This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 66 of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast.

In this episode I'm going to tell you why the next higher order thinking assignment in

your classroom should be a curation project.

If no one has ever encouraged, pushed or insisted that you build more higher order thinking

into your students learning, it's possible you've been teaching in a cave.

Higher level thinking has been a core value of educators for decades.

We learned about it in college, we hear about it in PD, we're even evaluated on whether

we're cultivating it in our classrooms.

Charlotte Danielson's framework for teaching, a widely used instrument to measure teacher

effectiveness, describes a distinguished teacher as one whose lesson activities require

high level student thinking.

All that aside, most teachers would say they want their students to be thinking on higher

levels.

That if our teaching kept students at the lowest level of Bloom's taxonomy, simply recalling

information, we wouldn't be doing a very good job as teachers.

And yet, when it's time to plan the learning experiences that would have our students

operating on higher levels, some of us come up short.

We may not have a huge arsenal of ready-to-use high level tasks to give our students.

Instead, we often default to having students identify and define terms, label things, or

answer basic recall questions.

It's what we know.

And we have so much content to cover, many of us might feel there really isn't enough

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