[MUSIC] Thinking, don't we all think all the time? Well, let's talk about thinking about thinking. That's thinking skills, which seems a strange notion in a way that we need to be taught how to think and develop skills of how to think. So here's five questions. First of all, what are our thinking skills? Don't we think all the time? Does it really need special skills in order to be able to think? And if so, can those skills be learned? Even more challenging, can they be taught? Can we teach people to think? Well, some of the things that characterize thinking skills are first of all, that process of thinking about our thinking often called metacognitive activity. Thinking about our own thinking. Going other range of different intelligences. We'll talk a bit more about this notion about not having just simply one intelligence, but a whole range of different ways of being clever, if you'd like. Thinking skills, thinking divergently. That is not always focusing on what is immediately obvious, but being creative in our thinking, creating new ideas. Thinking out of the box, as it's sometimes described. Developing problem solving strategies. Weighing up possible different decisions. Brainstorming questions, letting our mind run away, if you like for awhile. Come up with sometimes quite unexpected and sometimes maybe even absurd answers. But often, it's through that process that some of the great breakthroughs in thinking and inventions have been made and when thinking organizing information. Well, if you're the teacher, if you are a teacher and you have a class that looks a little bit like this. You may wonder what's actually going on in their heads? Have a look at this slide again. The thinking cat. The not thinking cat. The cat gazing out of the window. The very happy cat, the sad cat. The cat thinking about nothing at all in particular. Thinking about what it's going to have for its lunch. Who close is that sometimes to what it looks like in our classroom with 13, 14 and maybe more. In some cases, a hundred children sitting in front of us and very difficult to try and figure out what's going on in their heads and their arts. Well, one of the useful routines that David Perkins has used in his extensive work with teachers in classrooms in many countries of the world. He talks about one of these routines as the MYST, M-Y-S-T routine. Me, you, space, time. It says, as a teacher, how do I model my thinking in the classroom? How do I make my own thinking visible? How do I make my students think invisible? I always sit environments with the classroom organized in a way, but helps people to think myself as a teacher and my students. And time, the enemy time. How can I give thinking more time in my classroom? And how does people thinking change over time? And then another of his routines. They're all very simple, very simple routines. Three or four key things. See, think, wonder. Have a look at this picture and ask the question what do you see? Describe it. You may say, I see a woman. I see what appears to be a little boy. I see that woman bending down to make eye contact, I think. I think your arm is supposed to be around the boy. You might go on a bit and try to think about what kind of context is this in? What's actually happening here? What do you wonder about? Is it a parent? Is it a teacher? What country might it be in? So every picture in a sense tells a thousand words, if we look at it more carefully and raise those kind of questions. And the three questions that Perkins asks us to think about are I see, I think and I wonder. And he goes on to talk about something he calls a circle of viewpoints. So if you were to look at the picture again and think of what's happening here from different points of view, I'm going to think about this picture from the point of view of what appears to be the teacher. But just think about this picture from a point of view of what appears to be a student. What's the student thinking? What's the student feeling here? And a circle of viewpoints says, here's a question I have from that viewpoint as a teacher or as a student. And if you want to go on the web and you want to look up this reference to the thinking classroom, here's 30 thinking questions for you to have a look at. Not only the why, the what, the where, the when, but do you need some thinking time? When do you want to think about this? Can you teach this to someone else? Can you use your idea somewhere else and so on. Have a look at those 30 thinking questions. And consider which of those would help to make your teaching more engaging and give your students more time and ability to think creatively. Finally, here's a sequence of concept mapping, which David Perkins asked to his students to engage in. He said, take a piece of paper. Draw right in the middle, good thinking. Put a circle around it and then do a little mapping of what that would mean. In the first of these slides, this is not a very imaginative student, because the student can only come up with one thing. The second example, the students come up with a lot more things. Good thinking means getting good grades, getting straight A's, getting the answer right. But Perkins says, come on, think that a bit further. And when he runs his own courses on thinking skills, you'll find that students come up a whole better range of answers. I see, I think, I wonder. I never accept things at face value for the first time. I like to reflect. I like to challenge. I like to analyze. And here's a further slide with another student taking that same concept of good thinking. I'm doing a bit of concept mapping. And further, the student. Saying, I think I'm good at maths. I think I'm good with numbers. But then asked to develop those ideas a bit more comes up with a whole range of things puzzling, thinking, wondering, describing. Analyze a whole range of things that are learned by these students, because they have been taken further by a skilled teaching into thinking about their own thinking. To thinking more creatively and more analytically about their own teaching. And so when you use any of these routines as they David Perkins calls them, the very simplest of all is at the end of a lesson or at the end of a sequence of lessons to ask the question I used to think and now I think. [MUSIC]
