HOTS Questions- Part of Your Toolbox?

Recently our school had a team of five outside educators come in and evaluate 200 minutes of instructional time in grades Kindergarten through 8th grade and meet with me and one of my teachers afterwards to let us know what they saw that was going well and one thing we could improve upon that would have an immediate impact on student learning.

HOTS Questions visual

What we decided collectively could make an immediate impact would be for our teachers to have a stronger focus on HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) questions.  It is a tool in their toolbox that likely was being used, but needed to be refreshed and pulled out more often.  I talked with the staff at our staff meeting the following week to let them know what our focus goal was going to be for the next 90 days. I came up with a couple of ways we could tackle this.  At our next staff PD day, the presenter, Cindy McKinney, wove this into the discussion.

One of my teachers took the idea and quietly came up with a great visual on her own (see picture on left).  Her goal, when she made it, was to not only give herself this visual, but a smaller version for her students too! Some of her colleagues saw it and told her how awesome it was (and would she make them one).  The idea behind it is for the teacher (and students) to work from basic "basement" level questions that had concrete answers to "attic" level questions that require much deeper thinking.  Getting the students to move from the "basement" to the "attic" in their questioning skills on their own is vital to their success as students.  Now the onus is not solely on the teacher, some of it now falls to the students in her room too. 

This visual is like a Bloom's meets HOTS questions mashup.  The visual made sense not only to her, but her colleagues as well.  What a great, easy way to add (and refresh) this tool to the toolbox of things a teacher can draw from when needed.

I share this not to necessarily say that HOTS questions need to be a part of a teacher's toolbox, which they do, but also to showcase one of my teacher's great ideas for taking the initiative to move a needed staff focus goal forward without my help AND get buy-in from other teachers on staff to do the same.

Your thoughts?