It was great fun to meet with our TM consultants and consider how many ways they could use the Thinking Frames and Thinking Moves to help organise thinking and ideas connected to Christmas. Enjoy the suggestions below and please do share examples from your students with us.
What do you know about the Science of Learning? As you introduce a new concept, do you help learners picture what is going on in their brain? Do your students regularly talk about schema and long-term memory? The science of learning, often referred to as educational psychology or the psychology of learning, is a field of study that focuses on understanding how humans acquire, process, and retain knowledge and skills. Its main focus is getting us to understand and tap into the incredible resources our brain offers!
This month’s blog is by Arabella Chute: The world is changing in many ways, and the educational system is finding ways to evolve alongside society with varying degrees of success. Many schools are thinking hard, not just what they teach, but increasingly how they teach. The growing understanding is that today’s children must master more than subject-area knowledge to thrive in tomorrow’s world, and being a Thinking School is taking part in this progression. That is why cultivating the ‘habits of mind’ through the power of storytelling is an essential teaching aid.
Wanting to keep your eye in on some of the latest ideas and research related to metacognition and self regulation this summer? Here’s a few books, articles and podcasts for the sun lounger:
Having spent much of the last decade using words such as: yet, growth, potential, flexible in my teaching and conversations with students it only recently dawned on me that this only focused on mindset. The structure of our brain and how it functions was not where I started the conversation in the classroom. Now’s the time to reflect!
‘Before and during the early stages of the thinking skills movement of the past 20 to 30 years, the ‘brain-mind’ was often called a ‘black box’, an unknown and unknowable mystery.’….. It was during the mid-1980s ‘thinking’ or ‘thinking skills’ became popular in schools.
You have read the EEF report, you have tried and begun to embed different metacognitive strategies, you meet students in the corridor that begin to talk about their learning… What is your next step? That’s easy to answer: become a Thinking School! A Thinking School takes an explicit, evidence informed, whole school approach to developing pupils’ cognitive capability and intelligent learning behaviours.
With its easy ‘fit’ with the Thinking Skills and Personal Capabilities framework within the Northern Ireland statutory curriculum, the Thinking School approach continues to draw interest from local schools there.
As the summer term looms with exam and assessment season this is the moment for us to take a step back and remind ourselves of the metacognitive cycle. Please indulge me on this one! Slogging towards someone else’s goal is never going to be motivating. For some students achieving their best or being given a target grade is not an enticing carrot; it feels like an imposed, overwhelming or unacheivable target.
As the spring term comes to a close, Thinking Matters brings you our latest Research Round-up. This month the highlighted books and articles focus on metacognitive strategies, retrieval practice, well-being and self-regulated learning.