How do you get learners to develop thinking skills?

Why is it important to get learners to develop thinking skills?

Technology is advancing so quickly that it is impossible for us to predict what skills our learners will need in their future workplace.  What we can predict is that they will not need to be automised production line workers, which is what some argue  the present-day school system was designed to produce.  Robots are doing more of the automated jobs, so humans will do jobs that only humans can do, which require thinking skills.

What are thinking skills?

There are two types of thinking skills - lower order thinking skills (LOTS) and higher order thinking skills (HOTS).

LOTS include labelling, remembering, comparing, contrasting.

HOTS include predicting, hypothesising, possibilty thinking, reasoning, looking for cause and effect, analysing, creating, evaluating.

Clearly HOTS are more difficult than LOTS and require more complex language.

How do you get learners predicting and hypothesising?

Asking questions like "What will happen if...", "What do you think is going to happen?",  "What can/ might/ could happen next?" gets learners predicting.  As you can see we use modal verbs and the first conditional to make predictions.  With young learners you can make this simple by giving them alternatives.  With my class of 7-year-olds I showed them a glass of water and different powders like sugar, salt, sand, flour and asked them "What do you think?  Will it make a solution or a mixture?"  So, I was expecting them to understand complex language, but I only required a one-word answer from them to make the prediction.

Hypothesising about the past requires more complex language like the third conditional "What would have happened if the plant hadn't had sunlight?", or mixed conditionals "What would life be like if electricity hadn't been invented?".  With young learners we can make this simple by using visuals and giving alternatives.  "If the plant hadn't had sunlight, would it have grown like this or this?"

How do you get learners to develop reasoning skills?

Asking questions like "Why do think that happens/ happened?", "Give three reasons why...?", "What causes/ caused that to happen?" help to develop reasoning skills.  With young learners this is very difficult because they do not have the language to express reasons.  Again we can use visuals and give them alternatives in some cases.  In others we can allow them to use L1 then give them the words they need in L2.  For example, when showing a diagram of the water cycle I asked my class of 7-year-olds "Why does the water evaporate?" and I accept a simple one-word answer "sun", or even better "because sun".

Justifying reasons, analysing and evaluating alternative solutions are more difficult skills and require more complex language.  I think these are challenging tasks for young learners even in their L1.  However, we could start developing these reasoning skills in their daily life, talking about the choices they make and the school rules.

Do you use any tasks to help develop reasoning skills in young learners?  Please tell me about them in a comment below.

 

How do you get learners to think creatively?

School is often accused of killing creativity!  It's important to include activities that stimulate creativity.  These can be open-ended activities, where there is no right or wrong answer or right or wrong way to do the activity, so the learners can make choices and the teacher can be surprised.  This can be something simple like asking learners to categorise things (words, pictures of objects or animals, sounds) without telling them HOW to categorise them.  I gave a class of 8-year-olds cards with pictures of different animals.  I was amazed by how many creative ways they categorised them!

After a discussion on how to stimulate creativity at Primary School, a student teacher suggested using plasticine.  Kids love it and it is very versatile.  They can make things individually or in groups and it guarantees full class participation!  I have used plasticine in Science when talking about the life cycle of the butterfly using the book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", and in Geography, asking the students to collaborate to make a model of their classroom.

Another learning tool, which stimulates creativity is the lapbook:
http://www.handsofachild.com/lapbooking/what-is-a-lapbook/

There are a lot of useful materials and ideas on the internet to help you make a lapbook.  I made a lapbook in Year 1 Primary School on the five senses:

http://homeschoolhelperonline.com/2015/07/27/five-senses-lapbook/

My colleague, Frances, developed a lapbook on living things in Year 3 Primary School.  The students started by drawing their favourite habitat then gradually added to the lapbook with information on living things and pictures and cut-outs of the living things in their habitat.  She used material on Mrs. Gren:

http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/topic/living/life-processes.html#.WDmhfH0t1Xs

How do you stimulate creative thinking in your classroom? Please share your ideas in the comments box below.

 

How can you incorporate thinking skills into your lessons at the planning stage?

Here's a useful too to help you remember to plan activities which help develop thinking skills:

This was given to me by Diana Hicks at her seminar on CLIL in May 2016.