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The Nature and Development

of Teachers' Metastrategic
Knowledge in the Context of
Teaching Higher Order Thinking
Anat Zohar
Published online: 17 Nov 2009.
To cite this article: Anat Zohar (2006) The Nature and Development of Teachers'
Metastrategic Knowledge in the Context of Teaching Higher Order Thinking, Journal of
the Learning Sciences, 15:3, 331-377, DOI: 10.1207/s15327809jls1503_2
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THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 15(3), 331–377
Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
The Nature and Development of

Teachers’ Metastrategic Knowledge in
the Context of Teaching Higher
Order Thinking
Anat Zohar
School of Education
The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
This study examines the development of teachers’ metastrategic knowledge (MSK),

a component of metacognitive knowledge, in the context of higher order thinking.
Participants were 14 junior high school and high school science teachers who at-
tended a professional development course. Data collection was carried out by trian-
gulation of several data sources: classroom observations, individual interviews, writ-
ten assignments, and recordings of discussions that took place during the course. The
Findings section provides a detailed analysis of the professional development of 2
teachers, as well as an analysis of the development of the 14 teachers as a group. The
data provide evidence for the types of knowledge teachers need for applying MSK in
the course of instruction, the most specific of which are MSK of thinking skills (that
must be explicit) and pedagogical knowledge regarding MSK. The considerable
overall development in teachers’ MSK following an in-service course consisted of at
least 3 different patterns of development: (a) learning MSK regarding new thinking
skills, (b) transforming initially implicit metalevel knowledge into explicit metalevel
knowledge, and (c) introducing changes in the class culture to value new forms of
discourse regarding thinking. The implications for professional development courses
in this field are discussed.
Current educational reforms often stretch and challenge teachers’ thinking capa-
bilities (Fishman, Marx, Best, & Tal, 2003). To be able to respond to the unex-
pected events that characterize inquiry and thinking lessons, teachers must be able
Correspondence should be addressed to Anat Zohar, School of Education, Hebrew University, Jeru-
salem, Israel 91905. E-mail: msazohar@mscc.huji.ac.il
332 ZOHAR
to teach in an intelligent, flexible and resourceful way. To support students’ learn-

ing in reforms that highlight inquiry and thinking, teachers therefore need sophisti-
cated knowledge that cannot be embedded in curriculum materials or scripted into
instructional routines (Carpenter et al., 2004). A deep knowledge of the principles
of the educational reforms is necessary for successful and thoughtful enactment.
Such knowledge requires new conceptions of teacher professional development
that would center on the construction of teachers’ knowledge going beyond the ac-
quisition of a fixed set of teaching skills (Loef-Frank, Carpenter, Fennema, Ansel,
& Behrend, 1998). However, teachers, as well as students, do not simply assimilate
knowledge and change their ways of thinking. The construction of new knowledge
in professional development courses must be based on teachers’ initial (or intu-

itive) conceptions. Therefore, successful professional development requires stud-
ies of teachers’ initial knowledge in different areas to understand the processes by
which they construct new knowledge.
Metacognition is an important component of educational reforms that highlight
inquiry and thinking. The goal of this study was to investigate teachers’
metacognitive knowledge in the context of instruction of higher order thinking
skills. More specifically, this study focused on metastrategic knowledge (MSK),
which is a particular component of metacognition that refers to explicit knowledge
regarding the thinking strategies being used during instruction. In a previous study,
I established that science teachers’ level of this component of metacognition is
rather low and is insufficient for sound teaching of higher order thinking (Zohar,
1999). In the present study, I refined the theoretical framework concerning MSK
and the knowledge required to teach it, explored the nature of teachers’ MSK in
this area, and monitored developments in teachers’ knowledge in this field follow-
ing a professional development course.
PREVIOUS STUDIES ABOUT CHANGES IN

TEACHERS’ THINKING AND PRACTICE
The ultimate goal of most teacher educators is to affect teachers’ practice. The as-
sumptions behind the design of most professional development courses are that
they can induce changes in teachers’ knowledge and that such changes can indeed
affect practice and eventually students’ achievements. But these assumptions can-
not be accepted without a critical examination. Only if teachers’ knowledge is in-
deed reflected in their practice can educators hope to affect teachers’ practice and
students’ learning by developing teacher thinking. Affecting teachers’ knowledge,
however, is not an easy thing to achieve. It is even more difficult to affect teachers’
knowledge in a way that would induce changes in classroom practice. What fac-
tors, according to previous studies, are involved in this process? Under which con-
ditions can classroom practice and students’ achievements indeed be affected?
HIGHER ORDER THINKING 333
A large group of studies have addressed the relationship between teachers’

knowledge and their practice (for a more detailed review, see Zohar, 2004, chap.
6). These studies have addressed several components of teachers’ knowledge: sub-
ject-matter knowledge, beliefs regarding the nature of learning and instruction,
and pedagogical knowledge. The following sections describe studies regarding
these components and discuss their relationships with the present research.
Teachers’ beliefs about issues such as the nature of teaching and learning have a
strong impact on their practice in general (e.g., Aguirre & Speer, 1999;
Brickhouse, 1990; Hashweh, 1996; Onosko, 1990; Stipeck, Givvin, Sallmon, &
MacGyvers, 2001; Strauss & Shilony, 1994; Tobin & McRobbie, 1996) and on the
way they implement a new curriculum in particular. Indeed, changes in teachers’

views about teaching and learning might be much more difficult to achieve than
changes in teachers’ subject-matter knowledge (Borko & Putnam, 1996). This is
especially true when the expected change involves a transition from a traditional to
a reform-oriented educational approach. Some researchers have argued that
changes in this direction are very difficult and almost impossible to achieve (e.g.,
Prawat, 1992; Strauss & Shilony, 1994).
Several studies have demonstrated that making the transition into reform-ori-
ented approaches to teaching is possible but involves a complex and difficult pro-
cess, especially when the outcomes sought consist of changes in classroom prac-
tices rather than changes only in teachers’ thinking. Some studies have found that
although changes are possible, they are limited in terms of the number of teachers
whose practice can be affected by the treatment and in terms of the scope of the
change. For instance, Tobin (1993) reported an interpretive investigation of one
teacher’s learning and change within the context of the science curriculum. As the
teacher learned about constructivism and began to use it, it became apparent that
change was difficult. What was clear from this case study is that a person does not
automatically change his or her thoughts and actions to be consistent with held be-
liefs. In the study, the teacher’s thoughts changed; however, actions were another
matter. The teacher became a constructivist in the sense that constructivism influ-
enced her thoughts and actions in particular contexts but not in others. The findings
illustrate that it is possible for a person to embrace a set of beliefs about knowledge
and knowing without these beliefs affecting overt actions. Accordingly, it might be
anticipated that those who are learning about teaching can place high value on
constructivism and associated theories of learning, and at the same time believe
there are constraints to making practical changes to accord with constructivism.
Additional studies (e.g., Thomaz & Gilbert 1989; Watts, Jofili, & Bezerra, 1997)
have also documented changes in practice following courses that focused on in-
struction according to constructivist ideas. These studies have shown that although
changes are possible, not all teachers change to the same extent and some teachers
do not change at all. When implementing a new curriculum, teachers often tend to
“domesticate” it by transforming innovative curricula to fit a more familiar, tradi-
334 ZOHAR
tional way of instruction (e.g., Ball, 1990; Olson, 1981; Wilson, 1990). In a more
recent study, Holt-Reynolds (2001) analyzed the case of a prospective teacher who
adopted superficial elements of the constructivist pedagogies she had been taught
in a teacher education course, without adopting its more profound elements.
Another approach to professional development involves a vision of teachers
changing in ways that provide a basis for continued growth. The idea is that
self-sustaining, generative change will enable teachers to continue to learn and
grow for a long time after the end of the professional development. This entails
teachers making changes in their basic epistemological perspectives, in their
knowing of what it means to learn, and in their conception of classroom practice. A
fundamental assumption is that for professional growth to be generative teachers

must learn how to study new ideas on their own; how to conduct inquiry into sub-
ject matter, student learning, and teacher practice; and how to adapt their practice
in new ways according to the findings of their inquiry (Carpenter et al., 2004;
Loef-Frank et al., 1998). Assessment of this approach has also shown that different
teachers engage in different levels of practical inquiry and as a consequence show
different patterns and levels of change (Loef-Frank et al.).
Other researchers have emphasized the power of teacher community for im-
proving teaching and learning. This approach posits that conditions for improving
teaching and learning are strengthened when teachers collectively discuss issues
related to their practice and professional growth. Little (2002, 2003) conducted a
set of studies into professional community as a locus for teacher development, ask-
ing how classroom teaching practices come to be known, shared, and developed
among teachers through their out-of-classroom interactions. Little’s findings re-
peat the findings of previous researchers showing that groups of teachers indeed
reserve time to identify and examine problems of practice, to discuss them, and to
invite comments and advise from others in ways that open up new considerations
and possibilities for classroom practice. However, the research methodology used
by Little (audio and videotaped records of situated practice) also showed the limi-
tations of this approach for teacher development. The records showed how ongo-
ing interactions in teachers’ communities both open up and close off opportunities
for teacher learning—in the same groups and sometimes at the same time. Little
(2003) said that the force of tradition and the lure of innovations seem simulta-
neously to play in teachers’ everyday talk when the impulse to question practice is
inhibited by the press to simply “get on with it.”
Finally, it is important to highlight the idea that the ultimate test of teachers’
professional development is change in students’ achievements. Unfortunately,
very few studies have tested students’ achievements in relation to teacher learning.
Fishman et al. (2003) developed a unique methodology for conducting research on
teacher learning in professional development that began with science education
standards documents and then sought evidence of current student performance.
Next, the researchers designed a model for the evaluation of professional develop-
ment and a professional development course intended to help teachers acquire the
knowledge necessary to successfully enact the curriculum units, attempting to fo-
cus on areas of weakness in students’ performance. Fishman and his colleagues
then engaged in evaluation of that professional development by attending to both
teachers’ and students’ knowledge. They assessed teachers’ knowledge by using a
multitude of assessment means, but the most unique component of their study was
that they reassessed student performance, seeking to attribute changes in student
learning to particular aspects of the professional development activities. When the
workshop was redesigned according to conclusions from an initial stage of their
research, Fishman et al. were able to show a positive impact on teachers’ knowl-
edge and beliefs about their teaching, and also on their classroom enactment. The
researchers suggested that adopting their combined research approach to many dif-
ferent contexts may generate a more refined knowledge base that links teacher and
student learning to professional development.
Taken together, these studies of recent efforts to change teachers’ thinking and
practice to embrace reform theories of learning have indicated that when adequate
teaching methods are used, professional development courses can induce some
changes in teachers’ thinking and practice toward a more sophisticated model of
learning and instruction. However, these studies also have shown a repeated pat-
tern implying that such a change is a difficult and slow process. Only some of the
teachers who undergo a professional development course actually change their
classroom practice following the course.
The study described in the present article also examined teachers’ thinking and
practice following a professional development course. As mentioned in the follow-
ing sections, one of the aims of this study was to explore patterns of change in
teachers’ knowledge and practice regarding MSK following the course.
Teachers’ Subject-Matter Knowledge

There is little disagreement that adequate subject-matter knowledge is necessary
for science teaching because teachers cannot teach effectively what they do not
know. De Jong, Korthagen, and Wubbels (1998) described several studies focusing
on teachers’ understanding of science topics. Together, these studies covered a
broad range of key scientific topics, pointing to a lack of basic knowledge of im-
portant concepts among teachers, especially primary schools teachers. This lack in
teachers’ basic knowledge obviously interferes with the effectiveness of instruc-
tion. Similar studies also have shown that preservice teachers’ subject-matter
knowledge is often lacking and is certainly not sufficient for teaching coherently
(e.g., Cocharn & Jones, 1998; Kennedy, 1990; Morine-Dershimer, 1989). What
have researchers told us about the feasibility of inducing changes to teachers’
knowledge? There is much evidence for the feasibility of changing teachers’ sub-
ject-matter knowledge following a professional development course. For instance,
336 ZOHAR
De Jong et al. noted that numerous studies about primary school science teachers’
subject-matter knowledge have shown that teachers can improve their understand-
ing of science topics with the help of professional development courses. In another
review, Borko and Putnam (1996) noted that knowledge and beliefs about subject
matter seem to be more readily changed as compared to knowledge and beliefs
about other issues such as the nature of learning and teaching or about the desir-
ability of new pedagogies.
The nature of MSK is very different from the nature of the knowledge involved in
specific concepts and science subject matter. Nevertheless, in the context of this
study, being acquainted with elements of MSK is parallel to subject-matter knowl-
edge in other science fields. Although MSK addresses general elements of thinking
skills rather than a specific science topic, teachers cannot address MSK in their prac-
tice if they do not first possess that type of knowledge. MSK is a body of knowledge
with which teachers must be familiar to effectively address it in class. Therefore, in
the present study, I examine what is equivalent to subject-matter knowledge in the
context of MSK and discuss its implications for the nature of teacher knowledge in
this area. To do this, I first need to clarify the concept of MSK, examine its signifi-
cance for instruction, and discuss how it may be expressed in teachers’ thinking.
Only then can I return to a clarification of the type of subject-matter knowledge that
applies in this study and to the description of my research.
MSK AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR

EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE
This article addresses one of the many components of metacognitive knowledge,

namely metacognitive knowledge regarding higher order thinking strategies. The
term higher order thinking strategies may be used to delineate cognitive activities
that are beyond the stage of recall and comprehension, according to Bloom’s
(1956) taxonomy. It refers to cognitive activities such as analyzing, synthesizing,
and evaluating (Bloom, 1956). More recent examples of cognitive activities that
are classified as higher order include constructing arguments, asking research
questions, making comparisons, solving nonalgorithmic complex problems, deal-
ing with controversies, identifying hidden assumptions, classifying, and establish-
ing causal relationships. Most of the classical scientific inquiry strategies, such as
formulating hypotheses, planning experiments, controlling variables, or drawing
conclusions, are also classified as higher order thinking strategies (Zohar, 2004).
Previous researchers have addressed the component of metacognitive knowl-
edge that applies to higher order thinking strategies by using several different
terms: metacognition, metacognitive declarative knowledge, conditional knowl-
edge, explicit knowledge, and MSK. Although in the present study I decided to use
the term metastrategic knowledge or MSK, earlier studies that apply to all of these
terms are relevant as background for the present study.
Let us now turn to a definition and explanation of the central concept I am refer-
ring to in the present study. MSK is general, explicit knowledge about the cogni-
tive procedures that are being manipulated. The cognitive procedures are com-
prised of higher order thinking skills and strategies. The pertinent metacognitive
knowledge is an explicit awareness of the type of cognitive procedures being used
in specific instances. It consists of the following abilities (Kuhn, 2000, 2001;
Kuhn, Katz, & Dean, 2004): making generalizations and drawing rules regarding a
thinking strategy; naming the thinking strategy; explaining when, why, and how
such a thinking strategy should be used, when it should not be used, what the disad-
vantages are of not using appropriate strategies, and what task characteristics call
for the use of the strategy.
This type of knowledge seems to have a regulative significance for our thinking
because it may give us regulative advice about how to apply correct cognitive pro-
cesses to specific, contextually rich situations that are often “messy” in terms of their
underlying logical structures. This knowledge may do so by directing our attention
to the general structures that are embedded in specific situations and contexts. There-
fore, an underlying assumption of this study was that although knowledge acquisi-
tion is content and context specific, general aspects of thinking also exist and have
important significance for learning to think (Perkins & Salomon, 1989).
Theoretical considerations suggest that MSK is important for students’thinking.
Therefore, instead of waiting for MSK to develop spontaneously, it makes sense to
try to teach it as an explicit instructional goal with the prediction that such teaching
may affect students’ thinking on the cognitive and metacognitive levels. Empirical
studies have indeed confirmed this prediction. Gains in students’ achievements fol-
lowing metacognitive treatment have been shown in such diverse areas as reading
comprehension (Aldridge, 1989; Brown & Palinscar, 1989; Davey & McBride,
1986; Gourgey, 1998; Koch, 2001; Palinscar & Brown, 1984), mathematical prob-
lem solving (e.g., Kramersky, Mevarech, & Lieberman, 2001; Mevarech, 1999;
Schoenfeld, 1979, 1992; Whimbey & Lockhead, 1986), physics (Basca & Grotzer,
2001; Grotzer & Perkins, 2000; Koch, 2001), foreign language (Carrell, Gajdusek,
& Wise, 1998), writing (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1985), and lecture comprehension
(King, 1994). Additional empirical studies have supported the more specific claim
that using metacognition mayimprove learning of problem-solving and higher order
thinking skills (Chen & Klahr, 1999; Lin & Lehman, 1999; Ross, 1988; Schoenfeld,
1992; Toth, Klahr, & Chen, 2000; White & Frederiksen, 1998, 2000). In addition,
studies have indicated that the effect of addressing metacognitive knowledge explic-
itly during instruction may be even more important for students with low academic
achievements than for students with high academic achievements (e.g., White &
Frederiksen, 1998; 2000). The explanation for this finding is that students with high
academic achievements often manage to construct elements of metacognitive
338 ZOHAR
knowledge by themselves. Students with low academic achievements, however, are

less able to do so. Therefore, treatment that focuses on metacognitive knowledge
makes a greater difference for their thinking.
PEDAGOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE

CONTEXT OF TEACHING MSK
As many studies have shown, familiarity with whatever it is that one is supposed to
teach might be a necessary condition, but it is certainly not a sufficient condition
for teaching. Another factor that plays an important role in teachers’ ability to im-
plement the new ideas they study in professional development courses is pedagogi-
cal knowledge.
There is a large body of literature that, following Shulman’s (1986, 1987) work,
has addressed various components of teachers’ knowledge and distinguished
(among other things) between subject-matter knowledge, general pedagogical
knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). PCK is a blend of peda-
gogical knowledge and subject-matter knowledge that is specific to each teaching
topic (e.g., Adams & Krockover, 1997; Cocharn & Jones, 1998; Gess-Newsome &
Lederman, 1999; Kennedy, 1990; Loughran, Gunstone, Berry, Milroy, & Mulhall
2000; Shulman, 1986, 1987; Van Driel, Verloop, & de Voss, 1998; Wilson,
Shulman, & Richert, 1987). However, the distinction made in the literature be-
tween PCK and general pedagogical knowledge is fuzzy and unclear when one
tries to apply it to the context of teaching higher order thinking in general, and
MSK in particular. An elaborate discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of the
present article and can be found elsewhere (Zohar, 2004, chap. 6). In the present
context, it is important to note that part of the difficulty in aligning teachers’
knowledge in the context of teaching thinking with the prevalent concepts used in
the literature is related to the debate among scholars regarding the question of
whether thinking skills are general or content specific. Teaching thinking accord-
ing to the infusion approach assumes that thinking skills have some elements that
are general and other elements that are content specific. This notion presents an in-
nate difficulty in referring to the pedagogical knowledge teachers have in this field
as either PCK (that tends to be embedded in specific subject matters) or as general
pedagogical knowledge (that tends to be independent of specific subject matters).
It seems that because of the special nature of the type of knowledge under consid-
eration none of the existing constructs are appropriate. I therefore suggested to ad-
dress teachers’ pedagogical knowledge in relation to instruction of higher order
thinking by using a special term: pedagogical knowledge in the context of teaching
higher order thinking (Zohar, 2004). This term highlights the fact that pedagogical
knowledge in this field has some unique characteristics. At the same time this term
does not imply a commitment to treat this knowledge as either content specific or
general. In the present study, I address a specific component of that knowledge,

namely, pedagogical knowledge in the context of teaching MSK.
MSK IN THE “THINKING” CLASSROOM
What are the main characteristics of pedagogical knowledge in the context of

teaching MSK? My main argument is that maintaining the reality of general cogni-
tive structures while teaching specific topics is a very powerful educational means
for bringing about changes in students’ reasoning. This can be carried out by en-
gaging in MSK in an intensive way. Two points about MSK in the classroom need
to be considered. First, MSK has a strong linguistic component that can be put into
words, that is, formulated as statements that may be individually and socially ne-
gotiated. But although this knowledge must have a strong language component, it
does not require a complex, technical language. Professional terms may be re-
placed by a relatively natural, everyday type of language. For instance, the term
control of variables may be replaced by a fair test. The term tautology may be re-
placed by a circular explanation or an explanation that does not tell us anything.
A second point is that MSK must be strongly supported by experience and involve
a constant transition between the level of general, abstract rules and the level of con-
crete experiences. Because this type of knowledge is highly abstract, it is unlikely
that most students will be able to understand it without engaging in a series of practi-
cal experiences that will give them the “gut feeling” for a specific kind of thinking
skill or conceptual structure. The discussion of abstract and general elements of
thinking is thus woven into multiple experiences that consist of specific, content-de-
pendent problems requiring students to use a particular thinking strategy on a proce-
dural level. In this sense, addressing rules, generalizations, and principles of good
thinking is always connected to students’ concrete experience in which they use a
thinking strategy rather than addressing it in an abstract way that is disconnected
from immediate thinking experiences. The idea is to move constantly between two
levels of cognitive activities: a cognitive level that consists of engaging in active
thinking about specific, contextually rich issues and a metacognitive level that ad-
dresses rules and generalizations about thinking patterns. Such a process must be fa-
cilitated by long-term planning of instruction, that is, having the same thinking skills
addressed over and over again through different parts of the curriculum.
The idea is that knowledge of the general structures implied in MSK may be
transformed into powerful pedagogical tools that can be very effective in teaching
higher order thinking. Such pedagogical tools include several elements:
1. Knowledge of how to model the use of general thinking structures in a vari-

ety of specific circumstances, moving continuously between the levels of
procedural and metacognitive knowledge.
340 ZOHAR
2. Knowledge of how to scaffold students’ use of general thinking structures

in a variety of specific circumstances, moving continuously between the
levels of procedural and metacognitive knowledge.
3. Knowledge of how to use structured instructional means for “teaching for
transfer” or “bridging.”
4. Knowledge of how to provide opportunities for students to articulate the
cognitive processes they apply during problem solving.
5. Knowledge of how to first design and then teach careful and thoughtful
learning activities in which thinking goals are made explicit.
6. Knowledge of how to engage in long-term and systematic planning of
thinking activities across several sections of the science curriculum.
Some of these elements require additional clarifications. Specific thinking strategies

may be taught in a particular lesson by using carefully designed learning activities.
In long-term planning, however, teachers should make sure that the same thinking
patterns are repeated over and over again in different scientific topics, so as to prevent
the “welding” of the thinking strategy into a specific context. This systematic repeti-
tion will enhance transfer. Thus, during the school year, as different chapters of the
curricula unfold, a specific thinking pattern would be addressed repeatedly through
different science concepts. There are many alternative routes to accomplish this pur-
pose. Teachers may ask students to reflect upon the thinking processes they have
used in solving a certain problem, coaching them in articulating the thinking patterns
they have used. After students have had the opportunity to engage in the same think-
ing pattern across several different contexts, teachers may bring up all these situa-
tions, asking students to find their common denominator. Such a discussion address-
ing general elements of a thinking pattern may lead to making generalizations and to
formulating rules regarding this thinking pattern. Preferably, teachers will lead their
students to formulate the generalizations and rules by themselves. Using another
technique, teachers can also present students with a list of thinking patterns, and fol-
lowing a ’thinking activity,” ask students to match specific thinking patterns with
various parts of the activity. To do so, teachers can use either a deductive or an induc-
tive approach, but the main thing is that teachers will navigate their students back and
forth between a concrete and an abstract level, with a strong emphasis on articulating
their cognitive activities. In sum, teachers indeed need complex and sophisticated
pedagogical knowledge to be able to apply MSK in class.
THE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT OF

THIS STUDY AND MSK
The analysis described in the previous sections carries a very clear and important
practical implication. It implies that MSK must become a permanent component in
the goals and design of learning in general and in the teaching of thinking strate-
gies in particular. According to this view, students still need to be engaged in solv-
ing context-specific problems. But the more general aspects of the thinking proce-
dures and of the metaconceptual structures they engage in must be addressed in an
explicit way. This would allow teachers to engage students in thinking processes in
a structured and systematic way in both specific lessons and across different units
of instruction. Indeed, this idea is expressed in several recent projects that focused
on teaching goals such as inquiry (White & Frederiksen, 1998), the formal opera-
tions defined by Piaget (Adey, 1999; Adey & Shayer, 1990, 1993, 1994; Adey,
Shayer, & Yates, 1989), and models of causality (Grotzer & Perkins, 2000).
Another project that engages students in extensive metastrategic thinking is the

