A reading guide designed for Jennifer Fleischner's nonfiction text, The Apaches: People of the Southwest, provides readers with three levels of comprehension questions meant to encourage higher-level thinking.

Discuss your class' vision of the future. Learners create materials for use in a time capsule. They write letters to explain their contribution and provide photos.  Afterwards, they use higher-level thinking skills to reflect on why...

Kndergarteners work to build strong listening and reading comprehension skills by answering higher level questions. After a teacher demonstration of the task, learners listen to the story The Three Little Pigs, the teacher asks them...

Activate higher-level thinking and reading comprehension skills with these questions about act 2 of Taming of the Shrew. Literary analysts respond briefly in writing to 5 questions about plot, characters, motivation, and personal...

If you're delving into Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, this learning exercise might be for you! Literature scholars respond to higher-level questions about character actions and motivations and the Zefferelli film version of the play....

Provide this packet for your pupils as they pour over The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. The study guide includes graphic organziers and comprehension as well as higher-level questions. Class members briefly summarize each chapter, compare...

Think about a moment, frozen in time. Now take a critical look at the painting, Better, Homes, Better Gardens. This painting works to provide learners the opportunity to analyze art, critique artist's choices, and write a story inspired...

Prepare participants for a Socratic seminar by asking them to not only design questions for the discussion, but to also observe an assigned partner during the seminar. A great way to encourage student-led discussions.

David Sedaris is quite the story-teller. Read "Remembering My Childhood on the Continent of Africa" and follow it up with this two-page worksheet. Readers will revisit the text to answer higher level thinking questions. Designed...

In this reading comprehension instructional activity, students answer higher level thinking questions based on thought provoking words in their questions. Students complete 5 higher level thinking questions.

Readers learn to ask questions about text with an activity based on Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. As they read, class members craft questions based on Bloom's Taxonomy and then find the answers themselves.

Help readers learn to create their own open-ended questions for any text you are working with. Using Bloom's Taxonomy, learners begin on the lower levels and work their way up to form questions that focus on synthesis instead of simple...

Young mathematicians practice their reasoning as well as adding and subtracting skills with this worksheet that includes five simple word problems about birthdays. Learners are give pictures of birthday cakes and based on the number of...

Focus your class's reading of To Kill a Mockingbird with this resource. Eighty-three questions are provided for chapters 12-31, the majority of which focus on plot recall. Since this is a word document, you can consider adding questions...

This detailed lesson plan from New York Times' The Learning Network centers around Carroll Academy and its girl's basketball team. Learners compare their school to Carroll Academy, read anywhere from 1 to 5 engaging articles about the...

Meant to be used in connection with the article "In Teacher Ratings, Good Test Scores Are Sometimes Not Good Enough" also available on The New York Times website, this resource provides 12 short-answer writing prompts that ask both basic...

Do not let Julius Caesar be Greek to your pupils. Rather, make the play a dish fit for hungry minds. Encourage your class members to lend their ears to a series of rich discussion questions so that they can become masters of the play, as...

Compare and contrast while challenging your class with this higher-level thinking and reading comprehension lesson plan. After observing the teacher model comparing and contrasting bats and birds, learners read passages about two towns....

After reading Flannery O'Connor's short stories, provide your high schoolers with these questions. You could use these to prompt higher level thinking for an upcoming test, or provide them as essay prompts. 

Five questions help you assess readers' understanding of Act 5 of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Several of the questions go beyond basic understanding and require higher level thinking and analysis.

Engage conversation and explore the journey as you challenge young readers to interpret the german folktale, "The Fisherman and His Wife" written by literary brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

Who, what, when, where, and why questions are often the questions that teachers use to foster engagement, verbal communication skills, higher-order thinking, and hopefully, a deeper understanding of the world. This tool is geared toward...

Students work in groups of two to develop questions and sample answers that are relevant, accurate and use higher level of thinking skills about a literary unit. Students present their questions and answers to the class as a review of...