5 IDEAS for Developing Real-World Thinking Skills

Infusing five processes into assignments can help students hone the skills they’ll need to address complex problems.

By: Harvey F. Silver, Abigail L. Boutz, and Jay McTighe

ASCD Educational Leadership® magazine  |  May 2022  |  Volume 79, Number 8

“If we want to prepare our students for this modern world full of unpredictable, complicated problems, we can’t just arm them with information. We must help them become sophisticated and flexible thinkers who can handle whatever challenges come their way. We need to familiarize them with broadly useful thinking processes that can help them work their way through a wide range of complex problems. And we need to develop their capacity to use these processes well by providing multiple opportunities to apply such thinking to authentic and challenging tasks…”