Rebecca Jermy - Farlingaye High School · Web viewI decided to take De Bono’s ‘random word...

Rebecca JermyFarlingaye High School 1

Research Project: Developing Thinking Skills in Year 8 Students

Farlingaye High School is an 11-18 mixed comprehensive of over 1800 students. I am in my third year of teaching English and have undertaken a research project into ways of developing, or stretching, students’ thinking skills in Year 8. Year 8 is often identified as a year in which students’ attainment slumps and therefore I wanted to explore ways of ensuring students made progress, building on the skills needed in Year 9 and Key Stage 4, and hopefully creating more confident and independent students because they have well developed skills and, in my vision, meta-cognitive awareness of their thinking processes.

The importance of promoting thinking skills has long been recognised by many researchers. Piaget’s constructivist theory states that ‘to think means, above all, to understand; and to understand means to arrive at transformations, which furnish the reason for the state of things’1. Thinking is here recognised as vital to achieve understanding, highlighting how students need to mentally engage with material before it can be processed and so learned; thus, he sees thinking as a way of understanding the world around us. However, Piaget’s theory has since been developed: John Dewey has highlighted that thinking should not just be used as a means of understanding the world, but a means of interrogating it. Indeed, he critically describes thinking as being anything that comes to mind whereas good thinking involves ‘overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept suggestions at their face value; it involves willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance….To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and proactive inquiry’2. Dewey’s perception that thinking is best when it is difficult, or creates ‘disturbance’, suggests that students’ thinking needs to be challenging to permit them to make significant progress in developing those skills that they then can apply to the world.

When considering how to achieve such valuable thinking, we can first turn to Vygotsky who accentuates more than anything else the value of language in achieving good thinking: ‘he believed that thought and language could not exist without each other. He strongly believed that articulating thoughts was an effective method to process connected thoughts in a conscious way, to raise the awareness of mental activity and subsequently to create organised logic’3. Vygotsky highlights the social nature of humans, arguing that the social context of talking allows thoughts to be given expression, and taken control of. By working with others first, humans can then learn to work alone. Researchers other than Vygotsky have highlighted the value of discussion and its value in developing thinking skills: Jerome Bruner comments that ‘teaching is vastly facilitated by the medium of language, which ends by being not only the medium of exchange but the instrument the learner can use himself in bringing order into the environment’4. Norman reflects on Bruner’s ideas, commenting that talk gives students the chance to learn via 1 Jean Piaget: ‘The Genetic Approach to the Psychology of Thought’, in ‘Readings for Reflective Teaching’, Andrew Pollard (ed.), 20022 ‘How We Think’, 1910 3 Debra McGregor: ‘Developing Thinking Developing Learning’, 20074 ‘The Process of Education’, 1966


‘collaborating and trying out new ways of thinking’5, however he also points out that this talk needs to be concerned with sorting and developing ideas, and thus is considered ‘exploratory’, permitting it to be ‘hesitant and incomplete’ rather than presentational. In accordance with this, Mercer (2002) has analysed discussions taking place within learning environments and found that students changed their thinking as they formulated their ideas more clearly in language and heard how others responded to them, thus recognising how thinking skills may be aided by talking.

Theorists have tried to define the sorts of thinking which may be undertaken by students. Bloom’s taxonomy is well known in defining questioning and the types of thinking required of students. The more recent PRICE model of thinking defines the categories differently, identifying: processing information, reasoning, inquiry, creative thinking and evaluation. However, there is clearly room for overlap within these skills: Alec Fisher writes about the overlap between critical and creative thinking, commenting that whilst critical thinking is evaluative, and often negative, good thinking will simultaneously be creative, coming up with alternative suggestions and improvements.

With this in mind, I chose to focus on creative thinking in my research, as I felt it provided a basis for both imaginative response, and successful critical thinking. If students could generate ideas, they could then comment more successfully on authors’ creative decisions and their effects. Later, they may then be able to apply these ideas in their own writing. Indeed, the very term ‘creative’ tends to imply a gift or talent that not everyone possesses and which can inhibit student confidence if they feel they are ‘not very creative’. Thus, I decided I wanted to find techniques and activities which would help students stretch their thinking and assist them in developing their own ideas.