Thinking in Science Classroom (TSC) project within which the present study took
place. The goal of the TSC project is to teach higher order thinking as part of sci-
ence learning (Zohar, 1996, 2004; Zohar & Dori, 2003; Zohar, & Nemet, 2002;
Zohar, Weinberger, & Tamir, 1994). The design of the TSC project assumes that to
develop their thinking, children must construct new strategies through active en-
gagement with multiple reasoning tasks. The TSC project also assumes that learn-
ing scientific facts and learning thinking patterns are inseparable. The project is
thus designed according to the infusion approach to teaching higher order thinking
(Ennis, 1989). According to this approach, instruction of higher order thinking is
integrated into the curriculum of school subjects, rather than taught as a separate
subject. Various units within the project are targeted to teach critical thinking, ar-
gumentation, and science inquiry skills. This goal is achieved by supplementing
the regular science curriculum with learning activities designed to foster higher or-
der thinking and scientific argumentation. The project consists of several different
types of learning activities, including invitations to inquiry, investigation of
microworlds, learning activities that teach argumentation skills, and open-ended
inquiry learning activities. Several evaluation studies of the TSC project have
shown gains in students’ reasoning abilities and in their scientific knowledge
(Zohar, 1996, 2004; Zohar & Nemet; Zohar et al.).
Thinking in the TSC project is taught in a systematic way in the sense that
thinking strategies are considered explicit educational objectives. Instruction is
planned in such a way that the same thinking strategy is repeated several times, in
different contexts, and through different types of tasks. Most of the time students
are engaged in active problem solving in various science contents. But in addition
to that, teachers also engage them in active discussions of the pertinent MSK.
Making generalizations about the thinking processes underlying students’ reason-
ing is a continual activity. But making the generalizations is not the end of the way.
Because the same thinking skill is repeated in various activities over and over
again, teachers (and eventually students as well) keep referring explicitly to these
general principles and rules, making connections between their immediate experi-
ences in specific problems and MSK. Connections to experiences in other school
342 ZOHAR
subjects and in everyday life are also made. Thus, the idea behind this project is to
move constantly between two levels of cognitive activities: a strategic level that
consists of engaging in active thinking about specific, contextually rich situations
and a metastrategic level that addresses general aspects of thinking.
RESEARCH GOALS AND QUESTIONS
The previous section regarding MSK in teachers’ thinking is mostly based on the
literature that does not address directly MSK in teachers’ thinking. Previous stud-
ies have not examined directly issues such as the types of knowledge teachers need
for applying MSK in the course of instruction, the feasibility of developing such
knowledge in professional development courses, the characteristics of such poten-
tial developments, and the nature of professional development courses in this area.
Thus, the goal of the present article is to describe a study that focuses on these is-
sues. The study addresses the following research questions:
1. What types of knowledge do teachers need for applying MSK in the course
of instruction?
2. Is it feasible to help teachers develop the knowledge that is required for ap-
plying MSK in the classroom during a professional development course?
3. How do teachers develop working MSK in a professional development en-
vironment designed for promoting such learning?
4. What can the answers to the first three questions teach us about designing pro-
fessional development that may promote the use of MSK in the classroom?
Method
Background. This was a predominantly qualitative study conducted within
the framework of grounded research (Gibton, 2001; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The
main theme of the research, that is, the development of teachers’ metacognitive
thinking, evolved from the purpose originally conceived for the research and in
terms of which much of the data was collected (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990;
Schwartzer, 2002). The data was originally collected to assess the development of
teachers’ pedagogical knowledge in the context of teaching higher order thinking.
Data collection took place in the form of individual interviews, classroom observa-
tions, and materials collected as a by-product of teachers’ learning during the
course (transcripts of discussions and selected examples of written work). Only af-
ter I read and reread numerous times the rich materials that were collected did
teachers’ metacognitive thinking indeed emerge as a specific topic of inquiry.
Data analysis is presented in two different forms. First, I present stories of de-
velopment of 2 teachers using a narrative approach (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990).
Second, I present an account of the development of a group of 14 teachers by using

more formal categories of analysis that emerged from data taken from interviews
and classroom observations data.
Connelly and Clandinin (1990) cautioned against “the illusion of causality” that
is characteristic of narrative research. In this illusion, a sequence of events exam-
ined in temporal order has the appearance of causal necessity. To overcome this il-
lusion, Connelly and Clandinin explained, the researcher must write the narrative
inquiries according to the explanations assembled from the overall narratives. In
the present study, I follow the more specific footsteps of Fishman et al. (2003),
whose study demonstrated how to conduct research in professional development
by constructing a chain of evidence from multiple points across a model of relevant

teachers’ knowledge. Fishman and colleagues’ methodology consisted of describ-
ing a model of teachers’ knowledge that formed the basis for the curriculum of
their professional development. Then they looked for evidence of teachers’ behav-
ior that matched components of this model across time. Similarly, I begin my own
study with a theoretical description of pedagogical tools that teachers need to ap-
ply MSK in the classroom (see pp. 339–340). Next I describe how these elements
were integrated into the curriculum of the professional development (see pp.
345–347). Finally, I look for evidence (taken from interviews, classroom observa-
tions, and materials collected during the course) of teachers’ knowledge that match
those elements. As in the case of Fishman and his colleagues, I argue that although
individual components of this methodology is weak, the combination of evidence
sources form a powerful empirical evidence base for the statement that the events I
describe in the Findings section are indeed related to teachers’ professional devel-
opment in the context of the course.
The in-service TSC professional development courses were used as a naturalis-
tic research environment. I was one of several course leaders. This role granted me
natural participation in the group I investigated. This fact may have contributed to
my ability to construct meaning from the data I collected but may have also limited
my ability to see alternative meanings.
Participants
Participants were 14 junior high school and high school science teachers who at-
tended the TSC professional development course. Registration to the course was
voluntary, so most of the teachers who attended chose to take the course because
they wanted to learn more about how to develop students’ thinking. It may thus be
assumed that the teachers who took the course formed a self-selective group that
would be above the level of a randomly selected group of science teachers in terms
of their curiosity, their motivation for professional development, and their motiva-
tion to be up-to-date in educational innovations.
344 ZOHAR
The 14 participants were selected from all those who took the course (n = 43, di-
vided into two cohorts who went through an identical program) on the basis of their
geographical proximity to the researchers’ institution (within a radius of 50 miles).
Participants were contacted by telephone prior to the beginning of the course, and
asked for their consent to participate in this study. Of the 14 teachers, 10 had a bache-
lor of arts degree, and 4 had a master of arts degree in science or in education. Eight
teachers taught in junior high schools, 3 taught in both junior high and high schools,
and 3 taught in high schools. At the beginning of the study, 3 of the teachers had been
teaching for 2 to 3 years, 4 had been teaching for 7 to 14 years, and 7 had been teach-
ing for more than 15 years (M = 13.6 years, SD = 8.2 years).
Rationale and Description of the

Professional Development Course
Rationale. When teachers encounter innovative learning materials, they of-
ten pay attention to superficial elements of the program while neglecting its core,
transforming innovative curricula into a more familiar, traditional way of instruc-
tion (Ball, 1990; Bruer, 1993; Wilson, 1990). To try and minimize this phenome-
non, the goal of the TSC teachers’ courses was to help teachers become intelligent
and informed users of the program rather than technicians who operate it with no
understanding of whatever it is they are doing. The main goal of the course was to
foster teachers’ abilities to teach science in a way that would develop students’
thinking rather than focus on transmission of information.
In the closing pages of their review of teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, Borko
and Putnam (1996, pp. 700–701) listed the following features that contribute to
successful learning opportunities for teachers:
1. Assessing teachers’ preexisting knowledge and beliefs about teaching,

learners, learning, and subject matter.
2. Providing teachers with sustained opportunities to deepen and expand their
knowledge of subject matter.
3. Treating teachers as learners in a manner consistent with the program’s
view of how teachers should treat students as learners.
4. Grounding teachers’ learning and reflection in classroom practice.
5. Offering ample time and support for reflection.
All these features were incorporated into our workshops:
1. Teachers’ (initial) knowledge and beliefs about teaching and learning were
most notably addressed through the video, activity sheets, and class discussion that
followed the Investigation of Microworld learning activity and through reflective
workshops.
2. In the context of the TSC project, thinking skills comprised an important

teaching goal. Thus, sustained opportunities to deepen and expand teachers’
knowledge were provided when teachers were asked to engage the TSC learning
activities “as if they were students” and when additional learning activities were
presented briefly. Creative workshops provided a different way of consolidating
teachers’ knowledge of thinking skills. These activities addressed both procedural
and metacognitive knowledge of thinking processes.
3. Throughout the course, teachers were treated as learners in a manner consis-
tent with the program’s view of how teachers should treat students as learners.
Much of the learning during the course took place in small groups, characterized
by lively discussions among peers. Teachers were stimulated to engage in active

thinking. The course leaders demonstrated the role of facilitators rather than of
transmitters of information. Finally, great care was taken to create a social environ-
ment that would encourage and support individual thinking so that teachers would
feel comfortable to explore their thinking and express their ideas.
4. Teachers’ learning and reflection were grounded in classroom practice, and
ample opportunities for reflection were offered through the reflective workshops.
Course description. The length of the course was 56 academic hours, di-
vided into three phases. Phase 1 lasted 3 consecutive days that took place early in
the school year. Teachers were released from their schools to attend. The main goal
of Phase 1 was to expose teachers to the principles and ideas of the TSC project.
Several types of sessions took place during this phase. Initial acquaintance with
some of the project’s characteristic learning activities began when teachers were
asked to solve the problems presented in the TSC tasks “as if they were students.”
In these sessions, teachers were engaged in active learning that took place both in-
dividually and in small groups. This process included extensive arguments and hot
debates. That activity served three purposes. First, it gave teachers an opportunity
to experience a TSC learning activity firsthand, as learners. Second, by solving the
problems presented in that activity, teachers engaged in the thinking patterns ad-
dressed by the activity, practicing them first on a procedural level and then on a
metacognitive level. This activity thus promoted teachers’ knowledge of thinking
skills on a strategic and metastrategic level. Third, based on their firsthand experi-
ences as learners, teachers were led to uncover the pedagogical principles upon
which the learning tasks were based. After teachers experienced the activity “as if
they were students,” the leaders asked them to review the activity, to contemplate
its goals, and to think about why various elements were designed as they were.
Through active discussions, teachers thus collaboratively constructed some of the
most basic pedagogical elements of a thinking project (e.g., students as active
problem solvers, the value of individual problem solving as a preparation for group
work, teaching for transfer, addressing thinking patterns on a procedural and
metacognitive level). In addition, teachers watched videos of students who en-
346 ZOHAR
gaged the same tasks, analyzed their thinking difficulties, and discussed various
instructional means for treating these difficulties. There were also some formal
lectures about theoretical topics pertaining to instruction of higher order thinking
(e.g., transfer and metacognition).
By the end of the first phase, teachers were asked to try out some of the thinking
tasks in their classrooms and to reflect upon them in writing, according to a set of
leading questions (see Individual Interviews subsection). They were asked to sub-
mit the written reflections approximately 4 weeks before the course met again for
Phase 2.
Phase 2 took place approximately 3 months after Phase 1 during 2 consecutive
days that consisted mainly of two workshops. The first—the reflective work-
shop—centered on the written reflections that teachers sent. The leaders of the
workshops adapted chosen reflections into written cases by adding guiding ques-
tions. These cases were then discussed during the workshops by small groups of
teachers. In the second—the creative workshop—small groups of 2 to 4 teachers
engaged in active design of “thinking” tasks and lessons. The purpose was not so
much the end products, but the process. It was found (through formal and informal
assessment) that the process of designing learning activities to promote students’
thinking was very helpful in consolidating teachers’ understanding regarding the
goals and the pedagogical means for teaching thinking. In addition, some time was
devoted once again to formal lectures about theoretical topics that pertain to in-
struction of higher order thinking. By the end of Phase 2, teachers were once again
asked to try out some “thinking lessons” in their classrooms and to submit written
reflections about their teaching. Phase 3 took place approximately 3 months later.
The plan for Phase 3 was essentially the same as for Phase 2.
MSK was addressed extensively throughout the course. The content of that part
of the course’s curricula was very similar to the ideas presented in the Background
subsection of the Method section of this article. Components of this content were
integrated into all sections of the course rather than addressed by one or two large
units. This was carried out by the use of diverse teaching methods: attending short
lectures regarding theoretical issues pertaining to metacognition and/or MSK;
solving problems with an explicit metacognitive and/or MSK component (pre-
sented as part of the TSC learning activities); reflecting upon and discussing the ra-
tionale of such learning activities; watching video segments of students who en-
gaged in TSC learning activities that had an explicit metacognitive and/or MSK
component and discussing relevant issues in students’ learning; experiencing the
teaching of TSC learning activities that consisted of an explicit metacognitive
and/or MSK component; reflecting (in writing) upon such teaching experiences
and then discussing them with peers and course leaders; analyzing written case
studies (that were based upon real classroom interactions) that addressed pedagog-
ical issues pertaining to the teaching of metacognition and/or MSK; designing new
learning activities that consist of an explicit metacognitive and/or MSK compo-
nent; and getting feedback from peers and course leaders regarding such learning
activities.
Data Collection and Instrumentation

