Clarification:

Effective teachers create learning opportunities which challenge students to think in complex ways, apply their learning to solve meaningful problems, and create projects/products that extend the content and learning objectives. Thinking allows students to make connections to existing cognitive maps and create new connections and meaning. The following descriptions further define each type of thinking:

Analytical Thinking: Most teachers focus only on analytical thinking in their classrooms. This type of thinking demands that students analyze, evaluate, and explain phenomena. Analyzing, evaluating, and explaining information is a skill that applies to all disciplines and is critical for an informed and educated society.

Practical Thinking: Many students often do not see the connections between what they learn in school and how they can use this knowledge in the real world. Teachers who integrate practical thinking into their teaching, design learning activities where students are forced to use and apply concepts and ideas that they learn in real-world scenarios.

Creative Thinking: By teaching students to create, design, and imagine, teachers prepare students for the flexible and creative thinking they will need to exercise later in life. Creative thinking allows students to generate new ideas by bringing together existing ideas in new configurations, developing new possibilities for things that already exist, or discovering or imagining something new.

Research-Based Thinking: In the midst of the information age, students need to know not only how to research to find information, but also how to review a variety of ideas and come to solutions that are well-supported and make sense.

With this type of thinking, students learn to problem solve, apply critically, evaluate, create, and collaborate - important skills for the 21st Century learner and for life.