This chapter focuses on bridging the gap between policy and practice in Israeli schools, in the context of implementing a national innovative policy in the area of teaching higher-order thinking (HOT) across the curriculum. The chapter elaborates on capacity building of senior instructional leaders who were national subject superintendents (NSSs), responsible for the quality of teaching, learning and assessment in specific school subjects. The model of implementation had three main features: (a) deep and long-term (3 years long) capacity building and the formation of a community of learners; (b) a balanced blend of tightness (in terms of defining the overall goal—developing students’ HOT) and looseness (in terms of autonomy as to whether and how to engage in the change process); and (c) tailoring the change process to multiple, specific educational contexts. The workshop was part of a detailed plan of a top-down implementation process addressing changes in assessment, curriculum and learning materials and professional development. It made prominent contributions to the web of interactive changes that took place in learning and instruction of many school subjects, matching an ecological model of change. The analysis shows how a top-down implementation, together with a substantial degree of autonomy, can result in rich and diverse bottom-up initiatives. The NSS workshop thus demonstrated how long-term capacity building of a group of senior educational leaders can be used as a leverage for implementing an innovative instructional change on a large, national scale.

This study investigates challenges in addressing metacognition in professional development (PD) programs addressing instruction of higher-order thinking (HOT). A set of semi-structured interviews was conducted with 18 instructional leaders who had prominent roles in large-scale implementation programs designed to teach HOT. Most participants (n = 15) expressed the opinion that metacognition is valuable in teaching HOT yet, reported that metacognitive teaching is rare in wide-scale efforts to implement HOT. They explained that the major reason for this gap is teachers’ fragile knowledge of metacognition. The analysis shows a deficiency in teachers’ general metacognitive knowledge, deficiency in the more specific metastrategic knowledge (MSK) regarding individual thinking strategies, and deficiencies in relevant pedagogical knowledge. Implications are discussed.

One of the primary concerns of epistemic thinking research is understanding how people think about matters such as knowledge, truth, and justification. Understanding how people think about epistemic matters is highly important in current knowledge societies in which information has become more abundant and accessible, yet also increasingly diverse. This chapter focuses on the processes and resources that people employ in order to deal with epistemic challenges and explores how epistemic thinking is situated with regards to the distinction between cognition and metacognition.

Before participating in the teachers’ workshop, I used to address HOT in my teaching intuitively. But now I realize that doing so without explicitly addressing metacognition means that I had accomplished only a very small part of the job. (a participant in a teachers’ professional development workshop) Since the early days of studying metacognition, metacognitive training and instruction were shown to have positive effects on children’s performance in diverse fields. As we shall see in what follows, metacognition has both domain-general and domain-specific features. Therefore, it makes sense to study metacognition in general contexts as well as in the context of specific school disciplines and even in the context of more specific learning goals. Accordingly, the goal of this chapter is to present an overview of the role of metacognition in teaching higher order thinking (HOT) in science classrooms. 

This chapter describes a comprehensive research program addressing metastrategic knowledge (MSK), i.e., general conscious awareness of the thinking strategies applied during instruction and knowledge of their general characteristics. A series of three consecutive studies investigated the effects of explicit instruction of MSK. The findings of all three studies showed dramatic developments in students’ strategic and metastrategic thinking following instruction. The effect of the treatment was preserved in delayed transfer tests. Explicit teaching of MSK had a particularly strong effect on low-achieving students. The findings show the significance of explicit teaching of MSK for teaching higher-order thinking to all students and in particular to LA students. The final sections of this chapter report two additional studies concerning teachers’ knowledge in the context of teaching MSK. These studies showed that teachers’ initial metastrategic knowledge was lacking and insufficient for teaching purposes. Following professional development, considerable progress was made in teachers’ knowledge of MSK and in their pedagogical abilities to use this knowledge in the classroom. These findings show that a professional development course can indeed help teachers make considerable progress with respect to the knowledge that is required for applying MSK in the classroom. MSK, which is the metacognitive component applied in this chapter, consists of knowledge about tasks (referring to task characteristics that call for the use of a strategy or “when” to use a strategy) and knowledge about strategies (referring to “why” and “how” to use a strategy).

Recent studies have begun to show that epistemic thinking, thinking about knowledge and knowing, may play an important role in online learning processes such as searching, evaluating, and integrating multiple online sources. The purpose of this study is to characterize the epistemic thinking of elementary school students as they study online. This goal is achieved by using the Epistemic Understanding Questionnaire (Kuhn et al., 2000), and thinking aloud during two open-ended online tasks, followed by retrospective interviews (Hofer, 2004). The participants of this study are 42 Israeli sixth graders. Preliminary results show that epistemic thinking is related to performance of key online learning strategies such as evaluation, integration, and construction and justification of arguments based on multiple online sources. The study analyzes the interplay between epistemic metacognition and strategic performance. 

