Challenges in wide scale implementation efforts to foster higher order thinking (HOT) in science education across a whole school system

• I explore challenges involved in scaling up instruction of higher order thinking.
• Weaving thinking into multiple, varied, specific science contents is a huge challenge.
• Content goals tend to take priority over thinking goals.
• Organizational issues hinder large scale, deep teachers’ professional development.
• Scaling up thinking is often an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary process.

This study explores the challenges involved in scaling up projects and in implementing policies across the whole school system in the area of teaching higher order thinking (HOT) in Israeli science classrooms. Eight semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with science education experts who hold leading positions pertaining to learning and instruction on the state level of the following school subjects: elementary and junior- high school science and technology; high-school physics; high school chemistry; and high school biology. Some of the challenges that the interviews revealed are common to many types of educational change processes. The interviews also revealed several challenges which are more specific to the educational endeavor of teaching HOT according to the infusion approach across large numbers of classrooms: challenges involved in weaving HOT into multiple, varied, specific science contents; challenges involved in planning a reasonable and coherent developmental sequence of thinking goals; the fact that content goals tend to have priority over thinking goals and thus to disperse of the latter in policy documents and in implementation processes; and finally, the considerable challenges (pedagogical and organizational) involved in developing educators’ sound and deep professional knowledge in the area of teaching HOT and metacognition on a large, nation-wide scale. The data shows that wide-scale implementation of thinking in Israeli science classrooms often develops as an evolutionary rather than as a revolutionary process. The implications for designing large scale implementation programs aimed at fostering students’ reasoning are discussed.