The findings are based on the triangulation of several data sources: individual in-
terviews, classroom observations, and materials collected as a by-product of teach-
ers’ learning during the course (transcripts of discussions and selected examples of
written work).
Classroom observations. The TSC research team conducted 28 classroom

observations (2 observations in the classroom of each participant), divided into two

series. The first series took place before the beginning of the course and the second
after its completion. For each classroom observation, teachers were asked to invite
the researcher to visit a thinking lesson, defined as a lesson in which the development
of students’ thinking was among the teacher’s explicit goals. During the 28 class-
room observations, lessons were audiotaped and the researcher took notes.
Individual interviews. The TSC research team conducted 28 semistructured

individual interviews (two with each participant), divided into two series. The first
series took place before the beginning of the course and the second after its com-
pletion. Interviews took place following the lesson in which the interviewer ob-
served a thinking lesson. Most interviews were approximately 45 minutes long
(the shortest interview lasted 25minutes, and the longest interview lasted 1 hour).
The interviews were rather comprehensive and referred to many elements of teach-
ers’ knowledge in the context of teaching higher order thinking skills. The three
following interview items are relevant to the study described here: (a) Do you en-
gage your students in learning to think? If so, how do you do that? (b) Are you sat-
isfied by the amount of time you devote to teaching thinking? (c) Which thinking
skills do you emphasize in your teaching? In addition, teachers were asked to re-
flect on the lesson they had taught and, among other things, to explain which think-
ing skills they addressed during the lesson.
Transcripts of discussions. All discussions that took place during the

course among participants, and between participants and course leaders, were re-
corded by a tape recorder.
Selected examples of written work. Two sources of examples of written

work that teachers completed during the course were used for this study. The first
source consisted of reflections upon selected events from recorded lessons. These
examples were part of a portfolio that teachers put together during the course.
Teachers were asked to record (with either an audio- or videotape) one thinking
lesson. Then they were asked to listen to the tape (or watch the video), and choose
348 ZOHAR
two events—a successful one and an unsuccessful one. The successful event was
defined as an event in which a teacher felt that he or she had made some progress
toward the goal of helping students advance their thinking. An unsuccessful event
was defined as an event in which a teacher felt that he or she had failed to achieve
this goal. Teachers were asked to transcribe the two events they had chosen and to
reflect upon them in light of several leading questions. All teachers agreed that
their work would be analyzed for research purposes.
The second source of examples of written work consisted of detailed lesson
plans that teachers produced, mostly during creative workshops.
Data Analysis
All recordings from both the interviews and the classroom observations were tran-
scribed by a research assistant and checked for accuracy by the researchers. Catego-
ries for analyzing the interviews and classroom observations were established.
These categories were not predetermined but emerged from the data following re-
peated readings, as is often the case in qualitative research (“grounded research”; see
Bogdan & Biklen, 1982; Gibton, 2001; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Sabar, 1990;
Spradly, 1980). Most of the categories addressed various elements of higher order
thinking, such as the number and quality of thinking skills applied at each lesson, or
pedagogies related to the “culture of thinking” in the classroom. The analysis of
some of the categories was based upon conceptual frameworks that were found in the
literature about teaching higher order thinking (e.g., in the Findings section, see the
detailed description of the category that pertains to the language of thinking). A de-
tailed analysis of these categories is reported elsewhere (Zohar, 2004). The present
article reports only these categories that pertain to metacognition. Inter-rater reli-
ability ranged from 85% to 90%. A case study approach was used to analyze the data
collected from the two teachers whose development was studied in detail.
FINDINGS: DEVELOPMENTS IN TEACHERS’ MSK
In the first part of the Findings section, I describe the professional development of
two teachers in detail. To get a broad picture, however, in the second part of the
Findings section, I describe the development of the 14 teachers as a group.
Part 1: A Detailed Analysis of the Development of Two

Teachers: The Cases of Yael and Sarah
Yael’s Case
Yael’s knowledge before the course. Yael is a woman who has been teach-
ing science in a junior high school for 17 years and reported (in the early interview)
that she loves her job. The development of Yael’s MSK during the course is not a rep-
resentative case, because she made the most significant progress of all teachers. Her
case therefore portrays an almost ideal rather than a typical model of professional de-
velopment in the sense that her prior knowledge enabled her to take the ideas pre-
sented in the course and implement them in an admirable way. I chose to analyze the
case of Yael for two reasons. First, this case illustrates the type of professional
growth that might be hoped for following a professional development course in this
field. Second, because Yael’s development took place on multiple levels and in-
volved many different issues, a detailed analysis of this process creates a solid foun-
dation for understanding the group analysis that I present afterward.
In the early interview, Yael stated that one of her professional goals is to teach
her students to think. However, beyond this very general statement she was unable
to answer any of the more specific questions that referred to teaching higher order
thinking. She could not describe the means by which she engages her students in
learning to think, and when asked whether she is satisfied by the amount of time
she devotes to teaching thinking, she replied
You are asking me about a concept that I cannot define, so I cannot answer
this question.
When asked which thinking skills she is addressing in her teaching, Yael an-
swered that she does not know of any thinking skills:
I don’t know which thinking skills exist, so I can’t tell you. I am doing many
things by intuition, but I don’t know how to explain what I am doing by using
specific concepts.
The early classroom observation in which Yael was asked to invite the researcher to
attend a thinking lesson confirmed that during her actual teaching, Yael indeed re-
quired her students to think in an active way. The classroom observation confirmed,
however, that at this earlystage Yael lacked appropriate conceptual tools for thinking
and for speaking about thinking skills. The observation of the lesson took place in a
seventh-grade classroom. The goal of the lesson was to solve a problem: Students re-
ceived a copper cylinder and were asked to find out the specific mass of copper. To
solve the problem, students had to first solve a subproblem (how can the volume of
the copper cylinder be measured). Then they needed to measure the volume of the
copper cylinder (by dipping it in a graduated cylinder filled with water), and finally
to compute the specific mass of copper (students learned the formula for computing
specific mass and the mass of copper in a previous lesson).
The teacher seemed to be charismatic, creating an atmosphere of intellectual
challenge in the classroom. Students working in small groups competed with each
other as to which group would be the first to solve the problem, and seemed to be
350 ZOHAR
highly involved with the task, which they eventually solved correctly. However, it
was apparent that in leading her students through the task, the teacher used a wrong
terminology. Task analysis shows that although the task involved a “hands-on”
measurement (of the cylinder’s volume), the lesson involved problem solving
rather than scientific inquiry. Nevertheless, Yael presented the task as an instance
of scientific inquiry. She asked her students to define a research question to plan an
experiment, to record experimental results, and to draw conclusions. Following the
lesson, when the interviewer asked Yael why she thought this lesson was an exam-
ple of a thinking lesson, Yael could not give a clear answer.
In sum, the data shows that before the teachers’ course Yael indeed initiated
thinking activities in her classroom, but she did so intuitively; she lacked the MSK
that pertains to the thinking activities she had initiated.
Yael’s knowledge following the first interval and during the second
interval of the teachers’ course. During the first phase of the teachers’
course, Yael was deeply impressed by the metacognition unit. At the end of this
unit, she shared the following thoughts with one of the course’s leaders:
I feel that I am in a state of shock right now. According to my current under-

standing, metacognition is the highlight of the program. If you don’t apply it
with students, you get only about one quarter of the job done. I had never ap-
plied it in my work, so I’m shocked because I thought I was doing it right … .
It’s a real revolution in the way you ought to teach … . I can’t afford to start
applying it slowly, in a gradual way, so I am already thinking about how I
ought to change the way I teach the next subject I am going to work on.
Immediately after returning home from the first phase of the course, Yael began
to write new “thinking” learning activities in which she applied the principles she
had learned during the course to new science topics. She was so excited by this
work that she felt a need to share her experiences. She called up one of the course’s
leaders to tell her about an invitation-to-inquiry (see Schwab, 1962, 1963) learning
activity that she had designed on the subject of the discovery of radioactivity by
Marie Curie. Yael reported that she had already used this learning activity success-
fully in three of her classrooms, and had also let two other science teachers from
her school (who had also attended the teachers’ course) use it in their classrooms.
She also said that she recorded one of these three lessons for her portfolio assign-
ment (i.e., for the assignment in which she was asked to report on selected events
from a recorded lesson):
I took you very seriously. During my winter vacation, I spent hours writing
an activity in chemistry … . I think the final product is really good consider-
ing it’s my first thinking activity. I am eager to get your feedback … . We al-
ready used it in five classrooms, and they [i.e., the students] liked it. It was
difficult for them to define a problem. I never before thought that it was a dif-
ficult thing to do. I know for sure that they learned at least one thing—about
conclusions. They confused between experimental results and conclusions
… [and we discussed the difference at length] … but I think it’s a good idea
to repeat this issue in other topics over and over again.
A task analysis of Yael’s learning activity shows that its final part addresses
MSK in an explicit way. This part of the activity provides a list of thinking skills,
requesting students to review their replies to previous questions and asking them to
match between the thinking skills in the list and their thinking while working each
of the previous questions. Yael learned this pattern of activity from one of the TSC
learning materials she had engaged with during Phase 1 of the course. She was able
to transfer this pattern to a new topic, that of her newly designed activity. A de-
tailed analysis indicates that at this stage of her professional development, Yael
identified correctly some of the thinking skills that were involved in the task, but
still failed to acknowledge some additional components that she had overlooked. It
should be noted that in the feedback that the TSC team gave to each of the learning
activities Yael (and the other teachers) designed, Yael always received comments
regarding the correctness of the MSK that had been used.
The data thus shows that following the course’s first phase Yael started to experi-
ment with teaching for thinking in a more focused and explicit way than prior to the
course. Throughout her work she began to apply correct MSK of thinking skills in her
teaching. This can be seen by the way she defined the thinking skills that her students
were engaged in (i.e., the references she made in the previously cited quote to defining
a problem and to differentiating between experimental results and conclusions). Addi-
tional pieces of evidence for the emergence of MSK at this stage is provided by her
correct identification of several of the metastrategies involved in the activity, and by
the design of an item in which Yael had explicitly aimed at engaging her students in
metastrategic thinking. The design of this item also reflects the first steps in the emer-
gence of pedagogical knowledge that pertain to the teaching of MSK.
In the second phase of the course, during a reflective workshop, Yael had an op-
portunity to present to her peers the learning activity she had written. All the partic-
ipating teachers analyzed the activity through a group discussion, made comments,
and discussed the thinking skills that were part of the activity by using explicit
thinking terms. During the rest of the school year, Yael sent the TSC staff three ad-
ditional learning activities that she had written and had used in her classrooms. She
received prompt and detailed feedback regarding each of these activities. She also
reported that she had engaged her students in a number of additional thinking ac-
tivities taken from the TSC books.
Yael’s own account of her professional development at this stage becomes ap-
parent through the way she described her experiences. In the opening session of the
352 ZOHAR
course’s second phase, teachers were asked to share with their peers any experi-
ences that they had with teaching thinking. Yael described her experiences in the
following way:
At the end of the first interval, I was in a state of shock. Since I returned
home, I started to write and to create new materials. I suddenly realized there
were so many issues I had never been aware of. I used to do many things in an
intuitive way, but I could not define them. I can’t tell you whether or not
these changes actually reached my students, but I went through a real
change. It was indeed an illumination.
At a discussion that took place in the closing session of the second phase, however,
Yael expressed a somewhat different view regarding the effects of her own change
process upon her students:
When I plan my lessons, I devote a greater part of my thinking to developing

students’ thinking. I am trying to insert a thinking section in almost every
lesson, even if sometimes it is only a small section … . Following the course,
I became more conscious of the thinking components in my lessons. The
funny thing is that my students also begin to feel some sort of change … .
They now know how to identify the thinking components in my lessons.
Yael’s knowledge at the end of the year. In the late classroom observation
that took place at the end of the school year, Yael engaged her students in a learning
activity about hormones. Yael had begun to write this learning activity together with
a group of other teachers during a creative workshop session that took place in the
course’s second phase. She completed the activity on her own, after she came back
from the course, and used it in the lesson to which she invited the experimenter for the
late classroom observation. The gist of the activity is that students are first asked to
collect information about several specific hormones and then to use this information
for generating a definition of the concept hormones. An analysis of this lesson
showed that Yael made enormous progress on many dimensions that pertain to
teaching thinking in comparison to the early classroom observation. In what follows,
I present only the dimensions that pertain to strategic knowledge and MSK.
In the lesson I analyzed as part of the late classroom observation, students were
presented with more thinking tasks than in the early classroom observation. Of the
questions that the teacher asked during the late lesson, 82% were classified as higher
order thinking questions, as compared to 50% of the questions during the early ob-
servations. There was also a difference in the nature of the skills that were addressed
during the two lessons. In the early observation, most of the thinking skills that were
addressed during the lesson were scientific inquiry skills. As described earlier, many
of these skills were not used in a proper way. In the late observation, students were re-
quired to use thinking skills such as making comparisons, making generalizations,

and generating definitions. As opposed to the lesson she gave at the beginning of the
year, in her later lesson, Yael used a very precise thinking vocabulary to describe the
thinking processes being addressed. She used words such as define, compare, con-
firm, and conclude in a correct and precise way, indicating that she was conscious of
the thinking skills that she required her students to use. Yael (Y) also used MSK as an
explicit means for helping a student (S) who had difficulties with the task and who
were unable to form a complete definition of hormones:
Y: Wait a minute, I need to ask how you had reached this definition.
S: That all hormones … I read everything and looked for things that are com-
mon to all of them.
Y: Is this all that they had in common? Try to see if there are any others.
Having a clear idea of the metastrategic elements of generating definitions (i.e.,

look for the things that many instances have in common) also enabled Yael to scaf-
fold students’ knowledge in another case in which students could not initially de-
fine hormones successfully. To extract the general features of what constitutes a
good definition, Yael used a teaching strategy that consisted of drawing an analogy
to a simpler definition that students were familiar with. As explained earlier, stu-
dents were asked to define the concept hormone. Instead of defining the concept,
one student, Eran, described each of the hormones involved. The following conver-
sation then took place between Yael (Y) and Eran (S1), with two other students (S2
and S3) joining in later:
Y: So is this your definition?

