TEACHING THINKING

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TEACHING THINKING

• Macgregor SHS

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Overview

• Why bother to try to teach thinking?
• What is a thinking skill?
• Which thinking skills will we teach?
• Basic Thinking Skills
• Higher Order Thinking Skills
• Teaching Thinking
• Thinking and Literacy

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Why bother?

• Thinking skills unlock the keys for learning

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MacGregors Strategic Directions

• Since 1995 placed increasing emphasis on the
  skills/attitudes/processes underlying subject
  disciplines
• Thinking Skills
• Literacy and Numeracy
• Communication skills
• Accessing, processing and presenting information

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Premises

• All subjects require students to think
• There are some generic strategies that guide
  thinking no matter what the subject
• There are some specific strategies in all
  subjects to implement thinking skills
• All students will benefit from explicit help in
  the application of generic strategies and
  specific tasks requiring structured thought

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Premises

• There is a need for students to explicitly
  develop the capacity to transfer their ability to
  think to other subjects,to employment, to leisure
  and to non subject specific tasks
• The identification and explicit practice of
  generic thinking strategies and specific thinking
  skills will help students develop their ability
  to think in a structured way in unfamiliar
  situations

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ED QLD 2010 Directions

• Framework project
• New Basics
• Productive Pedagogies
• Literate Futures
• Information, communication technologies (ICT)

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Why bother?

• Research
• Mayer
• ROSBA, CCEs and KLAs
• 2010 Directions
• New Basics
• Productive Pedagogies
• ICTs
• Literate Futures

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Research

• Several large scale classroom evaluation studies
  have successfully linked teaching thinking
  methodologies with learning outcomes both in the
  short term and in the longer term, although not
  all are equally successful McGuiness 1999

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Research

• Can thinking skills be taught? A paper for
  discussion. Valerie Wilson
• http//www.scre.ac.uk/scot-research/thinking/index
  .html
• Scottish Council for Research in Education (May
  2000)

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Research

• Towards Developing and Implementing A Thinking
  Curriculum. Robert J. Swartz (June 2003)
• http//www.nctt.net/hongkongaddress.html

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Mayer
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FROM ROSBA TO KLAs

• ROSBA 1978, Content, Process, Skill and Affective
  Directives
• Viviani Report - CCEs are processed based
• KLAs Outcomes based

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Common Curriculum Elements

• Identification of processes
• Definitions of thinking skills
• For Example Classifying is systemically
  distributing information/data into categories
  which may be presented to, or created by, the
  student.

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KLAs

• Outcomes Based
• HPE Select and use information and apply problem
  solving and decision making strategies to make
  informed decisions evaluate their own actions
• Science Working scientifically
• Analysing
• Applying ideas and concepts
• Assessing and reassessing
• Creating analogies
• Inferring from data
• Interpreting data
• Judging credibility
• Synthesising

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KLAs

• SOSE
• Students evaluate evidence
• Students develop criteria based judgements
• Students analyse patterns of spatial variations
• Technology
• Analyse alternate structures, logic methods of
  control
• Students process, transform, present and transmit
  information using appropriate forms,
• Students devise detailed production proposals
• Students develop suitable alternatives

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New Basics

• Productive Pedagogies
• Higher order thinking
• Critical Analysis
• Problem based curriculum

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Valued Performance under the New Basics

• Researching and consulting
• Analysing, synthesising, relating and selecting
• Negotiating and personalizing
• Planning, designing and creating
• Judging and deciding
• Operating and making and acting
• Evaluating and revising
• Presenting, performing, explaining and
  communicating

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Literate Futures

• 4 Resource Model
• Code breaker
• Meaning maker
• Text User
• Text Analyst

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Conclusion

• Underpinning all initiatives is the need for
  students to be able to think effectively and
  reflect upon their learning
• In 21st Century students must be smart thinkers
• Need to explicitly teach students how to think

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What is a thinking skill?Which will we teach?

• ?

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Taxonomy

• Foundation Skills- Recall Perception
• Basic Thinking Skills -Analysis, Comparison,
  Classification, Evaluation, Prediction,
  Interpretation and Inference.
• Synthesis
• Higher Order Thinking Skills - Problem Solving,
  Decision Making, Creative Thinking and Critical
  Thinking.

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Which thinking skill have we been predominantly
using in this session?

• ?

