Investigating Thinking Skills
Friday 7th March 2003
What experience do you have of innovative practice in your school?
Attending training courses on both thinking skills and accelerated learning.
Giving staff training in AL & TS.
Using AL & TS techniques in the classroom with a range of different ages.
Giving demonstration lessons to help embed ideas such as mind and concept mapping.
Observing TS lessons.
Working on the foundation curriculum team (C 2000) to develop a curriculum that reflects the diverse nature of the school. Each unit includes elements of AL, TS & Collaborative Group Work.
Developing ideas for including VAK into all areas of the curriculum.
Teaching boys and girls in some year groups separately for some lessons such as literacy.
What factors have attracted you to being innovative?
- Raising standards by doing something new and different.
- Taking a creative and more radical approach if progress is proving difficult by usual conventional methods.
- Opening up the debate about teaching &learning styles.
- Raising staff morale by fostering creative approaches to the curriculum and encouraging risk-taking.
- Tackling some of the more tricky targets on the school strategic plan such improving boys’ literacy and making the curriculum socially and linguistically relevant.
- Developing a "learning school" ethos where action research is encouraged and reflected on.
- Being in more control of the direction of the school and developing as competent and confident professionals.
- The nature of lessons tends to have become rather uniform in recent years. Children learn best when they are offered the widest possible range of learning experiences.
What barriers have you experienced?
- Some children can find the more open-ended nature of the tasks quite a challenge to begin with.
- Teacher independence and creativity has been eroded in recent years and some do not feel confident to experiment with new ideas.
- The learning culture within the school has to be right to enable teachers to experiment with new ideas. This has not been a problem personally but it could be in some situations.
What experience do you have of using thinking skills strategies in your own teaching?
- Using VAK in a wide variety of different lessons.
- "Odd one out" strategy in Science, Literacy & Maths activities.
- Memory Mapping in History/Art.
- Mind Mapping aspects of a story in Literacy.
- Mind Mapping as an assessment tool in Science.
- "Time out" breaks accompanied by "brain gym" (Mike Hughes, Closing the Learning Gap)
- "CORT tools" (Edward de Bono) for thinking through tricky problems during staff meetings.
What stage have colleagues in your school reached in using thinking skills?
- Half the staff has been on the "thinking skills" course given by the EAZ.
- These teachers have started to use the TS strategies.
- Most teachers have observed TS lessons given by trained teachers.
- All staff have taken part in TS activities in staff meetings.
How might your ideas be shared with other schools and scaled up to have a greater impact?
- Give demonstration lessons on particular thinking skills strategies.
- Publishing ideas for good quality lessons on the web.
- Publishing work resulting from TS lessons on the web and in Govt. publications.
- Good quality TS courses that are "hands on" and give lots of practical ideas for using the strategies in a wide variety of curriculum areas.
- Assessing the impact of TS realistically as one of a range of strategies for raising standards.
- Cultivating a climate that encourages creative thinking and risk-taking. Both the Govt. and LEA’s could encourage this much more.