S1: Is it wrong?
Y: Wait a minute, let me ask you something [turning to the board and writing;
see Table 1]. Eran, let’s say you are an alien who just landed on earth and
saw these three animals—sparrow, peacock, and ostrich. You saw all three
of them and you asked me what they are. So I told you they were birds.
Then you went back to your own planet and reported that while you were
on earth, you saw birds. They asked you, “What are birds?” What is a bird?
Here, look at these three examples.
TABLE 1
The Example Yael Wrote on the Board
Sparrow Peacock Ostrich
Brown feathers Colored feathers (male only) Large body, eggs, and feathers.
Thick beak Lays eggs The beak is medium-size relative to its body.
Lays small eggs Sharp beak
354 ZOHAR
S1: Birds have feathers … [Yael turns to the board and writes: “Birds have
feathers.”]
S1: And a beak, and eggs.
Y: Great. How could you define birds based on these examples? How did you
know how to define a bird when you only had three examples? What did
you do in order to define? You didn’t just tell me “A sparrow, a peacock,
and an ostrich.” What did you do?
S1: I extracted and I summarized.
Y: What do you mean by extracting and summarizing. Let’s look for another
word.
S2: He extracted.
S3: He looked for the things they had in common.
Y: Can you take the things that all hormones have in common and tell me what
is a hormone? [Lesson continues, with different students offering defini-
tions.]
It seems that in this case, Yael ascribed the student’s difficulties in forming a
definition of a specific concept (hormone) to lack of MSK about the general char-
acteristics of a definition. She used the specific examples of birds and the general
definition of bird as an analogy that students were familiar with from their every-
day life. Then, she asked students to articulate what they did to define that concept.
This led to the formulation of a general rule about how to define concepts (i.e.,
MSK). She then led the students to use their newly constructed general rule to
solve the original problem, that is, to define a new concept (hormone) with which
they were not familiar.
Yael’s use of MSK in this lesson was not intuitive (the term she had used in the
early interview and observation for describing her treatment of thinking skills).
There are several pieces of evidence showing that in the late interview she was
highly aware of the thinking skills being taught. In the concluding interview, Yael
discussed several thinking skills in an explicit and correct way, and pointed cor-
rectly to the thinking skills addressed throughout the “hormones” activity. Another
piece of evidence supporting this finding is based upon the transcript of her lesson.
At a certain point during the lesson, Yael encountered a student who wrote a cor-
rect definition for hormone. However, this definition was copied from the textbook
rather than generated through the process of collecting information about several
specific hormones and extracting their common features. Yael responded by ex-
plaining once again how to form a definition and concluded her explanation by
making an explicit reference to the teaching goal underlying that part of the lesson,
which addressed MSK regarding definitions:
My goal here is to teach you how to use specific examples in order to form
definitions. I don’t want you to copy the definition from the book, because
although you might then have a wonderful definition in your notebook, you
would have missed the main point of the lesson.
Finally, Yael’s progress at the end of the year is reflected by her strive for
long-term planning and methodological teaching of thinking skills. In a written
questionnaire that was given at the end of the course, Yael was asked about any fu-
ture difficulties she might expect in “teaching for thinking.” Her reply included the
following:
Another difficulty [that I predict] is how to plan in a serious way the activi-
ties and the skills that I would like to address in each grade level. I would like
to think about it at the beginning of the year in order to see how to spread the
issues throughout the year, so that there will be an order and logic to what I
would teach rather than just do it by mere convenience as I’ve done this year.
Yael repeated the same idea in the late interview:
I know that I used to do a lot of these things intuitively, without knowing the
titles or the names. It’s clear to me that now, when I know the titles—i.e., the
metacognition you had taught us—I find it much easier to do it in a con-
scious way. I want to organize our whole science team and tell them we need
to sit down [to plan the curriculum]. Some of the thinking skills are too diffi-
cult for students in Grades 7 or 8.
This excerpt also indicates that being conscious of thinking skills as explicit ed-
ucational goals also opens the door for the possibility of being sensitive to stu-
dents’ initial thinking level while planning a thinking curriculum. In sum, the data
shows that by the end of the school year Yael had a sound MSK of the thinking
skills she addressed in her teaching. She also had an appropriate pedagogical
knowledge that enabled her to engage her students in metastrategic thinking. She
explicitly discussed elements of MSK with her students, using various pedagogi-
cal means. Her solid MSK was reflected in the ways Yael dealt with students’
wrong answers and thinking difficulties. Finally, she was beginning to think about
how she could use the MSK she had acquired for long-term and methodological
planning of her teaching and for considering students’ thinking difficulties.
Sarah’s Case
Sarah’s knowledge before the course. Sarah has a bachelor’s degree in

education and a teaching certificate in biology and chemistry. She teaches in a ju-
nior high school located in a large city, with teaching experience of 7 years. She
also works as a pedagogical advisor to science and technology teachers.
356 ZOHAR
In the early interview, Sarah reported that although she had never yet attended a
course whose goal is the development of students’ thinking, she had prior knowl-
edge of this topic from courses she had taken in philosophy and in education, and
from courses she had taken during her training as a pedagogical advisor. Indeed,
when asked about her goals with regards to fostering students’ thinking, she ex-
pressed concise and well-formulated goals:
[One of the important goals is] critical thinking so that they will not accept
everything they are told without questioning it. I feel that it is important that
students will be able to think for themselves, and to criticize. It is important
to teach more skills, and less content. Critical and independent thinking are
extremely important … . So that they will be able to find materials on their
own, to analyze them, to decide what is important and what is not so impor-
tant … . To be able to analyze and to synthesize.
When asked about the characteristics of a good teacher, Sarah replied that a
good teacher is one who is capable of teaching the skills she had described earlier.
She also explained that she chose to participate in the teachers’ course because she
felt the need to study how to teach thinking in a systematic and structured way:
I have a pretty strong intuition about … thinking skills … . I know what I

would like my students to be able to do. When I teach them, I know the types
of abilities they are lacking. But I would like it to be methodical and struc-
tured so that I will not have to improvise by using my intuition. I would like
to know which specific methods I need to use for various circumstances. I
am now at Stage 2 of teaching thinking, and I would like to be able to get to
Stage 3—a higher level. I am still missing the structured form. I hope to learn
this in the course.
These excerpts show that before the course Sarah had significant knowledge re-
garding the teaching of higher order thinking in general and about metalevel ele-
ments of teaching thinking in particular. Her interview shows that she was familiar
with a variety of specific thinking skills, viewing them as explicit, metalevel educa-
tional objectives. However, further probing during the early interview as well as an
analysis of the early classroom observation revealed severe gaps in Sarah’s knowl-
edge. First, the ability to use the language of thinking to describe thinking skills did
not always correspond with correct knowledge regarding the essence of these think-
ing skills. For instance, Sarah often said that she felt that teaching her students to ask
questions is very important, but the interviewer’s probing showed that in using this
term she meant to say that she is the one who is supposed to ask the questions (rather
than her students), whereas her students’ role is limited to finding the answers. Sec-
ond, Sarah did not engage her students in metacognitive thinking. This finding is
supported by two different pieces of evidence: First, Sarah stated explicitly that she
does not work with her students on a metacognitive level. Second, this statement was
confirmed by the analysis of the early classroom observation.
In addition, the early classroom observation revealed several problems that al-
though not directly related to the issue of metacognition, are nevertheless relevant
for understanding how metacognition was expressed in Sarah’s teaching (a de-
tailed analysis of this classroom observation is presented in Schwartzer, 2002).
Most of these problems pertained to pedagogical knowledge and were related to
the interaction between the teacher and her students. Sarah designed a reasonable
written assignment that indeed required higher order thinking. That assignment,
however, was presented to the students in a detached and decontextualized way

(“This activity sheet is not connected to anything we did before”). Students did not
understand what the assignment was about. They tried to ask but received no an-
swer, and therefore were not eager to cooperate with the teacher. Also, instead of
letting her students think for themselves about the problems presented in the activ-
ity, Sarah conveyed the full answers as soon as students expressed the slightest dif-
ficulty. Students thus received “ready-made” answers rather than being able to
construct them by active thinking and problem solving. In addition, the climate of
the lesson was unpleasant, with several discipline problems and a generally antag-
onistic atmosphere between teacher and students. Obviously, this was not an ideal
learning environment for encouraging students’ free thinking. Finally, the teacher
simply rejected students’ wrong answers or ignored them rather than treating them
in any way that could lead to meaningful learning. All in all, the impression from
this lesson was that the learning processes that took place in class were much less
effective than the ones that may have taken place with the same lesson plan, using a
different pedagogical approach.
In sum, the data show that before the course Sarah had a considerable (although
not complete) declarative knowledge pertaining to teaching thinking in general,
and to metastrategic elements in particular. However, this declarative knowledge
could not be expressed in her practice due to several deficiencies in her pedagogi-
cal knowledge. A large gap was thus observed between the teacher’s declarative
knowledge about how to teach for thinking and her ability to carry out these ideas
successfully in her practice.
Sarah’s knowledge during the teachers’ course. The data show devel-
opment in various elements that pertain to Sarah’s metacognitive knowledge dur-
ing the course. After the first phase of the course, Sarah began to use in her teach-
ing elements that pertain to metacognition. Between the first and second phases of
the course, and between the second and third phases, Sarah tried out in her class-
room several of the TSC thinking activities. In the portfolio describing her work,
she noted several times that she discussed the thinking skills applied in these activ-
ities (e.g., controlling variables and differentiating between experimental results
358 ZOHAR
and conclusions) with her students in an explicit way, that is, on a metastrategic
level. By the end of the course’s first phase, she noted that she enjoyed the course
and emphasized what she had learned:
Studying about these things in a rational way organized my thinking. I used

to do things intuitively, but now I know why I should be doing them.
By the end of the second phase, she reported that writing the portfolio assignment
contributed to her metacognitive knowledge because she was required to think on a
metacognitive level when she first planned and then analyzed her teaching:
[Writing the portfolio required me to] analyze my actions, my own thinking,

and my students’ thinking. [I also had to analyze] the skills students will
learn (when I planned the lessons) and the skills they had learned (when I an-
alyzed the lesson after I taught it).
The analysis of additional data not directly related to metacognition revealed

that during the course, Sarah struggled with several pedagogical issues that pertain
to the problems diagnosed in the early classroom observations. The reflections she
wrote about selected events from recorded lessons show that she became aware of
the need to let students think for themselves rather than “spoon-feed” them with
the correct solutions to thinking tasks. Yet, she had a dilemma regarding the appro-
priate degree of teacher intervention. She had learned in the first phase of the
course about the significance of letting students think for themselves, but then
when she first tried it out in her classroom she felt that she went too far and pro-
vided too little guidance. This led to frustrated students who were unable to com-
plete the activity successfully. She tried a different way in a second classroom (by
leading students to the correct answer, but still letting them think and find the an-
swer on their own) and felt that it was much more successful. In the second phase
of the course, during a reflective workshop, Sarah shared her teaching experiences
and reflections with the whole group. The ensuing group discussion gave her spe-
cific feedback concerning the ways she had directed her students’ thinking in these
two lessons. Based on the analysis of these two classroom situations, the partici-
pants in that group discussion constructed several general principles for ways of
guiding students’ thinking (a detailed analysis of this discussion is presented in
Schwartzer, 2002). At the end of Phase 2, Sarah noted that the reflective workshop
in which she had the opportunity to present and discuss her own work was espe-
cially significant for her learning process.
Another pedagogical issue that occupied Sarah’s attention during this period in-
volved how to address students’ wrong answers. At the end of the first phase, Sarah
stated that before the course she used to avoid students’ wrong answers because
she felt that addressing them explicitly might confuse other students. During the
course, said Sarah, she learned that students’ wrong answers could be used as trig-
gers for meaningful knowledge construction. However, she anticipated that it
would not be easy to change her habits in this area.
Sarah’s knowledge at the end of the course. In the late interview, Sarah
was beginning to think about how she could use the MSK she had acquired for
long-term and methodological planning of her teaching. She noted that she would
like to design numerous thinking activities, because it is important that students be
able to apply the same thinking skills in several different science topics. Following
a question regarding the contribution of the course, Sarah replied
I find myself today with a much higher awareness of the significance of

