Reasoning demo

*Give time to think … and share ideas

What do experts notice? – A painter will notice subtle differences in colour, shape or texture. What about other experts … gardeners, doctors, musicians, drivers, sports-people, actors, cooks, mechanics?

Choose a couple of experts from the list or from your own ideas and think about what they notice and how and why they might have learned this.

*Introduce games that require noticing behaviours

For example… use the familiar Kim’s game where students have to look carefully for a given time and then try to remember the group of articles. This simple format has numerous variations…what’s missing, what’s been added, what’s the odd one out?

Introduce intriguing pictures to provoke noticing

Discuss noticing others

Invite some students to be Learning Detectives. Task them with watching how students play team games. Their job is to watch out for how to do the activity best, what works and what doesn’t work. You will need to model this regularly, it won’t matter whether they are throwing bean bags into buckets, jumping through hoops or balancing on bars, the noticing and coaching will make a real difference to their learning. If possible capture examples of effective learning on camera / video. Build the outcomes into a display that helps all students to become more aware of the effective habits of others.

Extend the language of noticing

Collect words that tell you how people learn to notice detail.

Relate noticing to well-known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Eagle-eyed.

I’ve gone through it with a fine-tooth comb.

Keep your eyes peeled

Intriguing Images

For example have an intriguing picture ready on the whiteboard before the lesson starts. Students look forward to looking carefully at pictures where all is not as it seems.

**Finding shapes

Offer students a random set of dots (or picture of the night sky). Invite them to seek items such as:

• A letter of the alphabet
• An animal
• A regular shape
• A face
• Or something linked to the content of the forthcoming lesson

Visible Thinking Routine

See, Think, Wonder:

• Invite students to make an observation (see) about an object (artwork, image, artifact) or topic.
• Follow up with what they think might be going on. Encourage backing up their interpretation with reasons.
• Ask students to think about what this makes them wonder about the object or topic.
• The routine works best when a student responds by using the three stems together at the same time, i.e., “I see…, I think…, I wonder…”. If not you need to scaffold each response with a follow up question for the next stem.

This routine encourages careful observations and thoughtful interpretations. It helps stimulate curiosity and sets the stage for inquiry. Use it at the beginning of a new unit to motivate student interest. Try it with an object that connects to a topic during the unit of study. Use the routine with an interesting object near the end of a unit to encourage students to further apply their new knowledge and ideas. Go to visible thinking website for more examples and information about thinking routines.

*Viewing Frames:

Use sets of interesting pictures together with cards with a viewing window cut into them. Students place the viewing card over the picture in seeking a range of different features. E.g. something red, made of xx, something denoting happiness, something which suggests what might happen next. It’s a good idea to look firstly for concrete features before moving on to abstract features. You could:

• use a poem. Use the viewer to find the stanza that is most descriptive, that makes them happy, that uses the best simile…
• or use a geometrical image, use the viewer to find corresponding angles, perpendicular lines, a reflex angle…
• or an image of the water cycle, use the viewer to find where water vapour is rising, where water is moving downwards, where it would be best to site a farm, a village, a wind turbine…
• or . . . .

Draw out reasoning in Strategy Games

Use games that require strategy and logical thinking. From noughts and crosses to chess, from hangman to backgammon, such games help to develop and refine reasoning skills.

Many appear in the form of maths investigations and problems: Frogs; Tower of Hanoi; Nim; Connect 4; etc.

Code Breaking

Present students with coded messages and require them to work them out using their deductive skills.

Start with simple substitution codes where, for example, each letter is replaced by the one after it in the alphabet. (i.e. b replaces a, c replaces b etc. etc.) Increase difficulty by using more complex ciphers.

Explore the meaning of reasoning

Collect words that tell you how people learn to Reason.

Relate reasoning to well-known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

On the one hand . . .

One step at a time

It adds up

Sequencing

Cut up;

• a cartoon,
• series of pictures of a production process,
• a flow diagram,
• a mathematical proof,
• a story line,
• a musical score,
• a poem,
• a sequence of events, and so on.

