HOT Skills

Book excerpt: Too many teaching and learning activities require students to use only lower-order thinking (LOT), and many of the attempts educators make to promote higher-order thinking (HOT) are misconstrued. Higher-order thinking makes teaching and learning more engaging and intentional, adds intellectual rigor to any curriculum, and aids in the development of some important life skills among young learners Even preschoolers are capable of a great deal of higher-order thinking. Infusing a play-based curriculum with activities and interactions that promote higher-order thinking creates the type of play that fosters cognitive, language, physical, and social development. It is important to start developing students’ higher-order thinking skills when they are young, and this book provides numerous strategies for doing so. Most of the activities are in the form of open-ended interactive games that can be easily modified to be responsive to variety of cultures and to meet a range of learning abilities, styles, and intelligences.