Hagevik has already introduced her students to a number of strategies for engaging in certain kinds of thinking skillfully that are very important to master. For example, she has taught them to think about parts of a whole object by considering, in addition to the traditional question “What are the parts of this object?”, what the function of each of the parts is and how they work together to make the whole operate as it does. This, she feels, is really what a thinking skill is: it involves engaging in a type of thinking like thinking about the parts of a whole skillfully by following a procedure that focuses attention in ways that lead to a richer and deeper engagement with content. She operationalizes this by teaching her students to ask and answer a series of prompting questions reflected in this “thinking strategy map”
questions that are designed to guide their thinking when they are thinking about parts of a whole: