From Talking About HOTS to Designing for HOTS

We have spent quite some time asking what education should achieve beyond grades, examinations and the acquisition of knowledge.

We have talked about higher-order thinking, creativity, “what-if?” questions, responsible creativity, and the difficulty of assessing creative thinking without turning creativity itself into another rigid benchmark.

But there comes a point when discussion needs to move towards implementation.

If we genuinely want students to become better thinkers, problem-solvers and creators, where does that change actually begin?

I believe it begins much earlier than the classroom.

It begins when we design the learning experience itself.

A teacher cannot simply walk into a traditionally structured course one morning and announce, “From today, we are going to be creative thinkers.” The students may be willing, but the structure surrounding them may still reward remembering more than questioning, producing answers more than exploring possibilities, and getting things right more than understanding why.

My own classroom experience with this became very clear when I moved students from fundamentals towards higher-order questions.

The fundamentals were comfortable. Students knew what was expected of them. But when I started asking “What if?”, the dynamics changed. They suddenly had to make decisions, consider alternatives, justify their reasoning and accept that there might not be one predetermined answer.

That transition cannot always be created through questioning alone.

The course itself has to make deeper thinking possible.

This raises a much bigger question:

What would a course look like if it were deliberately designed to develop higher-order thinking and, eventually, creative thinking?

Perhaps we need to rethink the entire learning journey.

  • Not by abandoning foundational knowledge.
  • Not by making every activity artificially “creative”.
  • Not by replacing examinations with fashionable alternatives.
  • And certainly not by telling every student that they must become an innovator.

Instead, perhaps we need to progressively move learners from:

Knowing → Applying → Analysing → Evaluating → Exploring → Creating

This progression is already reflected, in different ways, in established educational frameworks such as Bloom's revised taxonomy. Instructional-design frameworks such as ADDIE also give us a systematic way of analysing learners and needs, designing learning experiences, developing them, implementing them and evaluating what actually happened.


The interesting question is what happens when we deliberately bring these ideas together.

Can we design courses in which students first acquire the necessary foundations, then learn to apply them, then encounter unfamiliar problems, explore alternatives, ask “what if?”, create possibilities and finally reflect on what they have learned?

I don't claim to have a definitive answer.

But after years of teaching, course development and experimenting with different ways of engaging learners, I think it is a question worth exploring practically rather than philosophically.


So, in the next few posts, I want to try something different.

Rather than simply arguing that HOTS and creativity are important, I want to explore a possible step-by-step pathway for designing learning experiences that deliberately create opportunities for both.

It is not a new educational model. It is a proposed approach, informed by established instructional-design principles, Bloom's taxonomy, recent educational research and, perhaps most importantly, what I have observed in real classrooms.

The real test is simple:

Can we move from talking about the need for better thinking to actually designing learning that makes better thinking possible?

 

What do you think? 👇

I'd be interested to hear from teachers, educators, lecturers, academic leaders and other education professionals who have experience with these issues. If you have a different perspective, a classroom experience, or an approach that has worked for you, please feel free to share it in the comments.

Thoughtful disagreement is welcome too. The aim is to learn from one another and keep the conversation going. Thank you!

In this series of posts:

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