TEACHING HIGHER ORDER THINKING SKILLS IN K-3
In a new book published by Routledge, Dr. Steffen Saifer argues that younger children can and should learn higher order thinking skills.
The increasing importance of higher order skills
Developing students’ higher-order thinking has never been more important or necessary. They need to acquire sufficient critical and creative thinking skills to be successful and productive in an ever more complex and fast-changing world.
While our youngest students are capable of higher-order thinking, too many lessons elicit only their lower-order thinking (e.g., memorizing or following directions) or basic middle-order thinking (e.g., calculating or categorizing).
Much like learning a language, starting early is the most expedient way for higher-order thinking skills such as inferring or evaluating to become automatic mental habits. But how can we effectively teach students as young as five years old to think creatively and critically?
In fact, because all higher-order thinking skills can be practiced at levels ranging from easy/basic to difficult/complex, we can start teaching them at any grade or ability level. For example, while inferring is a critical thinking skill, it is relatively easy to infer that the proverb, “don’t count your chickens before they hatch” is about having realistic expectations and not about poultry farming!
Grade 2 case study: Lincoln Thinkin’
Teaching higher-order thinking does not require a new curriculum, extra lessons, or special materials. In the following scenario, a second-grade teacher promotes several critical and creative thinking skills within a lesson about Abraham Lincoln while still meeting the lesson’s other learning objectives. Prior to the lesson the class had read two simple biographies of Lincoln. Because questions and tasks that elicit higher-order thinking also pose enjoyable challenges, the students are actively engaged in the learning process.
Teacher: “What do you think is the most important thing you have read about Abraham Lincoln or about what he did?”
Several students contribute ideas: “He was poor, but grew up to be president.” “He freed the slaves.” “He won the Civil War.”
Teacher: “I agree with all of you. I also really admire what a great speaker he was. He could really give a speech! And everyone loved him and his ideas, isn’t that right?”
There were a few nods, but no responses. There is about ten seconds of silence.
Teacher: “Let’s think about what I just said. I told you something that isn’t true, but my question at the end maybe stopped you from thinking deeply about what I said. Or maybe it stopped you from telling me I was wrong. What was my question, and how did it trick you?”
During the discussion that followed, the teacher explained: “My question, ‘isn’t that right?’ is a way to get you to agree with me. We read about the deep divisions between the North and South, but we read nothing that said everyone loved Lincoln. Even if he was widely loved, it couldn’t be possible that everyone loved him.”
Next, the teacher read ten statements about Lincoln to the students and, after each statement, asked them if it was true, false, or an opinion. Among the statements were: ‘Lincoln was the sixteenth president,’ ‘Lincoln was the best president,’ and ‘Lincoln fought bravely in the Civil War.’
The teacher then led a discussion about types of misleading statements, about ‘facts’ and ‘opinion’ relating to Lincoln. which was enlivened when several students shared their disagreement with the teacher’s answers. Next, the students were given the challenge to write three statements about Lincoln, one which was ‘true’, one which was ‘false’, and one that was an ‘opinion’. They wrote these independently and then, in small groups, informally discussed them with each other.
In my experience, the strategies to develop higher order skills in this scenario can be used for any content area – from math to music – and questions can easily be made age-appropriate in order to develop skills such as inferring and the close reading of source material.
A balanced approach to thinking skills
We can identify the various thinking skills the teacher elicited from the students using the taxonomy below as a guide. This lists and categorizes a range of thinking skills on a continuum from concrete/practical (bottom) to abstract/conceptual (top). In addition to being an aide memoire for understanding and conceptualizing thinking skills, it is a useful tool for checking that our questions and assignments prompt as much – or more – higher-order skills as middle- and lower-order thinking.
In the “Lincoln Thinkin’” scenario, students were called upon to use a range of skills from lower-order thinking skills, follow rules and directions, to several middle-order logical thinking skills – including associate/differentiate and sequence/pattern, and importantly some higher- order skills such as query, induce/deduce, and shift perspective, which were needed to identify opinion statements and to overcome the distractions (or red herrings) embedded in some of the statements given by the teacher. Critical thinking was also elicited when students were invited to disagree with the teacher. Creative thinking, including imagine and generate, was engaged when students created their own set of statements.
Conclusion
It takes higher-order thinking to accept and respond effectively to the ever more formidable challenges our younger students face now and will face later in school and in life. To be truly educated today takes more than knowledge; it takes the ability to recognize and counter disinformation and deceptions, to question deeply, to look beyond surface appearances, to solve problems creatively, and to imagine possibilities. By developing critical and creative thinking skills early, we can help ensure our students will have these important mental capacities. Fortunately, higher-order thinking challenges can easily be embedded within our current curriculum activities and they will boost learning by making the activities highly engaging for students.
Steffen Saifer is a writer and international education consultant based in Spain. More information and many more ideas for teaching higher-order thinking can be found at https://higher-order-thinking.com
His recently published book Teaching Higher-Order Thinking to Young Learners, K–3: How to Develop Sharp Minds for the Disinformation Age (2025) is available from Amazon: (click on the image below)
Feature Image: Credit: Jacob Wackerhausen iStock
Support Image: Author – Anthony Berger, photographer. Brady National Photographic Art Gallery (Washington, D.C.)
Created/Published: Washington, D.C. 9 February 1864
This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer.
