Headteacher, Bernadette Hancock describes how thinking maps have been used at her Cardiff school in all curriculum areas, helping children to become more fluent in developing key communication skills.
Provides information and advice on recent developments in the area of cognitive education with specific reference to past, present and future research and publications produced from Exeter University's School of Education and Lifelong Learning (SELL).
Links to thinking schools across the UK.
Aims to support high quality research on cognitive skills and critical thinking development in order to transform learning, teaching and leadership.
Visual thinking tools for educational results.
Picture the Music Create is a multi sensory teaching tool that motivates and inspires creativity.
MPNS is an experienced group of educational professionals whose core purpose is the development of coaching skills and cultures within organisations.
Working with a network of colleges and private training providers supplying key support services.
Helping schools and consortia to identify and meet the challenges of an ever changing educational environment.
A single point of contact for employers of all sizes to help them identify training requirements and improve key business objectives such as efficiency, productivity and profitability.
Set up by the Gatsby Charity Foundation to develop a model of effective teaching and learning drawn from research and best practice.
Links to various education websites.
Critical thinking involves developing the key skills of questioning and reasoning and the ability to demonstrate:
- a readiness to reason and create order and meaning from our experience of life
- a willingness to be open minded, to question and to challenge the ideas of others
- an openness to be challenged by others, and to the possibility of being wrong
- a desire to test out ideas and search for ‘truth’.
Children need to be shown how to develop as reasonable, fair-minded critical thinkers. They need to practice the skills of questioning, reasoning, predicting and patterning experience. Learning to think critically means learning to make informed judgements about:
- how to question, when to question and what kind of questions to ask
- how to reason, when to reason and what reasoning methods to use
In terms of the work of Benjamin Bloom et al, critical thinking is the highest of the six thinking skills in his taxonomy, which is classified as evaluation.
See also Bloom’s Taxonomy, Three-Storey Intellect