that good thinking consists of a cluster of well-developed creative and critical thinking skills. Few would argue against the goal of teaching students to be good thinkers, but is teaching thinking skills enough?
             While acknowledging that skills are important, this paper goes beyond a skills-centered view and proposes a dispositional approach to the teaching of thinking. We join the voices of others in stressing the importance of dispositions, (see, for example, Baron, 1987, and Ennis, 1987), and make the strong claim that being a good thinker means having the right thinking dispositions. On this view, teaching thinking means more than inculcating particular thinking skills, it means teaching students to be disposed to think creatively and critically in appropriate contexts.
             This paper is divided into two parts. Part One offers a brief description of a dispositional conception of thinking: it lays out a view of what good thinking dispositions look like and what they are made of. Part Two compares different models of teaching and examines the extent to which they provide adequate guidelines for teaching thinking dispositions.
             Part One: A Dispositional Conception of Good Thinking
             What characterizes a good thinker? To be sure, a good thinker possesses certain abilities: cognitive capabilities, as well as thinking strategies and skills. Yet what sets good thinkers apart is not simply superior cognitive ability or particular skills; rather, it is their abiding tendencies to explore, to inquiry, to seek clarity, to take intellectual risks, to think critically and imaginatively. These tendencies can be called "thinking dispositions."
             Thinking dispositions are ongoing tendencies that guide intellectual behavior. They can be good or bad „Ÿ productive or counter-productive. For example, you might have the disposition to make careful plans in appropriate situations. That's good. But sometimes you might have the disposition to pl...