teaching higher order thinking. I learned new ways, techniques, and ideas. I
changed the focus of my classroom activities. I emphasize new things in my
teaching such as how not to ignore or reject students’ wrong answers, how to
plan separate activities for “strong” and “weak” students, and how to plan
written assignments that aim to teach a larger repertoire of thinking skills
such as controlling variables, differentiating between experimental results
and conclusions, assessing the validity of conclusions, examining assump-
tions, planning experiments, making observations, and many others … . De-
veloping students’ thinking is now at a higher level of awareness. I have in-
ternalized it.
This excerpt shows that Sarah was aware of the fact that the course expanded
her metacognitive knowledge in the sense that she was now consciously thinking
about a larger list of thinking skills when planning her lessons. She was also aware
of the fact that she had acquired new pedagogical knowledge, such as how to treat
students’ wrong answers.
In the lesson I analyzed as part of the late classroom observation (the science
subject of that lesson was a comparison between germination of pea and wheat
seeds), students were presented with more thinking tasks than in the early class-
room observation (45 vs. 18, respectively). An analysis of the late classroom ob-
servation also shows progress in several areas that pertain to metacognition. In
terms of the vocabulary of thinking, Sarah used 30 thinking words in the early les-
son, and 140 words in the late lesson. Some examples of the new words she used in
the late lesson include the following: validity, assumption, identify, hypothesize,
and interpretation. She used the thinking vocabulary in a correct and precise way.
In addition to engaging students with tasks that required thinking on a strategic,
cognitive level, Sarah engaged her students in metacognitive thinking by using two
distinct means: a class discussion and a written activity sheet. In an elaborate class
discussion, Sarah explicitly addressed the issue of how to differentiate between ex-
perimental results and conclusions (Zohar, 1998). This class discussion was too
360 ZOHAR
extensive to be presented here in detail. Nevertheless, I present a summary of it to

illustrate how Sarah combined her new knowledge of metacognition with the new
pedagogical knowledge she had acquired during the course.
When a student wrongly described experimental results by stating the conclu-
sions from that experiment, Sarah did not reject or ignore his wrong answer as she
had done earlier. Instead, she used that wrong answer to initiate a class discussion
in which she led her students to think about the specific details of the experiment
under consideration, as well as about metalevel generalizations regarding the na-
ture of experimental results and conclusions, and the differences between them. By
going back and forth between the strategic, cognitive level and the general,
metacognitive level, she helped students see what was wrong in the initial reply.
Finally, the same student who gave the initial wrong answer eventually constructed
an alternative, correct response. In this instructional sequence, Sarah illustrated the
interrelationships between knowledge of issues that pertain to MSK and issues that
pertain to pedagogical knowledge. Two elements of pedagogical knowledge in the
context of teaching higher order thinking that Sarah had learned in the course,
namely the knowledge of how treat students’ wrong answers regarding thinking
patterns and the knowledge of how to guide students’ thinking, were necessary for
Sarah to be able to lead her students in that metacognitive discussion.
The written activity Sarah used for the late classroom observation was taken
from the TSC book. This activity originally had no metacognitive component. Sa-
rah added several written questions that required metacognitive thinking. Some of
these questions followed a pattern that Sarah had encountered in other TSC tasks
(see Items 1a and 1b in the following list). Other metacognitive questions did not
follow a preknown pattern; that is, Sarah invented them (see Items 2 and 3 in the
following list). The metacognitive component of the activity was assigned after
students had completed the original written task and after difficulties in the origi-
nal task were resolved through class discussion. The task’s metacognitive compo-
nent consisted of the following (written) questions:
1a. Look again at section A questions 2 and 3. Next to each question write the
thinking skill you had used for answering the question. You may consult
the list of thinking skills below.
1b. Look again at section C questions 6, 7 and 8. Next to each question write
the thinking skill you used for answering the question. You may consult the
list of thinking skills below.
A list of thinking skills [These thinking skills were taken from the TSC teacher’s
guide.]:
• Drawing valid conclusions from data and from experimental results

• Controlling variables
• Differentiating between experimental results and conclusions

• Identifying hidden assumptions
• Avoiding explanations that are not explanations (tautologies)
• Identifying unsound conclusions based on a non-representative sample
2. Consider each of the questions in which you made a mistake. Please ex-
plain your mistake.
3. How would you improve your thinking to avoid each of the mistakes you
made?
Approximately 2 weeks after the late classroom observation, Sarah sent us by

mail a file with selected students’ answers to that activity. She noted that it was the
first time that she had tried out that type of activity, and that both she and her stu-
dents had enjoyed it. Therefore, wrote Sara, she planned to incorporate more
metacognitive activities in her future lessons.
In sum, the findings show that although Sarah had a considerable degree of
MSK prior to the course, this knowledge was further consolidated during the
course. Sarah’s more striking development, however, was in various elements of
pedagogical knowledge that enabled her to actually use MSK for planning written
assignments, for leading potentially fruitful class discussions and individual stu-
dents’ thinking, for addressing students’ wrong answers in a meaningful way, and
for modeling the use of the language of thinking in classroom discourse.
Part 2: The Development of 14 Teachers Throughout the

School Year
Interview Data
Information regarding teachers’ MSK of thinking skills was obtained from
three of the interview questions: (a) Do you engage your students in learning to
think? If so, how do you do that? (b) Are you satisfied by the amount of time you
devote to teaching thinking? (c) Which thinking skills do you emphasize in your
teaching? In response to the first question in the early interview, most teachers (n =
11) replied that they engage in developing their students’ thinking. In describing
how they develop students’ thinking, some teachers used only general terms: “in
the laboratories,” “by conducting experiments,” “by working with computerized
spread sheets,” or “by some types of questions.” Other teachers replied by giving
more specific examples of the means they use to develop students’ thinking: “by
asking questions,” “by formulating research questions,” “by analyzing experi-
ments,” and “by data processing.” The third interview question was apparently a
very difficult question for most of the teachers, because 11 of the 14 teachers could
not answer it:
362 ZOHAR
• “I don’t know which thinking skills exist, so I can’t tell you. I am doing many
things by intuition, but I don’t know how to explain what I am doing by using
specific concepts.”
• “I don’t know what you mean.”
• “What is a thinking skill?”
• “What do you mean? … Look, from your question I understand that there are
various thinking skills, but I don’t … I simply miss … Perhaps I am doing
some things unconsciously. It’s hard for me to answer this question.”
• “I don’t know how to classify them.”
• “A research question … I don’t know how to classify.”
These excerpts show that at the early interview most teachers were not familiar
with the concept thinking skills. The few teachers (n = 3) who did reply to the inter-
view questions by naming specific thinking skills used almost exclusively examples
of scientific inquiry skills such as planning an experiment, controlling variables, for-
mulating research questions, formulating hypotheses, and drawing conclusions.
In the late interviews, teachers’ replies to the same questions were different than
those they gave in the early interviews. Thirteen of the 14 teachers replied that they
engage in developing their students’ thinking. In response to the question regard-
ing the thinking skills addressed in their classrooms, these 13 teachers gave multi-
ple and varied examples. As in the early interviews, most of the thinking skills that
teachers mentioned consisted of scientific inquiry skills. Thus, in the late interview
a larger number of teachers (13 vs. 3) made references to scientific inquiry think-
ing skills than in the early interviews (e.g., formulating a research question, formu-
lating a hypothesis, planning an experiment, differentiating between experimental
results and conclusions, and drawing valid conclusions). In addition, at this stage
teachers also mentioned a variety of other thinking skills that were not mentioned
in the early interviews, such as asking questions, making generalizations, identify-
ing assumptions, differentiating between relevant and irrelevant information, iden-
tifying tautologies, analyzing graphs, making comparisons, constructing concept
maps, identifying problems, and metacognition.
In sum, the comparison between the findings from the early and late interviews
indicates that in the late interviews a larger number of teachers were aware of a
larger variety of thinking skills than was the case in the early interviews.
Classroom Observation Data

Two of the huge number of elements that emerged from the classroom observa-
tion data are related to teachers’ MSK: metacognitive activities that took place in
the classroom, and the language of thinking. In what follows, each of these ele-
ments is examined in a detailed way.
Metacognitive activities in the classroom. Metacognitive activities refer

to activities in which students are explicitly required to apply MSK, or to activities
in which students are asked to reflect on their thinking processes. Metacognitive
activities can take place as either group or class verbal interactions (i.e., as
metacognitive discussions), or as written tasks. The data show that before the
course, metacognitive activities took place in only 1 of the 14 observed lessons, in
the form of a class discussion. The 1 lesson in which a metacognitive discussion
did take place consisted of a general discussion about experimental treatment and
control, and about the differences between experimental results and conclusions.
Students were also asked to reflect on their gains from that lesson.
In the late observations, metacognitive discussions took place in 5 of the 14 ob-

served lessons. In 2 of the lessons, teachers used preplanned metacognitive activities
(one activity was taken from the TSC learning activities and the second was designed
by a group of teachers in a creative workshop that took place during the course). In
both cases, teachers followed the preplanned activity carefully, and the discussion
was not developed further than planned. Three other teachers engaged their students
in metacognitive activities that they had initiated on their own. One teacher used a
preplanned TSC activity that addressed variable control on a procedural level. The
teacher, however, added to that activity a new, metacognitive component in which
students were asked to identify the thinking skills they had used during the lesson, to
reflect upon their mistakes, to explain their mistakes, and to suggest ways for avoid-
ing similar mistakes in the future. One teacher engaged her students in metacognitive
activities in a spontaneous way, that is, as a response to unpredicted developments in
the lesson (see the hormones lesson described earlier as part of Yael’s development).
Although this data indicates some gains in teachers’ overall ability to engage
students in metacognitive thinking, still only 5 out of a total of 14 teachers applied
metacognitive thinking in their lessons at the end of the course. One might argue
that it is premature to conclude that the other 9 teachers were unable to apply
metacognitive thinking in their lesson based on a sole classroom observation.
However, in conversations that took place following the late classroom observa-
tions, several teachers explained that applying metacognitive thinking in their les-
sons still seemed a complicated thing to do. Teachers reported that they had en-
countered the concept of metacognition during the TSC course for the first time
and that they still did not feel confident enough to apply it in their teaching. They
also reported that they lacked the pedagogical knowledge of how to lead students
toward a metacognitive discussion. Some teachers reported that they plan to ad-
dress metacognitive goals in the following year, as part of a year-long plan for
teaching thinking. Part of their planning would include working on the same think-
ing skills in various science contents followed by metacognitive discussions of
general thinking principles. It may therefore be concluded that following the
course, only a limited number of teachers were able to engage their students in
metacognitive thinking during their thinking lessons.
364 ZOHAR
Using the “language of thinking.” The language of thinking includes

words that refer to mental processes and products, or to words that describe think-
ing or that stimulate one’s thinking (i.e., thinking, drawing conclusions, making
assumptions, justifying, establishing causal relationships, making contradictions,
etc.; see Tishman, Perkins, & Jay, 1995). Although using the language of thinking
is not a sufficient condition for metastrategic thinking, it is a necessary condition
because of the declarative nature of this type of thinking. I therefore decided to in-
clude the data that pertains to the language of thinking in the present analysis.
To assess teachers’ use of the language of thinking, I calculated two compo-
nents. The first component consisted of the number of thinking words in teachers’
vocabulary as it was expressed in the observed lessons. The number of times teach-
ers pronounced thinking words at the beginning and at the end of the year was
counted, and the mean number of words was calculated, using a t test to asses the
significance of the difference and to calculate the effect size. The second compo-
nent consisted of a similar analysis that was carried out for the variety of thinking
words (i.e., the number of different thinking words teachers pronounced, ignoring
how many times they pronounced each word).
The results show that the mean number of thinking words that teachers pro-
nounced in their lessons was 50.3 (SD =31.6) in the early classroom observations
and 77.7 (SD = 34.1) in the late classroom observations. This difference was statis-
tically significant, t = 2.66, p <0.05, with a large effect size (ES = 0.8). The median
was 42 words in the early classroom observations and 76 words in the late class-
room observations. It is important to note that the increase in the number of think-
ing words was found in the lessons of 11 teachers. Of the 3 remaining teachers, 1
teacher hardly spoke at all in the late classroom observation because during that
whole lesson students worked in small groups. A second teacher pronounced al-
most the same number of words in the two lessons, with a very slight decrease (79
words in the first lesson vs. 76 words in the second). Only the third teacher had a
considerable decrease in the number of words in the late observation (137 words in
the first lesson vs. 106 words in the second). However, because this teacher had a
high number of thinking words in both lessons, this decrease does not seem to be
significant in terms of this teacher’s ability to use thinking words during her lesson.
The analysis of the variety of thinking words showed that the mean number of dif-
ferent thinking words increased from 14.1 (SD = 3.65) in the early observations to
20.2 (SD = 4.52) in the late observations. This difference was also statistically signif-
icant, t = 5.61, p < 0.001, with a very large effect size (ES = 1.34). An increase in the
number of thinking words was observed in the lessons of 13 teachers. The remaining
teacher (in whose lesson a decrease in the mean number of different thinking words
was observed) was the same teacher mentioned earlier, who hardly spoke during the
late lesson because of students’ group work. In sum, the data shows that almost all
teachers improved their use of the language of thinking as measured by both the
number and the varietyof thinking words that theyhad pronounced in their lessons.
Comparison Between Interviews and

