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Introduction: Teaching Thinking Skills in Social Studies andHistoryBarry K. Beyer aa High School Social StudiesPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Barry K. Beyer (2008) Introduction: Teaching Thinking Skills in Social Studies and History, The Social Studies, 99:5,194-195, DOI: 10.3200/TSSS.99.5.194-195

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/TSSS.99.5.194-195

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ll our students can and do think. But many—too many, it often

seems—do not think as well as they could or should in many school sub-jects, including social studies and histo-ry. This adversely impacts the quality of their learning in our classrooms as well as in their lives outside our classrooms.

There are, of course, many reasons for this problem, some of them in soci-ety at large. However, a major source of this problem may be that many students lack the degree of proficiency in apply-ing many of the cognitive operations—or thinking skills—required to complete the sometimes complex learning tasks we assign them. Interestingly, research-ers tell us these thinking skills are one of the most important tools, if not the most important tool, of good thinking—and, as such, shape much of what is learned by thinking. This skill deficiency thus may be what is in large part responsible for subverting the quality of our stu-dents’ thinking and learning.

What can we as educators do about this problem? Clearly, ignoring it is not acceptable. Neither is sidestepping it by simply dealing with its symptoms. Doing more of what is already com-monly done or generally recommended to improve student thinking rarely, if ever, addresses this problem effectively. Instead, a more productive response is one that focuses directly on teaching students how to improve their thinking-skill performances.

Such instruction does not mean simply engaging students in exercis-ing these skills. Conventional teaching techniques such as asking higher-order questions or giving students written or oral questions that prompt which skill to use may give students an opportunity to exercise the application of a designated skill as best they can, if they already know how and choose to do so. But few if any of these techniques provide any instruction in how to improve or even “do” a skill for those who do not already know how to apply it. Indeed, if students have no idea how to apply a given thinking skill effectively or try but do so ineffectively, these and other similar exercising prompts are usually an invitation to frustration, guessing, sloppy thinking, or hasty judgment.

Sidney Harris’s cartoon (see next page) not only dramatizes the basic

problem with these and other similar approaches to teaching thinking but also identifies its solution. We can improve student thinking by providing them instruction explicitly in how to apply more expertly than they do now the thinking skills in which they need to be proficient but are not. And we can do this by using the strategies and tech-niques of direct instruction in teaching these skills.

Direct instruction in thinking skills consists of telling, explaining to, and showing students—with their active reflection and participation—how to apply, in expert fashion, each specific thinking skill to be mastered, by mak-ing explicit appropriate, authentic, step-by-step mental procedures to use; skill rules and heuristics to follow; and cri-teria or other skill knowledge to apply in executing those skills. This includes providing introductions focused directly on these skill procedures and the related skill information. It also includes con-tinued, teacher-supported, and guided practice in applying these skill compo-nents at increasing levels of expertise thereafter. This is the kind of teaching on which we focus in this special issue of The Social Studies.

Many techniques and materials for providing direct, explicit thinking-skill instruction exist. The articles that

IntroductionTeaching Thinking Skills in Social Studies and History

BARRY K. BEYER, Guest Editor

BARRY K. BEYER recently retired after thirty-seven years as a high school social studies teacher and university professor of education and history. Over these years, he has coauthored several social studies and history textbooks and authored numer-ous professional books and articles, many related to teaching thinking skills. He can be contacted at bkbeyer@frontiernet.net.

Copyright © 2008 Barry K. Beyer

194 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 THE SOCIAL STUDIES

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follow describe some of these as they have been and are being employed to teach specific thinking skills in specific contexts. Although these demonstra-tions of direct skill instruction are set in history courses, the teaching tech-niques and aids demonstrated may be used in teaching any thinking skill, at almost any grade level, in any social studies or history courses, or even in other school subjects.

My lead-off article describes what about thinking skills our students need to learn. It explains selected research-derived and classroom-tried skill- teaching techniques, strategies, and prin-

ciples for providing instruction directly in these skills to achieve this goal. This arti-cle also presents a brief rationale for inte-grating this skill instruction with content instruction in social studies and history.

Avishag Reisman, a PhD candidate in Stanford’s history education program, and Sam Wineburg, director of this program, award-winning author, and a codirector of the Historical Thinking Matters project of Stanford and George Mason Universities, describe three tech-niques used in their Web-based program to teach the historical thinking skill of contextualizing in various American history units.

Philosophy professor (retired), edu-cator, author, consultant, and director of the National Center for Teaching Thinking Robert J. Swartz describes how one secondary school classroom teacher introduces and infuses explicit instruction in analyzing and evaluat-ing arguments in an American his-tory course. The teaching techniques and aids he uses in this lesson can be readily adapted to teach explicitly any thinking skill.

Rebecca Reagan is a recently retired elementary school teacher and coauthor of several manuals on infusing direct instruction in thinking skills in vari-ous elementary school subjects. In her article, she describes a direct-instruction strategy she used to introduce the skill of determining the reliability of a historical source to fifth-grade history students.

My concluding article summariz-es the findings and recommendations of researchers, cognitive scientists, and thinking-skill teaching specialists regarding a wide variety of techniques and strategies for teaching thinking skills directly and reasons for employing these in our classrooms. This research also suggests the beneficial effects of integrating direct skill instruction into instruction in social studies and history as well as in other subjects.

There are undoubtedly teaching techniques and strategies other than those described here that, when prop-erly applied, can be used to provide direct classroom instruction in think-ing skills. Obviously, we cannot dem-onstrate all of these here. The point, however, is that techniques for pro-viding explicit instruction directly in the thinking skills that operationalize thinking do exist and can be readily incorporated into social studies and history classroom practice at a variety of levels and without difficultly. Doing so is well worth any effort required, especially because researchers confirm that systematic use of many of these teaching techniques and strategies produces significant improvements in both student thinking and academic achievement.

© ScienceCartoonsPlus.com. Used with permission of Sidney Harris.

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