Thinking Skills

Holyrood Community School
and
Sixth Form Centre

Thinking Skills

Thinking Skills at Holyrood

If learning is making sense of experience, and thinking is how we learn, then improving student’s thinking will help them to make more sense of learning. Thinking skills is about putting the emphasis on how we learn rather than what we have learnt.

What do Thinking Skills involve?

Putting emphasis on how we learn rather than what we learn

The teaching of thinking skills should enable students to become more creative and independent learners

Well established as a means of motivating students and raising achievement

‘Education is what you remember when you forget everything you have been taught’…. in other words the way in which you have learned to think is what you will carry through your life’

‘Unlock those little grey cells’: TES 02-03-01

Have a go this term’s Thinking Skills task – it’s all about working out why a young lad in Pakistan is making footballs secretly at home. There is not one, correct answer, so have a go – remember, it’s how you worked out your answer, which is the really important part.

Send me you answers to: n.gristy@holyrood.somerset.sch.uk

Thinking Skills Principles and Characteristics

Thinking Skills Principles:

Intelligence is modifiable

Challenge and interest – motivation

Learning with others – collaboration

Encourage transfer

Make students, and teachers, think about learning – metacognition

Provides learners with explicit strategies for thinking

Raising standards requires that attention is directed not only on what is to be learned but how children learn and how teachers intervene o achieve this

Characteristics of Thinking Skills strategies:

Increase self-esteem

Help a student’s motivation

Help transfer their current learning to new situations

Can promote better behaviour

Promote teamwork and working with others

Put challenge back into learning are structured for success – often no right answer

Develop a deeper understanding of fundamental ideas

Above all, Thinking Skills strategies are designed to make students think about how they have learnt what they have learnt through the mediation of the teacher at appropriate times in appropriate ways

To develop Thinking Skills classroom activities need to:

Be open and challenging tasks that make students think

Encourage them to use what they already know

Make opportunities for collaborative work with high quality talk

Encourage students to talk about how tasks have been done

Produce different learning outcomes, some relating to the subject itself but others to how learning can be used in other contexts, in other lessons

What does the National Curriculum say about ‘thinking skills’?

Information-processing skills enable students to:

Locate collect and recall relevant information

Interpret information to show they understand relevant concepts and ideas

Analyse information e.g. sort, classify, sequence, compare and contrast

Understand relationships e.g. part/whole relationships

Enquiry skills enable students to:

Ask relevant questions

Pose and define problems

Plan what to do and how to research

Predict outcomes, test conclusions and improve ideas

Reasoning skills enable students to:

Give reasons and opinions

Draw inferences and make deductions

Use precise language and explain what they think

Make judgements and decisions informed by reasons or evidence

Creative thinking skills enable students to:

Generate and extend ideas

Suggest possible hypotheses

Be imaginative in their thinking

Look for alternative innovative outcomes

Evaluation skills enable students to:

Evaluate information they are given

Judge the value of what they read, hear and do

Develop criteria for judging the value of their own and others’ work or ideas

Have confidence in their own judgements

Why is Omar stitching footballs secretly at home?

Mitre top quality footballs cost £60 in a shop.	Omar lives in the outskirts of Sialkot in Pakistan.
In Sialkot 75% of the world hand stitched footballs are made.	Mitre, a British company have footballs made in Pakistan because it can exploit the low wages for workers.
Mitre is under pressure from its directors to raise profits.	Rizwan, a factory owner in Sialkot offers to make footballs at a low price.
The women who stitch footballs are unhappy at their low wages, but they need to feed their families.	Omar‘s dad died when he was young, so his family need him to work.
A stitcher earns 50p per football. About 4 can be stitched in a day	When Omar watches football on his Uncle’s television, he wonders if the football being used was made by him
Omars mum’s sight has been slowly getting worse in recent years. She can no longer stitch.	In the past, many children have worked in stitching centres to help raise money for their families
Before the Atlanta agreement, Omar’s family were just about getting by.	The Atlanta agreement was reached in 1997. Companies like Nike, Reebok and Mitre agreed not to buy from factories who use children
Many factory owners in Pakistan have also signed the agreement to stop using child labour.	Today, more children in Sialkot go to school
There are now no children working in stitching centres, (but some do work secretly at home)	There was an outcry in 1996, when it was discovered that children as young as 7 or 8 were stitching footballs for a living.
Save the Children say that more needs to be done to help families find other ways to earn money after this agreement.	Unfortunately, Omar is still not receiving an education and his family are worse off than before.
The aim of the Atlanta agreement was to stop child exploitation	Mitre claimed that they were unaware that any children were being used in their factories