Classroom Observation Data: Teachers’ Awareness of
the Thinking Strategies Addressed in the Lesson
In the interviews that followed the classroom observations, teachers were asked
to explain which thinking skills they addressed during the lesson. I then compared
the teachers’ responses to this question to my own analysis of the thinking skills
the teachers had addressed during the lesson. The analysis is based on the data col-
lected during the classroom observations.
Results show that prior to the course only 4 teachers were aware of the thinking
skills addressed in the observed lesson. Two of these teachers addressed only sci-
entific inquiry skills such as description of experimental results and drawing con-
clusions. All the other 10 teachers were either completely unaware of the thinking
strategies addressed in their lesson or aware only of a few of the thinking strategies
that were actually addressed in their lesson. This information is based upon teach-
ers’ explanations and is also confirmed by my analysis of the lessons.
Following the course, however, 12 teachers were aware of the thinking skills ad-
dressed in the observed lesson. The reflective reports of these 12 teachers fully
concurred with my analysis of the lesson. The interview data of 1 teacher was unin-
formative regarding this point, and the interview data of another teacher indicated
that she made a mistake; that is, she indicated different thinking skills than the ones
she had actually addressed as apparent from my analysis of her lesson. It may thus
be concluded that the course helped teachers to develop the ability to identify the
thinking strategies they address in their lessons.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
The findings from this study confirm the findings from my earlier study (Zohar,
1999, 2004) that teachers’ initial MSK is lacking and is unsatisfactory for sound
teaching of higher order thinking skills. The present study aimed to refine our un-
derstanding of the knowledge teachers need for using MSK in the course of in-
struction. The study followed the professional development of 14 science teachers
during a whole school year in which they attended a professional development
course. The following findings emerged from our data analysis:
1. The importance of metacognition for teaching thinking in general, and MSK

in particular, was a new body of knowledge that most teachers encountered during
the course for the first time.
2. Following the course, most teachers showed a considerable development in
their MSK as compared to the beginning of the course. Before the course only a
minority of the teachers were aware of the thinking skills they had been addressing
366 ZOHAR
in their classrooms and most teachers were unable to name these thinking skills
correctly. As opposed to that, by the end of the course most teachers were aware of
the thinking skills they had been addressing in their classroom and were able to
name correctly most or all of these thinking skills.
3. MSK that pertains to scientific inquiry skills was more accessible to teachers
than MSK that pertains to other higher order thinking skills that are not related to
scientific inquiry.
4. By the end of the course teachers improved their use of the language of
thinking as compared with the beginning of the course.
5. By the end of the course considerable developments were observed in teach-
ers’ pedagogical knowledge in the context of teaching metacognition. However,

only about one third of the teachers were able to engage their students in
metacognitive activities that foster students’ MSK.
6. By the end of the course some teachers were using MSK as a means for treat-
ing students’ wrong answers. Teachers helped students to first notice their mistakes
and then to construct more correct responses by leading them back and forth be-
tween a wrong answer given on the strategic level and the general, metacognitive
level.
7. There were some indications that teachers could be expected to use their
newly acquired MSK for long-term and systematic planning of teaching thinking
skills in the future.
With respect to the second research question, these findings show that a profes-
sional development course can indeed help teachers make considerable progress
regarding the knowledge that is required for applying MSK in the classroom. How-
ever, to understand the nature of this progress and of its limitations, I need to turn to
a discussion of the remaining three research questions.
My ultimate goal in the TSC professional development course was to affect
teachers’ practice and eventually students’ learning. One limitation of this study is
that effects upon students’ learning were not assessed. Further study is needed to
assess such effects. The present study does, however, address the detailed conse-
quences of the course to teachers’ practice. In the literature review section of this
article, I asked what teachers need to know to be able to incorporate MSK routinely
into the course of instruction. The answer to this question involved two bodies of
knowledge. The first was teachers’ acquaintance with elements of MSK that are
pertinent to instruction of higher order thinking (i..e, what is equivalent to sub-
ject-matter knowledge in other science education contexts). The second was teach-
ers’ acquaintance with appropriate pedagogical knowledge about how to apply
MSK in classroom instruction. In what follows, teachers’ development with re-
spect to each of these bodies of knowledge is discussed in detail.
What is the nature of the development that is witnessed in teachers’ knowledge
of MSK that is pertinent to instruction of higher order thinking? The development
of sound MSK of even one thinking skill is often a long and tedious process that is
tightly connected to an individual’s strategic knowledge of that skill (e.g., Kuhn,
Garcia-Mila, Zohar, & Andersen, 1995; Siegler, 1996). With regard to some cate-
gories of thinking skills, the teachers’ responses to the course seem to fit the theory.
With regard to many other categories, however, teachers showed relatively rapid
changes. It is unreasonable to assume that the treatment of teachers’ thinking skills
that took place during the TSC course actually induced the rapid formation of to-
tally new MSK relating to so many thinking strategies. The findings thus suggest
that the pattern of teachers’ knowledge acquisition regarding this issue is complex
and varies for different categories of thinking strategies.
The idea of a variability in the patterns of teachers’knowledge acquisition in this

context is supported by previous studies about teachers’ strategic knowledge of
higher order thinking. Some previous studies have shown that in- and preservice
teachers’initial reasoning skills are often faulty (e.g., Bransky, Hadass, & Lubezky,
1992; Brownell, Jadallah, & Brownell, 1993; Jungwirth, 1987, 1990, 1994;).
Teachers can rarely provide a clear explanation of what critical thinking is, explain
major concepts in thinking (e.g., assumption, inference, or implication), or provide a
clear conception of the critical thinking skills they see as the most important for their
students to develop (Paul, Elder, & Bartell, 1997). Other studies conducted in the
context of the TSC project, however, have shown that teachers have initial varying
degrees of strategic knowledge regarding different categories of thinking patterns
(Schwartzer, 2002; Zohar, 2004). Various sources of information (interviews, class-
room observations, and written activity sheets) revealed that at the beginning of the
course, teachers were by and large already familiar and proficient with what is tradi-
tionally identified as scientific inquiry strategies (e.g., defining a research question,
planning experiments, describing experimental results, drawing conclusions, and
controlling variables). Teachers’ familiarity with these strategies may come from
their own science studies or from their teaching experiences. However, the previous
research conducted within the TSC project also has shown that teachers were not
proficient with what is traditionally identified as critical thinking skills (e.g., identi-
fying tautologies and assumptions, or constructing arguments and counterargu-
ments). For instance, during numerous workshops teachers rarely solved incorrectly
the Investigation of Microworlds learning activity that required variable control
(Zohar, 2004), but many teachers were unable to identify the assumptions on which
assertions were based, and often confused assumptions with hypotheses. Such inci-
dents were repeated among several different groups of teachers.
According to Kuhn et al. (1995) and Siegler (1996), successful performance on a
strategic level requires metalevel knowledge of the relevant thinking strategy, be-
cause such metalevel knowledge is necessary for consistently choosing the accurate
strategy from the larger repertoire of thinking strategies available in a person’s mind.
On this account, teachers’initially high performance on tasks that required scientific
inquiry strategies implies that they had (prior to the course) some form of metalevel
368 ZOHAR
knowledge regarding scientific inquiry thinking strategies. However, the fact that
most teachers were initially unable to verbalize this knowledge shows that it was im-
plicit. Therefore, regarding scientific inquiry thinking strategies, the nature of the
developments that were witnessed in teachers’ MSK seems to reflect a transforma-
tion of their initially implicit metalevel knowledge into more explicit metalevel
knowledge, enabling them to verbalize it in a better way than they were prior to the
course. Teachers’ initial strategic knowledge, as well as their initial implicit
metalevel knowledge, can explain the fact that MSK pertaining to inquiry strategies
was found to be more accessible to teachers than MSK pertaining to other strategies.
Nevertheless, the findings also emphasize the significance of making such metalevel
knowledge of thinking skills explicit. Although teachers did seem to have consider-
able implicit metalevel knowledge of scientific inquiry strategies, this knowledge
was insufficient for the purpose of teaching higher order thinking in a sound and fo-
cused way. To facilitate such teaching, teachers must transform their implicit knowl-
edge into explicit knowledge that can be mediated through the language of thinking
(i.e., knowledge of the names of thinking strategies and the ability to verbalize when,
why, and how to use appropriate thinking patterns in the process of knowledge con-
struction and in problem solving, as is stated in the definition of MSK provided at the
beginning of this article). Only when the relevant MSK is indeed made explicit, (i.e.,
it becomes MSK according to the definition) does it become accessible for teachers’
use in their practice.
Argumentation skills document yet another distinct category of thinking pat-
terns, highlighting another possible route for the emergence of teachers’ MSK. Ini-
tially(i.e., before the course), the TSC teachers never addressed argumentation skills
as distinct educational objectives in the interviews or in the classroom observations.
Several previous studies have also confirmed that science teachers rarely engage
their students in argumentation (Zohar & Nemet, 2002). Following the course, how-
ever, teachers used the TSC argumentation unit extensively and expertly, addressing
argumentation skills in their classrooms in a way that reflected both strategic knowl-
edge and MSK of the pertinent thinking skills (Zohar, 2004). In fact, judging from
the large number of books that were sold, the argumentation unit became the most
popular of the TSC units and was implemented in numerous classrooms all over the
country. Teachers’fast implementation of this unit suggests that as with scientific in-
quiry strategies, the pertinent strategic and implicit metalevel knowledge had ex-
isted prior to the course. However, unlike inquiry skills, argumentation skills were
not part of what science teachers had normally experienced as part of their science
classroom culture (Zohar & Nemet, 2002). Part of the course’s contribution in this
field might be similar to the course’s contribution regarding inquiry skills, namely,
turning implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Another part might be in induc-
ing a change in what is valued in classroom culture and discourse. Consequently,
teachers became more disposed to bring forward into instruction knowledge compo-
nents that they had normally not applied to their instruction prior to the course. It is
important to note that the two explanations for the course’s contribution (i.e., turning
implicit metaknowledge into explicit, and changing what is valued in classroom dis-
course) support rather than exclude each other.
Different considerations, however, apply to other thinking skills. Regarding
thinking skills with which most teachers were initially totally unfamiliar and un-
able to use even on a strategic level, they indeed did not have any initial metalevel
knowledge. Regarding, for instance, identifying assumptions, it seemed that when
the appropriate MSK was presented by the leader of the course, teachers asked nu-
merous clarification questions, indicating that they found the issue unclear and
confusing. Although toward the end of the course the TSC team observed some de-
velopments in teachers’ MSK regarding this thinking skill (some teachers had be-
gun to apply it in their teaching), this development was not formally assessed.
A second limitation of this study is that it assessed teachers’ developing MSK in
a general way, rather than doing so more precisely, which would have required sep-
arate and formal measures for each of the thinking skills addressed by the study.
Further studies are needed to find ways to measure teachers’ MSK of various
thinking skills before and after the course, to learn more about the precise develop-
mental patterns of teachers’ MSK regarding specific thinking strategies. Indeed, I
am currently developing such measures in two new, ongoing studies that address
the development of students’ MSK following explicit instruction, regarding four
scientific inquiry thinking skills. Applying similar measures to assess the develop-
ment of teachers’ thinking would make an important practical contribution be-
cause such research could yield specific recommendations regarding how to teach
specific thinking skills in future professional development courses.
However, despite this limitation, the findings of the study reported in the pres-
ent article and the theoretical considerations presented earlier can illuminate some
issues that pertain to the third research question, namely, how do teachers develop
working MSK in a professional development course. The data suggest that the
overall development in teachers’ MSK during the course is a conglomerate of sev-
eral types of developments. In some cases, the course introduced new thinking
strategies that teachers learned both on a strategic and on a metastrategic level. Fu-
ture research is needed to determine the exact nature of the development of teach-
ers’ thinking regarding such strategies. In other cases, the course helped in making
preexisting, implicit metalevel knowledge more explicit, and/or in changing the
learning culture to embrace and to value new forms of discourse regarding think-
ing. The latter two developments seem to be very significant in making MSK ac-
cessible in teachers’ practice.
What is the nature of the developments witnessed in teachers’ pedagogical
knowledge? Prior to the course, Yael had a solid pedagogical knowledge. Al-
though my analysis did not attempt to discern all the components of that knowl-
edge, it makes sense to assume (based on the first classroom observation and on the
literature) that it consisted of a mixture of general pedagogical knowledge and
370 ZOHAR
PCK in the context of specific science subjects. However, prior to the course, Yael
had no explicit MSK in the sense that she was unaware of the thinking skills she
addressed in her practice and was unable to discuss them on a metalevel. She was
also not familiar with many aspects of pedagogical knowledge in the context of
teaching higher order thinking, and more specifically with the pedagogical knowl-
edge that pertains to MSK. During the first phase of the course, Yael’s knowledge
was affected in at least three areas. First, she gained some new explicit MSK. Sec-
ond, she gained some specific pedagogical knowledge concerning how to address
MSK in class (e.g., a pattern for designing a written item that required students to
think on a metacognitive level). Third, she developed a set of beliefs regarding the
significance of using MSK with her students that motivated her to implement
metacognition in her practice. Because her initial pedagogical knowledge had
been sound, these changes in her knowledge were sufficient for inducing consider-
able changes in her practice. Right after Yael returned from the course’s first phase,
she began to implement MSK in her teaching. She then used it extensively
throughout the year. Data from the late classroom observation illustrate an exem-
plary lesson applying many of the pedagogical tools that are unique to the teaching
of MSK (see the MSK in the “Thinking” Classroom section).
Sarah’s developmental pattern was very different from Yael’s. Whereas Yael ini-
tially lacked knowledge of the pedagogical tools unique to teaching MSK, Sarah in
addition had significant gaps in her broader pedagogical knowledge. Like Yael, she
had initially lacked knowledge of the pedagogical tools that are unique to the teach-
ing of MSK. However, in contrast to Yael, she had several gaps in her broader peda-
gogical knowledge. These gaps obstructed the expression of her developing MSK in
her practice. She struggled with these issues throughout the course. During the
course, she indeed improved her knowledge of explicit MSK, and of specific peda-
gogical tools for teaching MSK (such as planning written assignments that consist of
a metacognitive component aiming to teach a large and varied repertoire of thinking
skills). However, these types of knowledge could not be fully expressed in her prac-
tice until she also developed more appropriate means for treating students’wrong an-
swers and for leading students’thinking. These findings show the interrelationships
between the various knowledge components that are at play here: The expression of
MSK in instruction was dependent upon elements of pedagogical knowledge, some
of which pertain to general pedagogical knowledge (e.g., knowing how to present a
written task in a way that will motivate students), some of which pertain to pedagogi-
cal knowledge in the context of teaching higher order thinking (e.g., knowing how to
lead and guide a discussion that addresses students’thinking), and some of which are
even more specific to the teaching of MSK (e.g., knowing how to design a thinking
task with a metacognitve component).
These findings and considerations can form the basis for answering the first re-
search question regarding the types of knowledge that teachers need to be able to
apply MSK in the course of instruction. The somewhat general ideas presented in
the literature review may now be revisited and consolidated in light of the empiri-
cal data presented earlier.
Previous researchers have shown that when teaching specific contents, teachers
must have a combination of subject-matter knowledge, general pedagogical knowl-
edge, and PCK (e.g., Gess-Newsome & Lederman, 1999; Shulman, 1986, 1987).
My findings show that these three elements are also necessary for addressing MSK
in the classroom, but here they have a special character that derives from the special
nature of MSK. As is the case for any subject matter they teach, teachers need to be
proficient in various elements of MSK to apply it in their classrooms. However, due
to the special nature of MSK, there are three further requirements. First, teachers’
MSK must be explicit. Although implicit metalevel knowledge may be sufficient for
applying thinking skills for problem solving, it is definitely insufficient for the pur-
pose of sound instruction. Second, MSK should become a valued and desired com-
ponent of classroom discourse. And third, teachers must also be proficient in the stra-
tegic level of a thinking skill because it is the foundation of having metalevel
knowledge regarding that skill.
In terms of general pedagogical knowledge, instruction of MSK is also similar
to instruction of specific subjects, in that general pedagogical knowledge is a pre-
requisite for both. To effectively teach/apply MSK in their classrooms, teachers
must have a pedagogical knowledge of higher order thinking skills (which can en-
able them to teach thinking skills on a strategic level; see Zohar, 2004). In addition
to this, however, teachers also need to be proficient in the subcomponent that con-
sists of several pedagogical tools that are very specific to the domain of teaching
MSK. A graphic representation of the types of knowledge that teachers need for
applying MSK in the course of instruction is shown in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1 Types of knowledge that teachers need to teach MSK.

