The teacher’s role in developing higher level thinking skills in young people

Abstract

This article provides a rationale and practical set of guidelines for enrichment clusters, a program that supports a different brand of learning from the deductive and prescriptive approach that dominates activities in so many of today’s classrooms. Enrichment clusters are interest- based and student-centric, and provide a space for inductive, investigative high-end learning that can fit into any school program. This article describes the learning theories and goals that guided the development of enrichment clusters and describes in detail the meaning of high-end learning and real problems. Also discussed are results from studies of Enrichment Cluster implementations regarding the specific learning outcomes that students demonstrated and teachers observed, which include: problem finding and focusing, determining the relevance and bias of found information, planning and sequencing, metacognition, argumentation, problem solving, communication, collaboration, and evaluating data for patterns and discrepancies. This approach has been adopted in thousands of schools around the world and it seeks to develop gifted behaviours in larger numbers of students than most programs that focus only on high IQ students.