There are lower and higher order thinking skills.
When we teach English, we develop thinking skills as well.How do we do that in a consistent way?We need to know what's going on.
It all comes from a book.Dr Benjamin Bloom created it.There are three modules.The education and learning objectives and activities are applied to the cognitive one.You can structure your lesson from the easiest to the most difficult levels in this module.
There are two types of skills:HOTs and LOTs.Both LOTs and HOTs are about gathering information.
You are going to teach Present Simple.How do we use these skills to teach English?
It is obvious that it is better to teach with HOTs as your students are more involved in a lesson.Students do something with the new knowledge when they use HOTs.Metacognition is when you think about your thinking.
You can use this taxonomy to apply it to skills or CLIL lessons too.You can teach History in English by comparing old and new things.This is an example of a task.
Sometimes teachers don't know what skills their tasks refer to or how to design activities for them.When you plan your lessons, I think this wheel is useful.
I highly recommend you to read these two articles about teaching critical thinking and thinking skills.