372 ZOHAR
The findings also point to some additional ideas regarding the third research
question (namely, how teachers develop working MSK). First, the case studies of
Yael and Sarah show that the pattern of teachers’ development is individual and
highly dependent upon each teacher’s prior knowledge.
Second, the findings identified several different aspects of development in
teachers’ working MSK. One aspect was expressed when teachers became more
proficient users of the language of thinking. Being more proficient users of the lan-
guage of thinking allows teachers to incorporate a richer “thinking” vocabulary
into classroom discourse, thereby providing modeling for students’ conversations
and providing scaffolds for their thinking (Tishman et al., 1995). Most teachers (11
of 14 regarding the number of words and 13 of 14 regarding the variety of words)

made considerable progress regarding this aspect. Another aspect involves teach-
ers’ awareness of the thinking skills they address during instruction. This aware-
ness is important because it allows teachers to consider thinking skills as distinct
educational goals. Such a consideration is a necessary condition for short- and
long-term planning of lessons that aim at fostering students’ thinking in a focused
and carefully designed way (Zohar, 2004). By the end of the course, 12 of the 14
teachers (compared to only 4 before the course) had made considerable progress
regarding this aspect. A third aspect refers to teachers’ ability to engage students in
metacognitive activities. At the end of the course, only 5 of the 14 observed lessons
indicated that teachers were indeed able to do so. The apparently greater difficulty
with this aspect can be explained by the fact that in addition to the knowledge re-
quired for the expression of the previous two aspects, this third aspect also requires
knowledge of specific MSK pedagogical tools. As described earlier, the use of
MSK in the classroom requires rather specific and refined pedagogical knowledge.
In fact, in the late interviews a few teachers said explicitly that they did not address
MSK in class because they felt that they lacked the knowledge that might enable
them to lead students toward a metacognitive discussion. Unfortunately, because
this issue was not further probed at the time of the interview, I cannot provide addi-
tional data regarding this point.
A renewed examination of the curriculum of the TSC course in light of this analy-
sis indeed reveals that although a considerable amount of time was devoted to famil-
iarizing teachers with MSK, much less time was devoted to teaching the specific
pedagogical knowledge that pertains to MSK. In addition, the teaching of this com-
ponent of pedagogical knowledge during the teachers’course was often fragmented.
This stands in sharp contrast to the well-planned and systematic way in which the
teaching of other components in the course’s curriculum took place. The reason for
this is that my own awareness of the significance of this element was sharpened only
following the course, and particularly following the analysis described in this study.
The finding that despite this limitation of the TSC program, one third of the teachers
did implement MSK in their lessons following the course indicates that this compo-
nent of pedagogical knowledge does not involve any inherent special difficulty. An
obvious practical recommendation that follows from this is that future professional
development courses must devote a considerable amount of time not only to teach-
ers’MSK but also to the specific pedagogical knowledge in the context of MSK that
is necessary for using this knowledge in the classroom.
Finally, in response to the fourth research question (regarding the design of pro-
fessional development to promote the use of MSK in the classroom), the study’s
findings indicate the types of knowledge that the design of professional development
courses in this field needs to address. The findings show the limitations that teachers’
implicit metaknowledge about thinking strategies have for effective teaching. The
findings thus highlight the significance of transforming such implicit knowledge to
explicit metaknowledge that may become a prevalent component in classroom dis-

course. The findings also highlight the significance of balancing the design of future
professional development courses in this field by combining the development of
teachers’ MSK with their (various types of) pertinent pedagogical knowledge.
In sum, several conclusions can be drawn from this study. First, the study pro-
vides research-based evidence that teachers need several types of knowledge for
applying MSK in the course of instruction. They need to have strategic knowl-
edge and MSK of thinking skills, and the MSK must be explicit. They need to
have several types of pedagogical knowledge, ranging from general pedagogical
knowledge to more specific pedagogical knowledge in the context of teaching
higher order thinking skills, to the even more specific subcomponent that con-
sists of pedagogical knowledge in the context of MSK. Finally, they need to
have dispositions that value thinking activities. Second, the findings show that
all of these knowledge components are indeed required for engaging students in
metacognitive activities. However, teachers can model the use of the language of
thinking in class, or they can become aware of the thinking skills they address
during instruction even without being proficient in the specific subcomponent of
pedagogical knowledge that pertains to the teaching of MSK. Third, the overall
development in teachers’ MSK that was found following an in-service course
consists of at least three patterns of development: (a) learning MSK regarding
new thinking skills, (b) transforming initially implicit metalevel knowledge into
explicit metalevel knowledge, and (c) introducing changes in the class culture so
as to embrace and value new forms of discourse regarding thinking. In doing so,
teachers are encouraged to express in their practice knowledge that they nor-
mally possess but are not in the habit of incorporating routinely into their teach-
ing. Fourth, the pattern of teachers’ development is individual and dependent
upon each teacher’s prior knowledge. Fifth, professional development courses in
this field can indeed help teachers develop the knowledge that is required for ap-
plying MSK in the classroom. To do so, they must address all the types of
knowledge mentioned earlier. In particular, it is important to help teachers think
explicitly about general knowledge pertaining to thinking strategies, and to study
the specific pedagogical knowledge that pertains to the teaching of MSK.
374 ZOHAR
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This article was downloaded by: [New York University]

On: 28 April 2015, At: 02:29

Journal of the Learning

The Nature and Development

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327809jls1503_2

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

The Nature and Development of

This study examines the development of teachers’ metastrategic knowledge (MSK),

to teach in an intelligent, flexible and resourceful way. To support students’ learn-

in professional development courses must be based on teachers’ initial (or intu-

PREVIOUS STUDIES ABOUT CHANGES IN

A large group of studies have addressed the relationship between teachers’

way they implement a new curriculum in particular. Indeed, changes in teachers’

fundamental assumption is that for professional growth to be generative teachers

Teachers’ Subject-Matter Knowledge

MSK AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR

This article addresses one of the many components of metacognitive knowledge,

knowledge by themselves. Students with low academic achievements, however, are

PEDAGOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE

general. In the present study, I address a specific component of that knowledge,

MSK IN THE “THINKING” CLASSROOM

What are the main characteristics of pedagogical knowledge in the context of

1. Knowledge of how to model the use of general thinking structures in a vari-

2. Knowledge of how to scaffold students’ use of general thinking structures

thinking activities across several sections of the science curriculum.

Some of these elements require additional clarifications. Specific thinking strategies

THE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT OF

Another project that engages students in extensive metastrategic thinking is the

RESEARCH GOALS AND QUESTIONS

Second, I present an account of the development of a group of 14 teachers by using

by constructing a chain of evidence from multiple points across a model of relevant

Rationale and Description of the

1. Assessing teachers’ preexisting knowledge and beliefs about teaching,

All these features were incorporated into our workshops:

2. In the context of the TSC project, thinking skills comprised an important

by lively discussions among peers. Teachers were stimulated to engage in active

Data Collection and Instrumentation

Classroom observations. The TSC research team conducted 28 classroom

observations (2 observations in the classroom of each participant), divided into two

Individual interviews. The TSC research team conducted 28 semistructured

Transcripts of discussions. All discussions that took place during the

Selected examples of written work. Two sources of examples of written

FINDINGS: DEVELOPMENTS IN TEACHERS’ MSK

Part 1: A Detailed Analysis of the Development of Two

I feel that I am in a state of shock right now. According to my current under-

When I plan my lessons, I devote a greater part of my thinking to developing

quired to use thinking skills such as making comparisons, making generalizations,

Having a clear idea of the metastrategic elements of generating definitions (i.e.,

Y: So is this your definition?

Sparrow Peacock Ostrich

Yael repeated the same idea in the late interview:

Sarah’s knowledge before the course. Sarah has a bachelor’s degree in

I have a pretty strong intuition about … thinking skills … . I know what I

however, was presented to the students in a detached and decontextualized way

Studying about these things in a rational way organized my thinking. I used

[Writing the portfolio required me to] analyze my actions, my own thinking,

The analysis of additional data not directly related to metacognition revealed

I find myself today with a much higher awareness of the significance of

extensive to be presented here in detail. Nevertheless, I present a summary of it to

• Drawing valid conclusions from data and from experimental results

• Differentiating between experimental results and conclusions

Approximately 2 weeks after the late classroom observation, Sarah sent us by

Part 2: The Development of 14 Teachers Throughout the

Classroom Observation Data