Swartz et al define creative thinking as the generation of possibilities in ‘the active use of our creative imaginations’6. Swartz comments that when we are using methods that work, we often don’t leave these comfort zones or trial new possibilities. Thus, when we do act differently (creatively) we are involved in ‘divergent thinking’ which leaves the opportunity to come up with original ideas. Thus, it is proactive thinking, rather than merely reflective, which De Bono (1993) also highlights as significant. Indeed, Robinson further defines creative thinking, commenting:

‘Creative thinking is a break with habitual patterns of thought. Creative insights often occur by making unusual connections, seeing analogies between ideas that have not previously been related. All of our existingideas have creative possibilities. Creative insights occur when they are combined in unexpected ways or applied to questions or issues with which they are not normally associated.’7

Robert Fisher perceives the ‘creative insights’ described by Robinson as allowing the possibility of speculation. He comments that children soon learn, from an early age, to

5 ‘Thinking Voices: The Work of the National Oracy Project’, 19926 Debra McGregor 7‘Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative’, 2001


stop speculating, because they inevitably make mistakes, and instead learn to rely on adults as the voice of authority. So, the dynamic shifts from the learner to the teacher, hence a child will stop asking ‘Is that a…?’ but instead will ask ‘What is that?’ Reminiscent of Dewey’s comments, Fisher notes that ‘thinking something new usually takes effort, which is one reason why it is harder to teach an old dog new tricks’8 and as a result, teachers must ensure that students feel safe to offer their own ideas in the classroom.

Of course, as Astington and Olson comment, ‘a major problem is that….thinking does not have any behavioural indices’9, meaning it is not always easy to measure what thinking is taking place. Judgments of thinking can only be based on what students say, write, or through their own comments on their own thinking. The value of trying to establish metacognition in students has therefore been highlighted by many researchers. Anne de A’Echevarria and Ian Patience thus comment, ‘the plenary in a Thinking Skills lesson is distinctive because it puts thinking under the spotlight. Students are asked to share not only what they have learned about the subject, but also what they have learned about the process that made the learning possible’10. Thus, Rexford Brown envisages being able to create a ‘literacy of thoughtfulness’11 where students can transfer the thinking skills they have developed to new problems and situations, similar to Hyle’s theory behind his thinking maps: that by having visual patterns through which to map thinking, students’ thinking will sub-consciously use these patterns to develop their own thoughts and ideas in different environments. And so, as Art Costa comments, thinking can become ‘a vehicle by which the mind is activated and engaged to experience the joy ride of learning’12.

Having completed research into developing thinking skills in the classroom, I was keen to try and find ways of challenging students’ thinking via a variety of activities.

Firstly, I wanted to develop ‘assessment criteria’ for good thinking, so that I had a clear list of characteristics I was trying to achieve. For this, I chose to generate the following list based on the reading I had undertaken, defining good thinking as: challenging, effortful, original, meaningful, and also linked to learning. I decided that initially I needed to evaluate the thinking that was already occurring in my classroom, and after four lessons with my Year 8 students went back to my lesson plans and reconsidered how much thinking I felt had actually occurred. Looking back at the lessons I had planned, I noticed that I was including activities that were promoting thinking, which I was pleased with, but also realised that these activities had been planned with the thought of extending students’ understanding of the play rather than to extend their thinking to then reach understanding. As discussed, Piaget comments that thinking means to understand, and thus I felt that my planning should have been undertaken with the conscious thought ‘how can I make students think and thus understand?’ rather than ‘this will help them understand the play’.8‘Teaching Children to Think’, 19959 The Cognitive Revolution in Children’s Understanding of Mind, in ‘Human Development’, 3810 ‘Teaching Thinking’, 200811 ‘Schools of Thought: How the Politics of Literacy Shape Thinking in the Classroom’, 1991 12 ‘Developing Minds: A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking’, 2001


With this in mind, I began to plan for thinking in my lessons. Having completed my research, there were several areas I wanted to look at, the first being discussion. To try and achieve a discussion which included ‘exploratory thinking’ that challenged students, I initially ‘tested’ the type of discussion that students would experience if just asked to ‘discuss’. I found that students tended to have a very short conversation that involved an exchange of ideas rather than an interaction between ideas, and very little discussion that took thinking further. To try and improve this, I then tried modeling exploratory talking, and then let students have a go at this themselves. However, students reported back that in fact they found it difficult to sustain their discussion, and so we generated a series of words and questions that students could use to develop their conversation, either by using them to ponder their own thoughts or to interrogate those of others13. Students also had a tick sheet which they could use to keep track of whether they were using these phrases. This proved much more successful, as students had phrases to rely on which would help their thinking and discussion become more exploratory. When evaluating the activity, students commented:

‘Our conversation went really well, as while we were sequencing our thinking, it was also a big bundle going from one thing to the next. I was coming up with lots of ideas, and had to ask questions to make other people think and keep the conversation developing.’

