All of the books below are available at the SL 2.0 Bookstore at Amazon.com prices.

Go to:  http://astore.amazon.com/schooleade20-20?node=3&page=47

• Thinking at Every Desk: Four Simple Skills to Transform Your Classroom, by Derek Cabrera and Laura Colosi (W.W. Norton & Company, 2012). According to Cabrera and Colosi, critical thinking can be broken down into four basic ways of understanding the world: Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives. It's hard to ignore the significant overlap between these categories; better to think of them as different lenses through which to view the same subjects. The book's many illustrations suggest that tools for visualizing ideas are universally applicable, across subject matter and grade level. Teachers can use the same triangle diagram to dissect the art of Frida Kahlo and Jasper Johns, or the federal government. While this may sit uneasily with those of us who think and talk best in pictures, I suppose it's true that most things can be broken down into groups of two or three. Simple, adaptable skills are both promised and delivered here.

• Effective Questioning Strategies in the Classroom: A Step-by-Step Approach to Engaged Thinking and Learning, K-8, by Esther Fusco (Teachers College Press, 2012). The Questioning Cycle—a sequence comprising planning and asking questions, then following up—forms the basis for this approach to critical thinking in the classroom. Many of Fusco's transcribed examples of actual classroom conversations lead directly into common core-approved close reading. She also provides overviews and literature reviews on several different questioning strategies, based on models like Bloom's Taxonomy and the Costa Model. Effective Questioning Strategies addresses the "Why?" as well as the "How?" of using questions to guide classroom conversation.

• Creativity, Critical Thinking, and Communication: Strategies to Increase Students' Skills, by Melissa Goodwin and Catherine Sommervold (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012). Goodwin and Sommervold are confident that each of the "3 Cs" in their title is measurable, although they decline to explain how this might work. The book's appendix offers 12 lesson plan outlines across six subjects, half of which suggest the use of a common core standard as the measure of assessment. The remaining lesson plans provide sample checklists and worksheets for assessing student creativity in subjects not covered by the common standards.

• Educating for Creativity & Innovation: A Comprehensive Guide for Research-Based Practice, by Donald J. Treffinger, Patricia F. Schoonover, and Edwin C. Selby (Prufrock Press, 2013). Treffinger, et. al., build this book around a definition of creative productivity called "The COCO Model". 
  Not the most helpful acronym, surely. Awkward abbreviations aside, Educating for Creativity & Innovation is dense with citations, tables, and lists that lay out the many possibilities available to educators. A wealth of examples, models, and rubrics for teaching and assessment threaten to overwhelm the reader when read through one after another, but make this volume potentially quite useful as a reference book. Just as there are many forms of creativity, the authors seem to say, there are a never-ending variety of ways to teach it.