Thinking Skills

As a Thinking School, the development of thinking skills is a fundamental part of our students’ learning and impacts positively on all areas of their development both academically and pastorally. Thinking has a unique place in the curriculum of Barbara Priestman. It is not a subject but a central and essential thread that is intricately woven throughout all subjects enabling all learners to become metacognitive, self-regulated learners.

We aim:

To ensure that both students and staff are taught how to think reflectively, critically, and creatively and to employ these skills and techniques in the co-construction of a meaningful curriculum and associated activities.
To engage students in enquiring into and exploring big questions so as to promote their personal, spiritual, moral, social and cultural development.
To enable students not only to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning but also to then know which strategies to use to make progress.
To ensure successful outcomes will be reflected in students across a wide range of abilities demonstrating independent and co-operative learning skills, high levels of achievement, and both enjoyment and satisfaction in learning.
To enable learners to develop their own beliefs and values and to have a positive attitude to the search for meaning and purpose in life and to become well-rounded active citizens.
To encourage learners to develop a positive attitude towards other people who hold beliefs different from their own.

Lessons are planned and delivered in a variety of ways ensuring that all students can access and participate in lessons. Classroom routines and lessons are adapted to explicitly reflect an understanding of relevant aspects of the Science for Learning, such as building on prior knowledge, regular review opportunities, providing effective feedback, and lesson structure. Reflective questioning is used to engage students in both thinking about ‘what’ they know and ‘how’ they know. High-quality questions guide students to think about their thinking (metacognition), the dispositions that they are drawing on and how they are collaborating with others as they are learning. Interactive, practical activities encourage students to discuss their ideas and extend their understanding of difficult concepts and challenging questions.

Thinking Frames

Thinking Frames are used in the academy to support students’ thinking. There are eight frames that support fundamental thinking processes.

The Defining Frame

Thinking Process: The Thinking Frame for defining, used for brainstorming or generating lots of ideas and thoughts, looks like this.

Key Questions: Tell me everything that you know about this? How are you defining it? What is your context? What is your frame of reference?

The Describing Frame

Thinking Process: The Thinking Frame for describing something or somebody looks like this.

Key Questions: How would you describe this object/idea/person? Which adjectives would you use?

The Compare Contrast Frame

Thinking Process: The Thinking Frame for comparing and contrasting any two objects, items, concepts or phenomena looks like this.

Key Questions: What are the similarities and differences?

The Categorising Frame

Thinking Process: The Thinking Frame for any type of categorising or classifying looks like this.

Key Questions: How might you group the main ideas, supporting ideas and details?

The Whole Part Frame

Thinking Process: The Thinking Frame for whole part thinking when deconstructing concrete objects looks like this.

Key Questions: What are the parts that make up the whole object? Can the parts be broken down into sub-parts?

The Sequencing Frame

Thinking Process: The Thinking Frame for sequencing looks like this.

Key Questions: What is the sequence of events? What are the sub-stages?

The Cause Effect Frame

Thinking Process: The Thinking Frame for cause and effect thinking looks like this.

Key Questions: What are the causes and effects?

The Connecting Frame

Thinking Process: The Thinking Frame for making connections and analogies or for transferring relationships looks like this.

Key Questions: What is the analogy being used?

The Reflective Lens

Thinking Process: The Reflective Lens (RL) is an invitation to the teacher (or student) to ask a generative, higher order, probing or metacognitive question. The RL is a set of double lines to create a double frame which can be put around every Thinking Frame. It is a questioning tool. It should always be presented, even if it is not used. This is to indicate that there is always the potential to ask questions, dig deeper, etc.

Introducing the RL: Each Thinking Frame has a task and, potentially a RL question. It is described as a meta-tool. The RL provides the ‘LENS’ through which the thinking is being viewed or constructed and the opportunity for ‘REFLECTION’, i.e. thinking again about what has been said or put within the Thinking Frame.

Embedding the RL:

We look at three categories of RL questions that could be asked although, of course the teacher will ask any question that challenges and extends student thinking:

Thinking Hats

Through using Edward De Bono’s six hat thinking, young people can learn how to separate thinking into six clear functions and roles. Each thinking role is identified with a coloured symbolic “thinking hat.” By metaphorically wearing and switching “hats,” thoughts can be easily focussed or redirected.