Invite students to reassemble the pieces in what they think is a viable order and explain their reasons for this. Model and listen for the language of reasoning to strengthen the process.

Ranking

Offer students pieces of information or ideas or pictures or statements as a set of separate items, usually on cards.

The subject could be: possible causes of global warming; the sayings of a religious leader; discoveries of the last 20 years; the music of Gershwin; causes of WW1; poems of Sylvia Plath; healthy lifestyle indicators; famous people etc.

The criterion for ranking the cards is given or negotiated with students. For example rank the cards in order of;

• importance
• appeal
• relevance
• how controversial
• any other appropriate criterion.

The point of the activity is to debate the relative merits, place them in rank order according to the chosen criterion, and to be able to explain and justify the ranking based on evidence rather than opinion.

Visible Thinking Routine

• What’s happening here?
• What makes you say that?

This is one of many visible thinking routines to be found on the visible thinking website

The first question in this routine is flexible: it is useful when looking at objects such as works of art or historical artefacts, but it can also be used to explore a poem, make scientific observations and hypotheses, or investigate more conceptual ideas (i.e., democracy).
The first question invites students to describe what they notice, see or know, but it is the supplementary question (What makes you say that?) that requires them to build explanations. It promotes evidence-based reasoning and when the students share their interpretations it encourages them to understand alternatives and multiple perspectives.

Liepz & Bounz

A jumble of clues to unravel and make sense of. Are there any red herrings? Did we make any assumptions, and were they valid? Did we miss anything vital? Did we ‘get it right’? Can we convince others that our answer is correct?

Use Liepz and Bounz to explore how we have to use our reasoning skills to solve problems.

Observation Sheet

Explore strategies for getting unstuck…

…by looking at the hows of being stuck. Different sorts of stuck call for different strategies:

*Develop prompts to nudge students’ self-talk:

1. You have forgotten the next step in a process – what might I try next.
2. You tried something that didn’t work- what would be an alternative strategy?
3. You don’t understand the problem/objective/goal – I need to re-read the ‘question’.
4. The problem is presented differently – what does this remind me of? What did I do then?
5. You don’t know which remedy to choose – what’s the range of possible strategies I could use?
6. You can’t find a way out, you are in a blind alley – I’ll retrace my steps back to where I first ‘got lost’.
7. You don’t know where to find more information – where else might I look?

Introduce the Learning Pit to explore the stuck/struggle journey

Use the ‘Learning Pit’ as a means of opening up a conversation around the feelings involved with being stuck, and the journey towards getting unstuck – the struggle. It is essential that students know:

• that the ‘pit’ is only one staging post on the learning journey
• they can get out by using ‘stuck strategies’ and tools

It is also worth noting that the pit is not necessarily inevitable for all students in all learning – some will fly over the pit in some topics or curriculum areas.

Develop ‘stuck prompts’ together

• Work with students to find useful questions to ask themselves and helpful strategies for them to use when they are stuck.
• Ensure that there are plenty of options that come higher on the list than “Ask the teacher”.
• Create stuck prompts as reminders around the classroom.
• These are, in effect, low-risk, low-investment levers for creating a shift in students’ sense of what is valued, what is normal, and what is the point of their learning — and thus in the quality of their engagement.

Extend the language of persevering

What message is the writer trying to convey?

Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists of the ability to stick to one thing ‘til it gets there

Fall seven times, stand up eight

Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did

Explore the meaning of effort

Effort is a word that teachers use frequently, but what does it mean? How might students decode this and begin to do it purposefully?

• Explore what is meant by ‘effort’ with your students, and discuss with them the ways in which they might apply it.
• Encourage them to come up with a definition of effort and specific examples of what it might look like in the classroom – for example by;
  • trying different strategies to solve a problem,
  • using a Visible Thinking Routine (VTR)
  • aiming to achieve challenging goals, or
  • using different un-sticking techniques when something is tricky.
  • paying attention to whoever is speaking

Targeted Effort is now seen as a path to mastery. Students need to be aware of a connection between effort and improvement; that the sort of effort being used is causing their improvement. This is why it is important to give effort meaning. Meaning often underpins motivation which in turn drives behaviour.