‘Our thinking unravelled when we were talking.’

‘We were coming up with questions and giving reasons, as well as evaluating and adding to other people’s ideas. I managed to come up with questions which contributed to our conversation. I knew I was thinking well because we tracked our conversation on paper and wrote a lot!’

‘I knew I was thinking well because I came up with lots of ideas.’

‘We evaluated people’s views and I gave a lot of my own, which weren’t always obvious ones.’

I was pleased with many of the positive responses, especially the comment that thinking had ‘unravelled’ which indicated to me that exploratory talk had taken place because ideas had obviously been extended through the discussion. Negative comments about this task tended to focus on the group dynamic (‘I knew I was thinking well in my head but some people were straying off task’) which reflected some of the observations I had made when watching groups in their discussions. Inevitably, what I then had to do was think harder about the groupings I used. Although they had previously been planned, I decided to experiment with this area further. Whilst I initially had planned mixed ability groups, I later planned groups in terms of, what Robin Alexander describes as, ‘cognitive pace’14. Although more successful, this required further intervention to assist some students in

13 Appendix 114 ‘Talking, Thinking, Learning and Dialogic Thinking’


taking their thinking further, because there was not a member in the group willing to take the lead role.

I found that as students became more familiar with the phrases we had used in the exploratory talk, they consequently began to use them spontaneously in later discussions, interacting with ideas rather than just expressing their own. I felt this showed real progress in their thinking skills. Following this, I then tried using De Bono’s thinking hats with the class, which I had not used with younger students previously, although I had found them successful with older students. Again this proved successful, giving both structure and challenge to develop students’ thinking which some students preferred. Students commented in their evaluations:

‘I like this because I made my points, but then had everyone else’s ideas to think about as well which made it more complex.’

‘This made my brain conk into action because I had to fit my thoughts to a certain way.’

‘Although I was thinking about stuff for my own colour, I tried to think how it might be different if I’d been a different one.’

‘This made me think more because I had a specific thing to focus on and someone to control us.’

What interested me here was that students still were clearly engaging with the other ways of thinking, and the above comments suggested that students were doing this independently, even more discussing their ideas with others. Therefore, this activity was successful as it provided the structure necessary for some and, by trying to contain others’ thinking, almost motivated them to think outside the box or ‘hat’ they had been designated. Also, their comments suggested a real awareness of thinking as a useful skill in itself, which can be of variable quality, reflected upon and improved.

Importantly, by focusing on students’ discussion and the questions they asked one another, I also worked harder on the questions I was asking, planning them carefully to develop thinking. Obviously, using open, higher questions was something I was already very aware of, but I focused more on the questions that I would use to continue a whole class discussion after my initial questions had been asked; ultimately, this meant my questions would need to respond to the students’ points in a spontaneous but meaningful way, which would then develop their thinking rather than redirect it. I found this difficult, often because I already had preconceived ideas about where the discussion would lead, and as a result found myself responding to students with comments such as ‘Yes that’s interesting, what else?’ rather than taking their idea on board and exploring that further. Later, I forced myself to take more time to phrase my questions; in fact, as a result of me taking the time to consider the question I should be asking, it often gave students the chance to intervene for themselves, responding to what the previous student had said.


Continuing my work on questioning, I also spent time trying to use more provoking questions when asking students to work in groups. When initially experimenting with ‘exploratory talk’ and De Bono’s Thinking Hats, I had given students one question to consider. I then experimented with giving more questions written in such a way to encourage creative thinking, rather than, as I found I was accustomed to do, writing questions to test understanding. And so, when looking at Blake’s poems with my Year 8 class, I set students differentiated questions, to discuss in groups, that I had written and then rewritten. For example, one original question on ‘London’ was ‘Who do you think creates the rules that control people?’ Not only was this original question ultimately closed, with a right or wrong answer, but focused on the text rather than the thinking that would promote understanding of the text. Rewritten, I asked the question, ‘Why do you think people make rules for themselves to live by?’ which was both open, focused on creative thinking and, simultaneously, promoting understanding of the text. The work which students produced on the basis of this group work, and the questions asked, far exceeded my expectations, with 70% of students achieving above their attainment at the time15. I was exceedingly pleased that by reframing the questions and having worked on students’ discussion skills, they were able to generate such ideas about the poems independently. When reviewing the questions I had generated in the same manner for a different activity, students commented:

‘The questions made me think a lot and at the end of the exercise I had more ideas than at the beginning.’

