Future Learning Now

I had a great evening working with a group of teachers from the Dannevirke area. The focus of the evening was to take a fresh look at thinking skills and determine the challenges for schools as they move seriously towards implementing a learning and teaching approach aimed at improving students’ thinking. During the evening we discussed seven main questions:

1. What is thinking?
2. Why should we have an increased focus on thinking?
3. What is an effective thinker?
4. What attitudes does an effective thinker have?
5. What skills does an effective thinker need?
6. What are the basic, foundational or core skills of thinking?
7. What is the reasoning process?

And from these came a set of  suggestions that included:

•         Defining what it means at your school to be an effective thinker

•         Identifying a set of core or foundational thinking skills that will be the focus of your school’s programme

•         Identify the tools that will support and facilitate those skills

•         Make improving student vocabulary a major focus

•         Deliberately target questioning skills

•         Utilise the reasoning process as a central structure

•         Target improved teacher questioning