Model getting unstuck

Model being a learner and show how you work things out, get unstuck, learn from mistakes.

Take on the role of an intelligent novice

Model getting unstuck at a slightly higher, more coherent and informed level than is characteristic of your students

Model your ‘think alouds’

If students freeze when perplexed offer supportive questions NOT answers.

• ‘What do you do next?’
• and ‘Then what do you do next’
• and ‘Then what do you do next’

Thus you are encouraging students to take over the job for themselves

Remind students that uncertainty shouldn’t lead to paralysis!

Re-frame Challenge

Give Mistakes a status, a key role in learning

Give mistake quotas. Tell students you expect them to make, say 3 in a lesson. If not, the challenges they are tackling are too easy and they should move to harder ones.

Explore the concept of ‘Good mistakes’ – where the student has misunderstood something thus enabling you and the student to track the issue.

Offer a range of ‘good mistakes’ at the start of a lesson for students to find, explore and correct.

Give time in lessons for students to Trial and Improve something. Discard ‘trial and error’.

Visible Thinking Routine

From ‘I’m stuck ‘ To ‘I’m stuck because …‘

*Use Origami to help students explore keeping going with a challenge.

A seemingly simple task that frequently leads to frustration and the need to have another go. Some students may do it fairly easily, others will give up, and some will struggle through and achieve, almost to their surprise, the desired outcome. Use the task to explore the feelings around stuck, challenge, potential distractions, and trying to achieve a goal.

Use it as an opportunity to explore further with the group — what makes us give up, what helps us keep going?

*Engage with a ‘mystery’ object in a bag

Invite students to ask questions to find out what the mystery object is.

• Vary the complexity according to age and experience of class. Use clues to narrow down the possibilities for younger students e.g. it’s something you’d find in the garden. Young students will tend to want to ‘guess’. They will need encouragement to ask questions before offering solutions.
• Ask talk partners to come up with two ‘I wonder’ questions e.g.” I wonder what it’s made of?”
• Set a limit, say 10/15/20 questions allowing the students to guess before showing the object.
• Key is to focus on the questions; acknowledge and reward good questions.
• At the end compile a list of some of the useful/unusual/interesting questions that were asked.

Question focused research

Ask students to;

• research possible types of questions using the Internet.
• record and analyse the types of questions used in their peer group
• compare their research findings and their observations.

Use this to expand the range of questions used in class and to create guidelines for asking good (search) questions.

*Put questions on display

Click to enlarge

Create a Question Wall in the classroom to illustrate and prompt questioning. For example, the question wall might focus on student generated questions about the topic in hand. Use their questions to help to focus / shape their enquiry.

Establish ground rules for asking questions e.g. speaking clearly, think before you ask…is this an important/relevant question? Do I know the answer? Get to the point. Listen to the answer.

Questions on display

Click to enlarge

Create displays to support students’ questioning skills. Go on to

• Discuss what sort of questions these are — open, closed, speculative, divergent, clarifying, essential, subsidiary
• How they might lead to different types of information/reactions/strategies to gather information.
• Draw up and display lists of generic questions to use whenever students undertake certain types of task, e.g. scientific investigation.
• Refer to and extend these question groups regularly.

Create, with students, a set of questions they might ask when they are stuck. These might include; What did I do last time when . . . . ? What do I already know about this? What should I do first? And next? I am finding this tricky because . . . . Who might know? Where can I look?

*The why game

Start a story with an opening line. Encourage the students to keep on asking each other Why? and giving answers until they have created a story. Opening lines can be a simple

“The red van roared down the street”

but lead to all sorts of questions —“Why was the van red?” “Why was it roaring?” which lead on to other ‘Why?’ questions.

Vary the game by starting with a riddle or conundrum, or requiring different types of questions.

Extend the language of questioning

Collect ideas about the purpose of questions.

