Over the past 25 years teachers in the USA, and more recently
elsewhere, have been exposed to a wide variety of instructional
techniques aimed at helping to improve the thinking abilities and
practices of our students. Often these have come integrated into their
own set of materials. Others have been based on a wide range of
educational research and promoted on their own for use in the regular
classroom. Cooperative learning, teaching for metacognition, the use
of higher-order questions, and providing ample wait time for student
responses are examples of the latter. “Mediated learning”, “lateral
thinking”, and “philosophical enquiry” are examples of the former.