How can you develop thinking skills in your learners?
Short answer: try these 8 ideas to encourage deeper thinking in your lessons.
- Go back in time
- Reduce
- Transform
- Reorder
- Compare
- Rephrase
- Debate
- Problem-solve
Why is thinking important?
Thinking skills have been on the teaching agenda for a long time. It is obvious that we want to move away from an old school style of teaching which is teacher-led, focused largely on rote learning of facts and a text-book approach where information is provided in a finished format.
Instead, we want students to be independent thinkers, problem solvers and to fully process and understand their learning. If they can think it through and understand it, then they can use it. Students must think well to make progress, and yet it is not always integrated into the pre-planned learning opportunities and skill development in our lessons. I often fall into the trap of moving from providing information to a final product, skipping the opportunities for developing thinking along the way.
When Northern Ireland’s ‘revised curriculum’ came into being (it’s now nearly 20 years old … how did that happen!), thinking skills took a prominent role. Teachers were trained in strategies to promote thinking skills in every lesson, and to assess these skills across the curriculum. Some of the training documents and resources on the CCEA website are useful (*some of them!).
How can we plan for thinking?
How do we push students on? How to we get the information to fully settle into their understanding? And how to we avoid copious volumes of resource hunting and photocopying in our search for ‘thinking activities’?
I like to think of thinking for students as a baker sieves flour before baking cakes. One of the reasons to sieve flour is to break up larger lumps into smaller ones. We want to separate the grains.
Now listen, as an amateur cupcake maker, I have taken short cuts and it is fully possible to make a mostly decent cake without sieving. But the results are better when you do. The mix is more even, the texture is smoother and the sponge is lighter. Liquids absorb better too. There are many benefits to sieving flour.
With learning, we want students to sieve it too. We want them to break bigger chunks down into smaller ones. We want to mix ideas together to allow for smoother understanding. If students can form new pathways between information, they can adapt and reframe it for themselves.
So how can we get them to think? Asking ‘why’ repeatedly has its limits.
8 Thinking activities to try:
Here are eight ways to embed thinking skills into your lessons without having to redesign lesson plans or create lots of new resources. These thinking ideas should slot straight into your lessons, they can be planned and included without needing any resources.
Go back in time
What happened in the day/week/month before this story began? What 5 events have led up to this news story being written?
Reduce the information to one word
For example, what one word sums up this chapter? What word best describes this relationship? What word is the most important in the extract?
Transform the information
For example, take a list of historic events and transform it into a series of news headlines. Take a first person narrative and turn it into a police report or victim statement. Or vice versa! Turn the narrative into a tension graph.
Say it backwards
For example, retell the events of the chapter starting at the end. Explain a PEE paragraph by starting at the finishing point/goal and working backwards to show how the paragraph answers the original question.
Compare it to something else
If this character were an animal, what animal would it be (and why)? What type of weather best suits this character? If this newspaper article was. Snack, what snack would it be and why?
Rephrase it
Explain the concept without using any of the key words, for example, explain how a story is constructed without using the following words: narrator, character, plot, setting, etc.
Debate the topic
Who was responsible for Banquo’s murder? Should journalists be allowed to keep their sources secret? Why are full stops the hardest punctuation mark to get right?
Problem-solve it
Find 5 ways in which George could have acted differently in Of Mice and Men to avoid the ending that unfolded.
Give these a go and comment below to let me know what you think, or use the contact form to get in touch.