Relate questioning to well known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Curiosity killed the cat

I need to get to the bottom of this

More questions than answers

*Is your question important?

Identify a project which the class might investigate. Write a series of questions on separate pieces of cards and give each group a set of the cards. The group shuffle the cards and deal each student one card. They have to decide:

• the best order for the questions, to do the project well
• if they have to ask all the questions or whether
  some are irrelevant in the context
• whether there are any missing questions and if so, what they might be
• what they have learnt about questions from this.

*Questions you would like to ask

Tell students:

‘In 5 minutes, ‘something’ related to the upcoming lesson will walk in.

What are the three questions that we should ask it?’

Visible Thinking Routine

Question Starts is a Visible Thinking Routine that provides students with the opportunity to practise developing good questions that provoke thinking and inquiry into a topic by offering a range of interesting question stems. For example:

Brainstorm a list of at least 12 questions about the topic, concept or object. Use these question-starts to help you think of interesting questions:

• Why…?
• How would it be different if…?
• What are the reasons…?
• Suppose that…?
• What if…?
• What if we knew…?
• What is the purpose of…?
• What would change if…?

Review the brainstormed list and star the questions that seem most interesting. Then, select one or more of the starred questions to discuss for a few moments.

Reflect: What new ideas do you have about the topic, concept or object that you didn’t have before?

*An activity to learn about questioning

Build a three-level ‘questioning habit‘

‘ReQuest’ is a structured process for deepening questions.

For example, start with the painting The Arnolfini Wedding by Jan van Eyck:

• On-the-line questions: ask questions about the picture for which the answers can be seen just by looking closely at the picture: ‘How many candles are there?’ ‘What kind of room is it?’ ‘What is on the wall behind the people?’
• Between-the-lines questions: questions whose answers can be inferred by looking at the picture: E.g. ‘What is the relationship between the two people?’ ‘How long ago was the picture painted?’ ‘What time of day is it?’
• Beyond-the-line questions: questions whose answers need to be elicited by making interpretive links from the picture: E.g. ‘What did the artist think of his subjects?’ Is the number of candles significant?’ How does perspective work in the painting?

*My Grandma went shopping . . .

Recommend group of no more than 12-15

• Start by saying “My grandma went shopping and she bought…” and say an item. Let students take turns and each time one of them adds another item, they have to explain their link to everyone else.
• Encourage the students to think of lots of different ways of linking items and reward their ingenuity.
• To take the learning a little bit further, it could be useful to share a real shopping list with your students and discuss the links that help you when actually shopping.
• For example, perhaps you list all the fruit and vegetables first, if they are found in the first aisle etc. Or perhaps you list all the breakfast foods together…

*Mind Maps for link making

Use mind maps to encourage students to link and explain how information and ideas seem to be associated.

Use mind mapping at the beginning, middle and end of a unit of study to show how links and understanding change as knowledge grows.

Use a ‘thought shower mind map’ at the outset of a lesson to connect with prior learning and activate link making. Use in the middle to monitor shifts in understanding. Use at the end of a module of learning as a synthesising tool.

Think and Link

Organisation: For groups of 5/6 students.

Print out and photocopy the Odd One Out series of pictures. (see resource).

• Each row has 5 pictures in it. Four can be linked together easily but one doesn’t fit readily with the others.
• Encourage the students to find an odd one out and perhaps invent a reason or story about how/why the odd one could be made to ‘fit’.
• Spend plenty of time discussing why the pictures fit together and what the links are. It’s fine if the students can think of different ways to link them as long as they can explain their rationale to you and the other students.
• Keep praising and rewarding the ‘making links’ bit of the activity rather than focusing on getting it right.
• To extend this activity a little and assess their understanding, ask the students to devise a row of pictures of their own and give them to each other as a fresh challenge.
• Join in yourself and model your link making by thinking aloud.

*Match Them Up BRIAN PUT THIS IN STRATEGY

Offer students a set of cards that need to be matched up or linked in some way.

