Fifty Strategies to Boost Cognitive Engagement: Creating a Thinking Culture in the Classroom (50 Teaching Strategies to Support Cognitive Development)

This book is great to apply to educational settings of all ages and types.

Accessible book with plethora of resources that can be started immediately. Good addition to a professional learning library and for teachers who are looking to engage students.

Are you familiar or unfamiliar with Bloom's Revised Taxonomy? It doesn't matter! I believe that you'll love this book regardless because it not only defines the elements of the taxonomy but provides many, many, many examples of them. Those multiple examples act as seeds for the readers imagination to produce ideas for classroom use. Chapter 2, mm, mm, mm! The way it's put together is brilliant with its many examples, and sometimes non-examples, of each kind of thinking; ending with a "Rubric for creating, imaging, and innovating" and a "Creative thinking four-part debriefing structure" for creative projects. Stobaugh follows with a chapter on the benefits of movement, working together, and technology on student engagement and incorporates these, to different degrees, in what follows. What follows, is a chapter for EACH kind of thinking with multiple instructional strategies of that thinking. Each strategy follows with multiple examples, in several content-areas, and strategy variations. It gets the creative thinking juices going: "Which of these structures can I use? What would it look like to use this structure in my area?" I'm a retired general music teacher and I believe that ALL disciplines--including the arts and P.E.--could gather with this book and respond to it in their own ways. Individuals might strengthen different areas of different units. School staffs or departments might shape their professional development with this book or parts of it. College students could easily use this book to form a course for Individual Study. I think that this book has much to offer--even as an example of writing books like these.

I used this book with my third graders and it was amazing! My students were more engaged, and our class connected and bonded over our thinking classroom culture. We always went deeper into a topic, explored greater depths within a concept, and chased knowledge with never ending fervor. It was an amazing school year! I believe this played a vital role in more than doubling my students’ end of the year scores!

This is just what I needed to reinvigorate my lessons after the COVID slump. Some of them were basic strategies but it still was nice to have a reminder about them. Looking forward to putting them to use this year.

The book is set up so you can find strategies either by Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy Levels (understand, analyze, evaluate, create) or by Instructional Strategies For Engagement (movement, collaboration, media literacy). There are two great tables to help you reference the strategies. Next, the author explains each strategy, gives explicit steps for how to implement the strategy with students, suggests variations of the strategy, and provides additional content-area examples. This book is a gem!!!

This book is jammed full of strategies to get students to think in class, all centered around applying a taxonomy to the thinking in your classroom. Each strategy is listed and explained, the classroom example, the steps, variations, content area examples are all included with each of the 50 strategies shared.

I have both physical copies and Kindle version. The physical copy is amazing and I look forward to using it often in my classroom. So, you will know how disappointed I was with the Kindle version.The Kindle version is awful. Several formatting issues block out header graphics at the beginning of each chapter. Random spaces in the digital text are everywhere. The layout and design look like that are half-done. For someone who uses Kindle a lot with textbooks. This is a horrible version.