‘The questions were helpful for making us think because it allowed me to come up with a variety of ideas. I give it a 9/10 because I had good ideas.’

‘The questions made you think a lot because you had to extend your answers.’

‘The questions kept getting harder as you went through, so some of them were challenging and made me think more.’

I wanted to work on other activities that would challenge thinking. I decided to take De Bono’s ‘random word technique’ and use it as the stimulus for students’ creative thinking about the text under discussion. I wanted to extend this idea, and so used objects and pictures, as well as words, to try and extend students’ thinking by asking them to come up with ways in which they linked to the text. Intentionally, I always included words, pictures or objects that I had not considered for myself, to try and reduce the possibility of trying to get students to reach my thinking rather than having the chance to generate entirely new ideas. Students responded really well to this activity, often coming up with unusual ideas which obviously had required thought and also had probed their understanding of a topic or idea. This idea of forcing together different things not normally associated, was something I tried to extend when studying Richard II with students. I gave students a six by six table, with the bottom axis labeled good to bad, and the vertical axis labeled popular to unpopular. Students had to roll die to determine their position on the chart, and had to generate an example of a king’s behaviour which would

15 See Appendix 2 for examples of students’ work.


fulfil the criteria of the axis, such as both really popular and good16. Students were clearly challenged by this, particularly at times when characteristics that appeared at odds with one another were linked, such as bad but popular. Students commented, when evaluating this activity:

‘It made me think because there were always choices to be made.’

‘You had to think a lot more because you don’t know what will come up on the dice next, so you had to really think about what you were going to say.’

‘It was hard to find things that made the king both good and unpopular. It was a challenge.’

‘You were constantly having to think about new scenarios and how they compared to others.’

‘It made me think because I thought of all the things a king might have to do or has had to do, what characteristics that takes and if that would make them popular. We had to make lots of ideas!’

I also experimented with this idea to assist students in preparing for their own creative writing. Students were working on a poetry unit, writing their own poems on relationships with other people, and had to make unusual links between their feelings and objects, explaining their similarities. Students’ work again was superb, making very creative links to represent their feelings17. I continued this process, using other types of stimulus to engage students’ thinking because it was obscure and not immediately obvious. One particularly successful clip was named ‘Balance’: an animation available on Utube. We looked at this clip, associating it to the characters in the text being studied and using it to further our discussion about the way the characters treated each other, and how we as individuals behave.

These activities were amongst the most successful I felt that I trialed because they extended thinking, challenging students to make links that weren’t obvious. However, other areas I was pleased with included using emotional hooks, which although perhaps obvious in terms of engaging students, also proved successful in engaging students in exploratory talk about a topic, because they began to compare the stimulus from their own society with the situation in the text under discussion. In particular, I tried to get students to track how their thinking changed by asking them to record simplistically about how they felt about the situation in the text, and then later how they responded to the stimulus. Then, we tried to gauge why their responses were often at odds, which often developed very detailed debates about how the situations between the two were different, but also the way the material had been presented and its effect on the reader, thus probing more evaluative thinking. Another technique I was pleased with was using thinking maps more creatively. Although I had always used thinking maps a great deal, I tried to use

16 See Appendix 3 for examples of students’ work. 17 See Appendix 4 for examples of students’ work.


them more experimentally, and so I began to alter and adapt the maps. For example, I used the bridge map to help students track how situations were both similar and different, using a mirror image of the bridge map to help them see both sides of the argument. I also adapted the bubble map: instead of just using the bubble map to generate ideas about the characteristics of a character, I used a bubble map which had concentric circles, like a water droplet. I asked students to generate ideas about a character in the text, with one idea in each bubble, however, students also had to assess those characteristics and whether they made us as readers sympathise with the character or not, placing those that did close to the centre of the bubble, and those that were less appealing further away from the centre. What was interesting, was that students’ later discussion about the character was more considered because they had had an opportunity to assess which aspects of her behaviour were understandable or appealing to them, or not, and therefore assessing why they responded the way they did.

Alongside trying to find ways of extending students’ thinking, I wanted to try and increase students’ metacognition. To do this, I primarily tried to use questions to help students interrogate the thinking they had undertaken, including:

How did I do that? How did you do that? What was happening in my head when I had a good idea? What steps did I take to reach my idea? What could I do to think about this more?