Philosophy for Children (P4C)

One way of teaching people to become better thinkers is to teach them how to get better at dialogue. Research has found that group talk in schools is often ineffective. Adopting a framework that sets some parameters for good dialogue, but which is adaptable to different contexts is beneficial to ensure both staff and students know what purposeful talk ‘looks’ like.

We use the framework provided by the ‘4Cs’ in Philosophy for Children (P4C) to support analysing the dialogue that takes place in classrooms.

This framework allows us to translate Matthew Lipman’s (the founder of P4C) theory of ‘excellent thinking’ into something immediately accessible to staff and to students.

We discussed this framework with different groups of students and worked with them to develop a series of statements to identify the behaviours they need to focus on to move the quality of their dialogue forward.

The statements become tangible, attainable goals where students can articulate what they mean in a more precise way and begin to focus on what they do well and areas they need to develop.

Because students have ownership, they are more likely to identify when the talk is not purposeful and want to do something about it.

P4C is a practice of enquiring together into questions that matter to young people; they demonstrate ways to make the enquiry more rewarding by sharing opinions, giving reasons, considering the reasons of others, asking for examples, questioning assumptions, and testing hypotheses.

Students are given a stimulus provided by the teacher but then the onus is on the students to lead the session by picking out themes from the stimulus and then creating more general philosophical questions relating to the chosen theme but moving away from the stimulus.

Students then vote for which question they would like to discuss so the enquiry is driven by the interests of the students not the teacher.

P4C is about the teacher acting as facilitator and drawing out ideas from students without offering their own opinion or influencing the discussion in any way.

Thinking Moves

Thinking Moves A – Z supports our students with their thinking – It provides a vocabulary of 26 types of thinking. The Moves are understandable, comprehensive, and memorable.

The Moves themselves are not new – we all use them in our learning and our life every day. But the structure gives us a way of talking about how we think, and that enables us to improve the effectiveness of our thinking.

They support with dialogue and discussion and fit naturally with P4C.

Image/Question of the week

One way we teach students to become better thinkers through dialogue is through our Image/ Question of the Week sessions.

Each week, students are shown an image/ given a philosophical question and asked to discuss what it makes them think, how it makes them feel, what it makes them wonder etc.

This enables students to share their thoughts without the worry that they may say something wrong because there is no right answer; it is their personal opinion.

They are encouraged to ask questions of both themselves, and others.

Students get to practise sharing their thoughts and ideas in a safe environment and begin to practise all the skills they need in order to engage in purposeful talk and become better thinkers.

The essence of sessions is captured by staff, and students write their key thoughts on a record sheet that links to the Thinking Moves which are then displayed in school. The image/question is posted each week on Facebook and X and parents, carers and visitors to school are encouraged to share their thoughts too.

Questioning

“Effective use of questioning is a critical asset in every good teacher’s toolbox. But just as a good mechanic selects the right tool for the job and uses it correctly, a good teacher uses questions at the right level and follows good questioning techniques.” Callahan, J. F. and Clark, L. H. (1988)

If great questions are asked, new viewpoints, ideas and understanding can be developed. A good question can enthuse, stir, motivate and provoke which can eventually lead to a newly gained skill, deeper understanding or a new viewpoint.

Think time is the amount of time a teacher waits for a response to a question. While the interval may feel like an eternity to the teacher, studies have shown that the average teacher’s wait-time is-remarkably-less than one second. Teachers need to allow at least ten seconds for processing time when asking a question especially when those questions require some deep thought – don’t be afraid of silence!

When teachers wait time lengthens, it is highly likely that young people’s responses will be more fully developed, and they are able to give reasons and justify their answers with evidence. The talk in the classroom becomes less teacher-directed and more peer-directed.

The question matrix is a fantastic tool which shows how different levels of questions can be asked for different types of information. The question matrix can be used by teachers to help plan their questioning but also by young people in lessons to help them in their learning.

An example of how the question matrix could be used by young people in lessons. They take a stimulus and think of questions they would like to ask/ have answered in the various question categories.