As you will see from my recent blog post I had another opportunity to visit Beijing School for the Blind in the Easter holidays. As part of the exchange I gave a presentation to the staff on Thinking skills. I also got the staff to try out a couple of thinking skills activities – so they could see how they worked.
Staff were buzzing at trying out a new teaching technique – especially one which encourages peer cooperation and interaction, skills that the teaching staff are only just starting to develop.
The pictures show the staff trying out the activities. Please feel free to comment or contact me if you want to know more.
Looking back on my blog it’s been a while since I wrote anything. The first of the topics I have been meaning to write about is how we followed the “Leading in Learning” strategy to teach Thinking Skills to our pupils.
I’ve embedded a power point here which was the presentation I used when I launched the strategy at our school. I had been piloting the materials with my own pupils and had identified the strategies most useful to our pupils (all which are statemented as we are a special school).
Although the strategies are familiar, it is worth plugging the metacognitive plenary – the part of the lesson at the end where you talk about the ‘thinking’ involved. Also gives a chance for the teaching to model and the pupils to evaluate their work.
For the collective memory I used science diagrams showing pollution (I have also used the same pictures with pupils. The EM spectrum diagram works very well for this purpose). For the reading images I lifted a picture from an Anthony Browne books – these are excellent for reading images (hard to make sense of single picture without text for cues).
As well as the strategies mentioned in the presentation we looked at fortune lines (and living graphs) which involved a group sticking ambiguous statements onto a graph/fortune line. The answers are ambiguous so that there can be several right answers/no wrong answers. Pupils work on their reasoning skills and the ability to justify their answers.
One of the main problems we encountered was pupils not being able to work in a group, and having poor communication skills. I spoke to our speech and language therapist who recommended this book. I use one of the activities at the start of every science lesson as a starter. Not only are the pupils starting to develop their thinking/communication skills but they are alert & engaged for the rest of the lesson (and with much better retention too!)
It’s hard to sum up all the work we’ve done in a short blog post. Fill in the contact me form at the top of the page if you want to ask me any questions about what we’ve been doing.
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