Students found this hard, and while they could often say whether they felt they had had to think or not, they often struggled to say how their thinking had developed, and how they had created ideas. To try and assist students in doing this, one activity I trialed was using thinking gauges, where students recorded when their ‘light bulb’ moment occurred and then tried to record the stages they had undertaken to reach that point. I also tried asking students to monitor their thinking throughout the lesson, almost keeping an internal monologue of their thoughts. However, students continued to find this very difficult, and so I tried to make this analysis more manageable by asking students to vocalise how they reached an idea when they were interacting with me, asking ‘How did you reach that idea?’ to try and make them aware of the steps they had taken. This proved more successful than asking students to reflect on a longer cognitive process.

Although trying to challenge students’ thinking was at times frustrating, I was pleased by the evaluations undertaken at the end of the year in which I asked students to assess the year in terms of their perceived progress, enjoyment and the thinking they had undertaken. What pleased me was that students could pinpoint activities that they felt had challenged their thinking, making comments such as ‘The hats made me see thing in a certain way which was hard’ and ‘the pictures made me come up with new ideas’. One student commented ‘Miss, this year has made my brain hurt’. This pleased me, as I was reassured students recognised that they had had to think hard, and that I had succeeded in planning for thinking, which is what I tried to do in every lesson.


However, there are further areas to consider and other avenues to explore. I’m very aware, following an observation, that the way students share their creative thinking in my lessons could be improved. I took this point on board as I felt I had inevitably been concerned with trying to monitor the ideas students were generating as evidence of whether the activities I was using were proving successful, meaning I hadn’t thought about how valuable this sharing of ideas was in moving all students forward.

Attending the course ‘Talking, Thinking, Learning and Dialogic Thinking’ was particularly useful because it gave me a way of taking the project forward next year. Whilst I want to continue planning for thinking, I also want to work on how students share their creativity by experimenting with Robin Alexander’s ideas. In particular, I recognised the ‘pseudo open questions’ he identified teachers as using, focusing instead on the need for authentic questions which respond spontaneously to the students’ point rather than trying to develop the conversation to reach a preconceived idea. To avoid doing this, or artificially involving others in the group through less meaningful questions, Alexander commented that a teacher should focus on one child alone in feedback, which may be undertaken in front of the class, or while other students are engaged in another task, having a genuine conversation exploring their ideas and extending them through the conversation. I was interested in this idea, and would like to experiment with it, planning for such feedback with one student every lesson.

I have found this project exceedingly helpful in making me think more consciously about thinking itself, and how to make it challenging and exploratory. I feel I have developed further my repertoire of activities to encourage thinking, and obviously intend to continue developing these ideas to plan for thinking to achieve learning, sharing these ideas as part of the CPD programme. I would also like to focus on a different thinking skill, such as evaluation, and create ideas about how that may be developed further in my teaching.

BibliographyAnne de A’Echevarria and Ian Patience: ‘Teaching Thinking’, 2008Robin Alexander: ‘Talking, Thinking, Learning and Dialogic Thinking’, 2009


Astington and Olson: The Cognitive Revolution in Children’s Understanding of Mind, in ‘Human Development’, 38Brin Best and Will Thomas: ‘The Creative Teaching and Learning Toolkit’, 2007Sue Cowley: Getting the Buggers to Think, 2004Edward De Bono: ‘Teach Your Child How to Think’, 1993Rexford Brown: ‘Schools of Thought: How the Politics of Literacy Shape Thinking in the Classroom’, 1991 Jerome Bruner: ‘The Process of Education’, 1966Art Costa: ‘Developing Minds: A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking’, 2001John Dewey: ‘How We Think’, 1910 Alec Fisher: ‘An Introduction to Critical Thinking’, 2001Robert Fisher: ‘Teaching Children to Think’, 1995Paul Ginnis: ‘The Teacher’s Toolkit’, 2002Mike Jefferies and Trevor Hancock: Thinking Skills: A Teacher’s Guide, 2007Debra McGregor: ‘Developing Thinking Developing Learning’, 2007Norman (ed): ‘Thinking Voices: The Work of the National Oracy Project’, 1992Jean Piaget: ‘The Genetic Approach to the Psychology of Thought’, in ‘Readings for Reflective Teaching’, Andrew Pollard (ed.), 2002Robinson: ‘Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative’, 2001

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Rebecca Jermy - Farlingaye High School · Web viewI decided to take De Bono’s ‘random word...

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