18 -29of your handout.

Design 3 tasks using any of these graphicorganisers that will assist student to organiseinformation and ideas around the concept you have been discussing today.

Complete examples of your tasks on pages 11-13

of your workbook.

Refer to the developmental nature of thiscapability in your handout on page 15.

Discuss at your table why you think thiscapability exists in the model AND in this particular Domain.

Be prepared to share with the whole group.

On your table is an A3 representation of ananalogue clock. Name your team (in the centreof the clock) in a way that is relevant to thiscapability (Maintaining session momentum e.g.‘The minute you walked in the joint ...’)

Your team has 5 minutes to record a routine orstrategy for each hour of the clock, thatsupports students to manage their timeeffectively whilst conducting an inquiry.