ABSTRACT
At present there are no significant provisions made in professional preservice teacher education programs to help teachers become good teachers of thinking. By and large these programs tend to stress very traditional modes of instruction which emphasize factual knowledge. Moreover, in those preservice programs in which prospective teachers must major in a specific field in the arts and sciences, or take a number of required arts and sciences courses, courses that incorporate teaching for thinking as we have described it in this handbook are not usually part of the curriculum. Hence, there is no direct instruction available to teachers on the basis of which they can begin to develop the professional expertise needed to do such teaching well. The instructors who are their models in the arts and sciences courses (which are the fields in which most teachers will be teaching in their professional careers) tend, by and large, not to teach thinking explicitly. We are aware of efforts being made to reverse both of these strong traditions in higher education, but until these efforts bear fruit, this comment should be taken as an unfortunate description of the way things are.
