Thinking Skills and Creativity 21 (2016) 85–96 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Thinking Skills and Creativity journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/tsc Large scale implementation of higher order thinking (HOT) in civic education: The interplay of policy, politics, pedagogical leadership and detailed pedagogical planning Anat Zohar ∗ , Adar Cohen School of Education, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91905, Israel a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 29 October 2015 Received in revised form 1 May 2016 Accepted 10 May 2016 Available online 12 May 2016 Keywords: Higher order thinking (HOT) Civic studies Large scale implementation Instructional leadership a b s t r a c t Educational policy documents from around the globe currently highlight the goal of teach- ing higher order thinking (HOT). Yet, most classrooms worldwide are still predominately characterized by a pedagogy of knowledge transmission, focusing on lower-order cognitive levels. This discrepancy points to the need to study issues of large scale implementation of HOT. The goal of this paper is to address this issue by examining two decades of implement- ing HOT in civic education in Israel, adopting a dual approach: first, the paper provides a historical analysis of relevant policies and political transformations, showing what happens to a policy decision to foster HOT over the years. The analysis shows that the way from a policy paper to what actually had taken place in classrooms is long and bumpy. The policy did cause several practical changes, but for more than 10 years, impacts were slim, some- times causing unexpected (and undesirable) consequences. Then, the paper zooms-in on one specific period in which more elaborate implementation efforts took place. Significant hallmarks of the process were an emphasis on developing instructional leadership, detailed pedagogical planning, a blend of tight “top down” processes with “bottom up” processes characterized by growing freedom and autonomy, and modelling the culture of thinking. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction 1.1. Civics education and learning to think Educational policy documents from around the globe currently highlight the goal of teaching higher order thinking (HOT) even more prominently than in earlier times. This trend is reflected in numerous curricular and standards documents (Zohar, 2013). Yet, most classrooms worldwide are still predominately characterized by a pedagogy of knowledge transmission that focuses on lower-order cognitive levels. Numerous studies show that despite decades of efforts to implement HOT, it is still far from being a predominant way of teaching and learning. It seems that the combination of the challenges involved in scaling up educational innovations in general with the challenges involved with teaching thinking in particular, is immense. Several researchers therefore note that scaling up the “thinking curriculum” is a huge challenge that is still awaiting educational systems all over the world (e.g., Osborne, 2013; Fullan & Watson, 2011; Resnick, 2010; Zohar, 2013). Accordingly, despite abundance of research about small-scale efforts to teach thinking, there is still a gap in the research literature about how to ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: anat.zohar1@mail.huji.ac.il (A. Zohar). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2016.05.003 1871-1871/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.