It might be:

• a set of pairs of cards like ‘It has been raining’ and ‘The river is flowing fast’ where the student is challenged to decide whether there Must be a connection between the two events, Could be a connection, or No possible connection;
• a problem to select a substance (metal, clay, wax, salt, ice, …) and a change (freezes, dissolves, melts, burns, …) and decide if the change is Reversible or Irreversible;
• a set of cards that students are required to match into pairs – it could be 5 graphs and 5 equations; 5 characters and 5 attitudes; 5 words and 5 definitions etc.

*Discuss making links

Gather together a really good assortment of shapes: 2D and 3D shapes and different sizes and colours. Using small hoops or different coloured paper circles ask students to take turns to sort the shapes by putting them in the hoops and explain their reasoning for sorting them this way. It should be possible to rearrange the shapes in several different ways as different students take a turn. This can help the students understand that there are often many different ways to link things together.

Extend the language of Making Links

Collect words that tell you how people learn to make links.

Relate link making to well-known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Chain reaction

Cause and effect

Seeing the wood and the trees

*Similarity and Difference

Find two images with both similarities and differences. Invite students to work in pairs to identify at least 5 of each, and then work as a four to decide the 3 most important similarities and differences.

Timings could be around 1 minute for the pair work, and 2 minutes for the work in fours.

This will also support the skills of noticing, collaborating, and distilling.

*Odd One Out

Identify four ‘things’ related to your own subject area – this could be 4 images, 4 words, 4 techniques, or anything else that links to your own subject and/or what students are currently learning about.

Invite them to identify the odd one out, and to explain why they think this.

When you can, construct lists where it is possible to justify that each of the items are, in fact, the odd one out.

*Visible Thinking Routine

Connect, Extend, Challenge

This routine helps students make connections between new ideas and prior knowledge. It also encourages them to take stock of ongoing questions, puzzles and difficulties as they reflect on what they are learning.

Connect: How are the ideas and information presented connected to what you already know?

Extend: What new ideas did you get that extended or pushed your thinking in new directions?

Challenge: What is still challenging you or confusing for you to get your mind round? What questions, wondering or puzzles do you now have?

The natural place to use this routine is after students have learned something new. For example: after exploring a work of art, a theory, a method, a piece of evidence. Try it as a reflection during a lesson, after a longer project, or when completing a unit of study. The routine works just as well with the whole class, small groups or individually.

This is one of many visible thinking routines to be found on the visible thinking website

*And or So

An activity to encourage students to make imaginative links between seemingly unconnected objects. Who can find the most novel / humorous / unexpected link? Are some objects not linked in any way at all?

Use to explore how most things can be linked together in some way, and how making the links helps us to remember things and maybe see things in new ways.

*The Mind’s Eye

• Introduce students to the idea of the mind’s eye: Talk about the fact that we all have 2 eyes which we use all the time but that everyone also has a third, hidden, mind’s eye. Talk about how we can use this secret third eye to imagine and create pictures and ideas inside our minds.
• Invite students to close their eyes and imagine they are using their third eye. Describe something in great detail and ask them to try and see it with their third eye.
• For example: Close your eyes tightly and imagine my alien. It has a large, round, green body with lots of arms and legs. On the top of the round, green body is a huge pink and purple head with spiky yellow hair and 4 great big blue eyes. It has long, pink fingers on its hands and short, purple toes on its big feet. When it walks along it makes a high squeaky sound and it smells just like fish and chips!
• You could ask students to draw their idea of the alien, concentrating on their ideas rather than an exact representation of your description.
• Ask students to imagine something for themselves- unprompted by you. Invite them to describe what they are imagining.
• Talk about what seems to happen in their mind when they imagine.
• Talk about when our ability to imagine can be useful.
• Ask, “When do you use your imagination?”

Guided Visualisation

Invite students to visualise, for example, a snowy mountain peak until the image fades – discuss how long this could be sustained.

Now visualise hovering over the mountain and exploring the terrain by helicopter – the experience will have lasted longer.

