Thinkdrive – Cognitive Verbs

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Thinkdrive Workshop
Available FREE to schools

Thinkdrive – Cognitive Verbs

Explicitly teaching and carefully scaffolding cognitive verbs helps students understand the thinking required, organise their ideas and use appropriate language when responding to learning and assessment tasks.

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Overview

The explicit teaching and careful scaffolding of cognitive verbs is fundamental to Thinkdrive.

The design of any learning or assessment task begins with a cognitive verb, such as explain, design or compare. Selecting and explicitly teaching the right cognitive verb is crucial: it defines the thinking required, helps students organise their ideas and research, and guides the language they use in their written or oral response.

Teachers will explore how Thinkdrive makes this process easy to implement across learning areas, with ready-to-use resources supporting more than 60 regularly used cognitive verbs. Using Thinkdrive, teachers will quickly access:

Clear explanations of each cognitive verb
Downloadable thinking tools aligned to each verb
Sentence starters and task-specific language to support student responses
Student supporting resources, including the Task Verb Challenge Quiz, Learning Preferences Diagnostic and Assignment Pathway

Example Schedule

3:25–3:30
Assemble & Introductions
3:30–4:30
Explicit teaching of the cognitive verbs – scaffolding for success!
  • The difference in results between setting a task that is unstructured and when using highly explicit teaching with careful scaffolding.
  • The 4-Step Process using supporting resources:
  1. Identify the cognitive verb
  2. Understand what the cognitive verb requires
  3. Organise thinking using an aligned thinking tool
  4. Respond using appropriate, task-specific language

Reflection and K-10 transfer for all activities

Cost

FREE to schools

Delivery

Flexible delivery

Zoom, TEAMS or Face-to-face (where possible)

Presenter

Gerard Alford

Director, itc publications
gerard@itcpublications.com.au

Supporting Research

High Impact Teaching Strategies – Excellence in Teaching and Learning, 2020

  • Scaffolding – planned sequencing, specific steps / activities – effect size 0.53
  • Direct Instruction – explicit teaching practices, modelling – effect size 0.59
  • Feedback – student performance, learning goals, redirects teacher / student efforts – effect size 0.69

Note: An effect size of 1.0 would improve the rate of learning by 50% and would mean that, on average, students receiving that treatment would exceed 84% of students not receiving that treatment.

Bring this Thinkdrive workshop to your school

Contact ITC to organise the Cognitive Verbs workshop for your teachers.

Book or Enquire Now