What do teachers (pre-service teachers as well as in-service teachers) need to know in order to be able to implement argumentation processes proficiently in their classrooms? What implications does that body of knowledge have for teacher education (TE) and professional development (PD) programs? Let us take a look at the reflections of a teacher who had taught (what she considered to be) a successful argumentation lesson in a ninth grade biology class. The teacher provided guidance to a group of four students who engaged in an argumentation activity about moral dilemmas in human genetics (Zohar & Nemet, 2000). A typical problem with students’ initial reasoning in this unit is that they tend to form unwarranted opinions, ignoring alternative points of view. When they do justify their opinions, they tend to avoid cardinal justifications that involve the ethical sides of the issue, and thus to circumvent the focus of the dilemma. In her analysis of part of a lesson in which she provided guidance to her students, the teacher reported that before her intervention, students expressed their opinions in a loud voice, did not justify their opinions and did not listen to each other. A dramatic change took place following her intervention: students started to phrase the dilemma in terms of principled bio-ethical considerations, justify their opinions, refute each other’s arguments, and explain why other people’s opinions may be wrong. The guidance that has been successful in bringing about such a high-level discussion may seem an easy thing to do. Therefore, we should pay attention to the teacher’s report of what she had felt during the process of guiding her students (Zohar, 2004a, p. 146)

What do teachers (pre-service teachers as well as in-service teachers) need to know in order to be able to implement argumentation processes proficiently in their classrooms? What implications does that body of knowledge have for teacher education (TE) and professional development (PD) programs? Let us take a look at the reflections of a teacher who had taught (what she considered to be) a successful argumentation lesson in a ninth grade biology class. The teacher provided guidance to a group of four students who engaged in an argumentation activity about moral dilemmas in human genetics (Zohar & Nemet, 2000). A typical problem with students’ initial reasoning in this unit is that they tend to form unwarranted opinions, ignoring alternative points of view. When they do justify their opinions, they tend to avoid cardinal justifications that involve the ethical sides of the issue, and thus to circumvent the focus of the dilemma. In her analysis of part of a lesson in which she provided guidance to her students, the teacher reported that before her intervention, students expressed their opinions in a loud voice, did not justify their opinions and did not listen to each other. A dramatic change took place following her intervention: students started to phrase the dilemma in terms of principled bio-ethical considerations, justify their opinions, refute each other’s arguments, and explain why other people’s opinions may be wrong. The guidance that has been successful in bringing about such a high-level discussion may seem an easy thing to do. Therefore, we should pay attention to the teacher’s report of what she had felt during the process of guiding her students (Zohar, 2004a, p. 146)

What do teachers (pre-service teachers as well as in-service teachers) need to know in order to be able to implement argumentation processes proficiently in their classrooms? What implications does that body of knowledge have for teacher education (TE) and professional development (PD) programs? Let us take a look at the reflections of a teacher who had taught (what she considered to be) a successful argumentation lesson in a ninth grade biology class. The teacher provided guidance to a group of four students who engaged in an argumentation activity about moral dilemmas in human genetics (Zohar & Nemet, 2000). A typical problem with students' initial reasoning in this unit is that they tend to form unwarranted opinions, ignoring alternative points of view. When they do justify their opinions, they tend to avoid cardinal justifications that involve the ethical sides of the issue, and thus to circumvent the focus of the dilemma. In her analysis of part of a lesson in which she provided guidance to her students, the teacher reported that before her intervention, students expressed their opinions in a loud voice, did not justify their opinions and did not listen to each other. A dramatic change took place following her intervention: students started to phrase the dilemma in terms of principled bio-ethical considerations, justify their opinions, refute each other's arguments, and explain why other people's opinions may be wrong. The guidance that has been successful in bringing about such a high-level discussion may seem an easy thing to do. Therefore, we should pay attention to the teacher's report of what she had felt during the process of guiding her students (Zohar, 2004a, p. 146)

This chapter describes a course called Thinking in Science that is part of a junior high school teacher preparation program in an Israeli college. The purpose of the course is to prepare prospective teachers to integrate instruction of higher order thinking skills into science topics. A qualitative evaluation study of the course examined processes that took place, documented in a portfolio. The findings show a developmental trend in four different aspects 1) students’ ideas about instruction of higher order thinking; 2) students’ opinions and attitudes regarding the course; 3) students’ experiences in developing higher order thinking as learners; and 4) experiences developing higher order thinking as teachers. Learning processes during the course took place on both a cognitive and an affective level. Students’ development went through a stage of cognitive imbalance, indicating meaningful learning. We also discuss the implications regarding the introduction of higher order thinking into science teacher preparation programs.