Now provide students with a guided visualisation of the mountain that triggers their imaginative faculties – discuss the features of this experience.

Enable students to identify the ways of triggering their own imaginations when provided with stimuli. Invite them into a city at night, or the alimentary canal, . . .

Stimulating the imagination

Use music to create atmosphere and stimulate imaginative thinking.

Provide varied, unexpected and ever-changing visual experiences — on whiteboards, classroom walls, in ideas banks, through web-links, etc.

Read vivid prose and poetry that captures details, moods and atmospheres.

*Capture ideas

Encourage students to brainstorm or mind-map and keep notebooks or Post-its of interesting ideas to feed their creativity. Do this collectively and individually.

Elect one student as ‘Plant of the Day’, whose job it is to suggest unlikely ideas.

Play the prediction game, emphasise mental rehearsal

Show video clips of e.g. rugby or football heroes preparing to kick a ball, as well as other sports and entertainment people rehearsing ahead of action.

Discuss what they are doing to ‘play the movie’ in their heads before they act.

Explore occasions when this could be useful in students’ own lives. Identify the triggers and habits required when anticipating the right action.

*Talk about how things might look, feel, sound.

Give students a familiar object – a pencil, hairbrush, scissors, toilet roll, cushion – whatever comes to hand.

Then pose the question: ‘What else could it be?’ or ‘What could this become’

Discuss and praise the most imaginative ideas.

What you are trying to develop in young learners is:

• An awareness of the power of imagination;
• The ability to use their imagination to picture how things might look, sound, feel or be;
• The willingness to talk imaginatively about situations, events, characters, etc.

Expand the vocabulary of imagining

Click to enlarge

Collect words that tell you how people learn to imagine.

Relate imagining to well-known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

In my mind’s eye

Thinking outside the box

 

*Extend imaginative thinking by telling stories

Provide a stem statement…

A man walks into a room with a suitcase in his hand…

Invite one student to carry it on. Each student continues from where the previous one left off.

Or . .

Create a scenario…There are no windows, water drips into a bucket, two people are seated back to back…what might be happening? What might happen next? Can you improvise the dialogue between the people?

*Trigger imagination with ‘What if …’ challenges

Provoke students to think ‘What if… we ran out of oil in 25 years… we lived in a two-dimensional world… we all lived for exactly 70 years… tennis balls were heavier… we had two moons…’

Encourage students to build collaborative spider diagrams that explore the possible ramifications of such eventualities. Extend the imagining in creative presentations using a variety of media.

Visible Thinking Routine

Creative Questions

Creative Questions is a visible thinking routine that encourages students to create interesting questions and then imaginatively mess around with them for a while in order to explore their creative possibilities:

Pick an everyday object or topic and brainstorm a list of questions about it.

Look over the list and transform some of the questions into questions that challenge the imagination. Do this by transforming questions along the lines of:

• What would it be like if…
• How would it be different if…
• Suppose that …
• What would change if …
• How would it look differently if …

Choose a question to imaginatively explore. Explore it by imaginatively playing out its possibilities. Do this by: Writing a story or essay, drawing a picture, creating a play or dialogue, inventing a scenario, conducting an imaginary interview, conducting a thought experiment . . . .

Reflect: What new ideas do you have about the topic, concept or object that you didn’t have before?

For more detail on Creative Questions, visit the visible thinking website

*Imagining through all of the senses . . .

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What has happened here? Good guy or bad? Can we see any colours? Hear any sounds? Imagine being there….

A quick way to activate the Imagination and explore how we use our senses to imagine.

What you are trying to achieve:

To support students to use their imaginations using all of their senses,

How might you use the technique?

• As a starter for creative writing
• As a prelude to reading a book – start with the B&W copy of the dust jacket.
• To build empathy
• To scaffold the use of all of the senses
• To trigger the imagination

*Learn from expert interviews

Set up interviews with people who can do something really well. Develop a series of questions with students to uncover exactly what the ‘expert’ does. E.g. What sort of preparation is there? What resources are needed? What does it feel like? What sort of thinking, habits of mind, values or beliefs are helpful?

