Cultivation of Thinking Skills Through Instructional Procedures

This book is a thought provoking and compelling project which is based on a study whose purpose was to find out the extent to which learner-centered instructional procedures in the lower and middle basic schools in Zambia were being used in classroom lessons. Bringing together the insights of some of the best scholars in theories of learning, this book provides the definitive statement for defining features of cultivating thinking skills through learner-centred instructional procedures. Data collection involved observation of live lessons in integrated science and in numeracy and then post-lesson interviews with respective teachers, individually. The conclusion arrived at after data analysis was that the learners in the lessons observed were not learning how to think and, hence, how to learn. The main culprit cause was suggested to be the quality of teacher competence, presumed to have resulted from the low quality basic school teacher education regimen in Zambia. An essential element of this study is that it is highly focused on what actually goes on during the teaching and learning process in a typical Zambian basic school lesson.