While many educators commonly identify critical thinking as a goal for learning, they struggle with creating lessons that encourage students to take charge of their own thinking. This paper presents four essential elements of lessons designed to promote critical thinking including ill-structured problems, criteria for assessing thinking, student assessment of thinking, and improvement of thinking. With these four elements in place an iterative process of lesson planning emerges which simplifies

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... the planning process for teachers while engaging students' thinking to benefit their learning.