Create a checklist of key aspects to imitate.

Extend with students in the role of real or imaginary expert, encouraging them to assess their own subconscious knowledge of how to succeed.

*Use display to share key learning

Set aside an area of display where students are asked to share any strategies or ‘top tips’ that they have found particularly helpful in their own learning.

Set up a Helpful Habit board for tips from students to others about habits which might help them to achieve their long or short term goals. For those offering the ‘top tip’ it is a distilling activity, but the resulting gallery of ‘top tips’ invites students to adopt the successful strategies of others.

Explore how things can be used

Collect a pile of unrelated objects, or ask students to bring in one object each and mix them in random groupings – eg a copper tube, piece of cloth, felt pen, blu-tack.

Challenge students to make as many things as they can from the objects, using all of them but nothing else.

Discuss examples of particularly imaginative / effective use of materials and whether these ideas can be used in another context.

*Discuss capitalising

Use language to encourage thinking about capitalising. Build these into your learning language:

• Have you thought about what would help you to do this?
• Just think about all the things we have in the classroom that might be useful.
• How else might you do it?
• What is everyone else doing?
• Is there anything else that you could use?
• There may be other people who could help you with this.
• Who do you think might know something about this?
• Where could you find out more about this?
• Which of the things you used did you find the most useful?
• If you had to do this again is there anything else you might use to help you?

Extend the language of capitalising

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Collect words and phrases that tell you how people learn to Capitalise on what is around them.

Relate capitalising to well-known sayings

There is more than one way to skin a cat

Making the best of a bad job

A bit ‘Heath Robinson’

*How might we tackle this?

At the beginning of a session talk with the students about the strategies and things they might use to help them with their learning.

Talk to students frequently about where they might find information or help.

Offer students a rich and varied curriculum so that they can start to appreciate that they are learning from lots of different sources using a range of learning strategies.

How many uses for . . . .

To get students thinking about how resources can be used in many different ways.

Visible Thinking Routine

How will you find that out ? This routine helps students to take stock of what they need to find out and to consider the strategies they might use to achieve it. It encourages metacognitive thinking about which learning strategy is most likely to lead to success. The routine has two questions:

• What do you need to know / understand?
• Which strategy is most likely to be successful?

The natural place to use this routine is when students understand what they need to find out but before they make a choice from a range of learning strategies.

*Icarus All-Sorts

• Show a painting or picture or passage of text or diagram.
• Don’t give its title.
• Ask students to examine the picture/passage/score etc, and notice and make observations.
• Accept observations from paired discussion – encourage curiosity – take all offers at face value.
• Ask class to consider “What could we find out about this picture/object etc. ?”
• “Where could we find out about it?”
• Capitalise on using resources available in the school (internet, library, the relevant department …)
• Develop by offering the artist’s/composer’s name and encourage further research possibilities.
• Offer, or allow the discovery of, the object’s title. Ask: “What does the title mean? How can we find out …?”
• As suggestions and realisations occur prompt curiosity about subject (e.g. Icarus – as the myth emerges)
• [Encourage enquiries into what the myth has to do with the picture … and what the artist may have had in mind.]
• Distil all of the resources – from memory, to other people, to books and the internet, that have been used or could be used to fully explore what challenges are offered by the picture/diagram/score.
• Go on to discuss… internal capacities students drew and the external resources they turned to?
• How were external resources used – by being selective – skimming for information – going deeper to find out more – linking ideas and information?
• What are the first things to do when set a challenge that requires you to capitalise on all possible sources? We have an image, but we do not know what it is called. Where might we look? How might we find out?

The activity leads to a recognition of the range of resources that can be called upon when seeking to acquire new knowledge, understand the unfamiliar and respond to challenges.

*Give time to think… and share ideas

An idea to get students thinking about collaboration.

