The Miniature Guide on Active & Cooperative Learning

Although bringing critical thinking into the classroom ultimately requires serious, long-term development, you don’t need to sweat and slave and thoroughly understand critical thinking to begin to make important changes in your teaching. Many simple, straightforward, yet powerful strategies can be implemented immediately. In this guide the authors offer a sampling of such suggestions. These suggestions are powerful and useful, because each is a way to get students actively engaged in thinking about what they are trying to learn. Each represents a shift of responsibility for learning from the teacher to the student. These strategies suggest ways to get your students to do the hard work of learning.
Many of these strategies enable you to take advantage of what students already know and what they are able to figure out for themselves. Many involve students working together. All too often students get stuck, or don’t understand what they are supposed to do. Several students working together can correct each other’s misunderstandings and can make much more progress on tasks. When one student gets stuck, another might have just the right idea to move things along. This enables students to become responsible for more of their own learning. Over time, they begin to adopt the strategies they see their peers use successfully and learn to ask themselves critical questions raised by their peers.

Another advantage of the suggestions in this guide is their wide applicability. Most can be fruitfully applied to any subject, any topic. Most can become standard practice - techniques you continually use. 
This Guide contains suggestions, or "teaching tactics", that provide ways to begin the process of enabling students to think their way through the material they are expected to learn, to learn how to use what they learn, and use the power of their own minds to "figure things out".