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Analysis

• What are we analysing and why?
• Activate prior knowledge and find more
  information
• Identify components
• Examine components and their relationship to one
  another
• State results

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Analysis Components of a Sport

• Rules Procedures
• Equipment Pitch
• Players etc

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Identifying the components of a thinking skill
(Beyer)
Thinking Skill
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State Results

• What is a thinking skill?

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Our use of analysis ..

• What parts were difficult?
• Who controlled the learning?
• Have you learned anything about analysis?

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Metacognition

• Talking about the thinking
• Transferring to another context

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What is Higher Order Thinking

• Synthesis
• Problem Solving
• Decision Making
• Creative thinking
• Critical Thinking

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Higher Order Thinking

• The students success in using the higher order
  thinking skills of critical and creative
  thinking, problem solving and decision making is
  dependent on their mastery of the more basic
  information processing skills Beyer

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Teaching Thinking

• The danger inherent in the teaching of thinking
  is that the discrete skills remain single and
  isolated. There is little value in this approach
  if students are not given the opportunities to
  practise and transfer the thinking skills into
  course content. Beyer

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Premise

• Thinking Skills needed to be taught explicitly
• Need for a shift in Pedagogy to create the
  thinking classroom and the thinking student.

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Target

• Explicit, Active and Transferable
• E A T

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Teaching thinking

• Teaching for thinking
• Teaching of thinking
• Teaching about thinking

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The Thinking Classroom

• Explicit teaching of thinking skills
• Active use of the thinking skill (e.g.
  co-operative learning, hands-on exploratory
  activities, problems to be solved, risk taking,
  discussion)
• Reflection upon the nature of the thinking
  undertaken
• Transference of thinking skills across curriculum
  areas
• Thinking skills applied independently by students

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Designing an Infusion Lesson

• What thinking skill should be the focus?
• Plan the lesson
• Remember
• Introduction to the content and the thinking
  process (E)
• Thinking actively involving verbal prompts and
  graphic outlines (A)
• Thinking about thinking (E)
• Applying thinking to other situations (T)
• Robert J. Swartz Teaching Thinking Issues and
  Approaches

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Where is the thinking in literacy?

• Literacy is the flexible and sustainable mastery
  of a repertoire of practices with the texts of
  traditional and new communications technologies
  via spoken language, print and multimedia.
• By flexible, we mean that students are able to
  adjust and modify their performance to better
  meet contextual demands and varying situations.
  By sustainable, we emphasise maintenance and
  achievement over time. Mastery involves
  performance characterised by high achievement. A
  repertoire involves sets of options for complex
  performance of literacy practices.
• Literate Futures Report of the Literacy Review
  for Queensland State Schools 2000

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Inference and Interpretation

• Inference and Interpretation hard to disentangle.
  
• Both are integral to reading and comprehension
• Both are crucial thinking skills in student
  engagement with the multiple literacies
  (including numeracy)

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Rationale

• Current QCS test requires complex
  literacy/numeracy skills
• Student understanding and application of the
  thinking skills Inference and Interpretation are
  keys to success in the QCS test.

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Rationale

• To understand and apply the thinking skills of
  Inference and Interpretation students
• Need explicit instruction
• Need active involvement in the thinking
• Need to recognise the transference from one
  subject area to another
• Need to reflect upon their use of these thinking
  skills

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• Interpretation
• State what you want to know the meaning of
• Make observations and use prior knowledge

• Inference
• State what you want to guess/know
• Make observations use prior knowledge
• Make guesses
• Examine evidence supporting each guess
• Choose the best guess

• If necessary, make inferences

• Sort information / inferences and identify
  relationships

• State meaning

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The Teaching Learning Cycle

• Building the context
• Modelling the text
• Joint construction of the text
• Independent construction of the text
• Linking related texts

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Synthesis and the teaching learning cycle

• Synthesis
• Literacy Profile
• Teaching learning cycle
• LOTE
• Thinking skills

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Matching the thinking to the literacy outcome

• Synthesis model one size fits all
• Understand topic and product
• Content(Develop focus question, search terms,
  etc)
• Genre
• Locate information
• Evaluate information
• Select and sort information
• Create final product

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Unit Planning

• MacGregor SHS - Unit cover sheet
• H\Thinking WEB site\Unit Cover Sheet Feb
  2002.rtf
• Explanatory notes
• T\Thinking Skills\Lesson Planning
  Templates\Cover sheet notes 2.doc

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Lesson Planning

• Infusing the Teaching of Thinking Robert J.
  Swartz
• http//www.nctt.net/lessonsarticles.htmlLESSONS
• Template adapted from Swartz Perkins