The Value of Ideas: The Immersion Approach to the Development of Thinking

In this paper I examine three approaches to fostering higher level thinking in students: the stand-alone approach, in which thinking skills are taught separately from subject matter content; the embedding approach, in which these skills are explicitly taught in the context of subject matter content; and the immersion approach. Advocates of this third approach argue that it is counter-productive to devote too much attention to the explicit teaching of thinking; they believe that it develops naturally in classrooms where students are engaged, as members of a discourse community, in the pursuit of common understanding. The immersion approach is treated in greater depth in the present article. It represents an important alternative view within cognitive psychology because it assigns an active role to perception, thus downplaying the importance of information-processing skills in the development of thought and understanding.