26 Training and development for Thinking Science

Successful implementation of the Thinking Science programme appears to depend on the amount and quality of training and development that teachers have. Just as it is essential in an intervention lesson to provide plenty of interaction between pupils so that they can act as ‘peer coaches’, so it is with teachers. Teachers need guidance to examine the psychology underpinning the programme as well as time to discuss with other teachers the details of teaching each lesson. They also need time to plan, review and reflect.

Below we offer points for discussion with colleagues to help you prepare yourselves for teaching Thinking Science (divided into before, during and after a lesson), but in our experience this is not a substitute for receiving training and development support from an accredited CASE trainer.

Before a lesson the teacher should:

1 Identify the type of thinking to focus on in this lesson – each subject area lends itself to the promotion of particular ways of thinking. They are: control of variables, classification, proportionality, ratios, correlation, probability and, perhaps most importantly of all, the ability to make mental models of the world for predicting and hypothesising. The identification of a specific thinking skill to be developed in the lesson helps the teacher keep focused on what pupils need to gain from their discussions and ‘hands on’ activities.

2 Identify the key words to be reinforced or introduced. Check you have a good working definition for your pupils in your head. This is to provide a language for talking about science and thinking.

3 Decide on how to group the pupils. In a mixed ability situation it is helpful if each child is paired with another child of similar reasoning ability so that they can engage in meaningful and challenging discussion with each other. Reasoning ability is not necessarily related to reading ability – we find poor readers can be good logical thinkers, particularly boys.

4 Prepare some specific questions to use at each stage of the lesson.

5 Think of strategies to maintain the pace of the lesson – the ‘Blue Peter’ approach. It is not essential for every pupil to complete practical assignments or worksheets. In the right classroom environment, they learn from each other ‘second hand’. It is more important that the brighter and average children do not lose the momentum of their thinking. They act as peer coaches during group discussions.

6 Think of strategies to elicit prior learning and understanding, e.g. ‘mind mapping’, ‘brainstorming’.

7 Identify some bridging examples – this is helping children to see where else this type of thinking strategy is helpful, both in other subject areas and in everyday life. For example being able to think about ratios helps in history with time-lines or in the supermarket if you want to know if three for the price of two of one brand is better than just buying two tins of another cat food!

Effective strategies to encourage pupils to become more confident in talking to the whole class:

Ask pupils to discuss their thinking in pairs, or small groups so that any respondent is speaking on behalf of others, and all have ‘rehearsed’ what they would say if asked;

Use a verbal multiple choice format for a question and ask pupils, after being given time to think, to vote on the options, and then ask some to justify their vote;

Ask every child to jot down an answer in their ‘Thinking Diaries’ or notebooks and then select a few to read out what they have written.

At the end of a lesson the teacher could give pupils a metacognitive homework. For example: What did you learn? What was difficult? What was easy? Why?

Encouraging pupils to keep a personal learning diary is also highly effective in promoting thinking skills.

After a lesson the teacher should:

Make brief notes on any ‘surprise’ events in the lesson, and re-plan the timing to inform teaching the lesson next time;

Do a ‘quick and dirty’ assessment to check which pupils ‘got it’, which are ‘puzzled but engaged’, and which ‘cannot even see the problem’. Use this to guide you in grouping pupils and elicit responses in your next Thinking Science lesson.