In pairs – Think of a time when each of you has learned something with others. Take turns to interview each other about;

• Where you were.
• How many people were in the group.
• What you learned from them.
• How the group worked out the best way forward
• What you were trying to do.
• What you did to add to the group’s learning
• Who you were with.
• Whether you were able to pick up any good learning habits.
• Where the group’s best idea came from.

Introduce games that require collaborative behaviours

Give students challenges which can only be achieved through collaboration. For example; Ask a group of 10 to stand on a bench and put themselves in order of height without anyone stepping off and on again. They will have to work cooperatively as a team to meet this challenge.

An activity that enables students to recognise that working collaboratively means everyone having a role in success.

*Use activities to show everyone has a role in success

Four teams of seven. Explain: “Create a machine with moving parts using yourselves. Each of you is to be part of the machine or something that the machine makes. When you have made it work you will demonstrate it working to the class. You have 10 minutes. The class will try and guess what your machine makes.”

Debrief...how the group work together. Whether a leader emerged? How decisions were made about what the machine should make. How it was decided when the machine would start. How machine parts were assigned. What different people contributed to the team effort? What has been learned about working in a team?

*Explore and use team roles

click to enlarge

Open up a conversation about different team roles with students.
Introduce students to a few essential team roles, for example.

• Coordinator
• Resource gatherer
• Finisher

Many students will, initially, have a preferred role, but over time encourage them to try out other roles to broaden their team working skills. Experiment with allowing individuals to choose their own roles, assigning roles yourself, and allowing teams to assign roles.

Getting ready for teamwork

Try a sharing activity

An activity that requires students to share what they have in order to finish the task. Use this also to encourage them to think about what they are trying to achieve.

• Resource
• Task explanation

Use harder jigsaws, or groups of information, with older students.

*Building on the answers of others

Have students work in pairs for 5 minutes to begin a draft answer to a tricky question. Once time is up, partially completed answers are passed to the next pair to be built upon, refined or redrafted, and the process is repeated as many times as necessary. At the end of the process, answers are returned to the original pair who are tasked with using all of the suggestions to draft their final polished version of the answer.

For more on this, read The Teacher’s Toolkit (Paul Ginnis), pages 139/140

35 Pass the Buck

*Visible Thinking Routine

Think, Pair, Share

Offer students a problem or question which is more substantial than simple recall.

Think – Allow plenty of individual think time to engage with the issue.

Pair – Students then try out their ideas, (discuss, clarify, challenge) with a ‘Learning Partner’.

Share – The pair share with another pair, and subsequently with the whole class to arrive at a range of possible answers. They come to know and shape their views by collaborating with others.

Use as a simple strategy to prepare students for working together in teams, having first thought it through for themselves (Think), checked their ideas out with a trusted friend (Pair), before moving on to contributing to a group (Share).

At each point students are exposed to the views of others which encourages them to revise and refine their initial thinking.

Stranded!

This take on a classic exercise encourages students to listen, share ideas and, hopefully, come to an agreed solution.

Make pupils aware of listening

*Who said “Sausages”?

An activity to encourage good listening skills.

• First, try a quiet activity to help students focus on the physical sensation of intent listening.
• Ask the students to move round to sit in a circle.
• Ask them to close their eyes and clasp their hands gently on their laps.
• Tell them you are going to chime an Indian bell and that they should listen as carefully as they can and only open their eyes when they can no longer hear the sound.
• Ask them to be very, very quiet so that they do not disturb each other.
• Now move on to a simple listening game.
• Students remain sitting in their circle. They take turns to sit blindfolded in the middle.
• Point to a student in the circle who then says “sausages.” The blindfolded student has to guess whose voice it is.
• As they become more familiar with this game, they will deliberately alter their voices and it can be a lot of fun.
• Regularly remind them of the skills they are using and reward really good listening!
• After playing this game, you may be able to agree some good listening tips with the students.

Offer ways to focus on listening

What Can You Hear?

A short listening activity to help students to recognise that attentive listening enables them to centre themselves, focus on what is really happening and take possession of themselves as learners.

Coaching notes

Listening for Inference and Understanding

Explore sentences spoken with different stress, tone, pace and emphasis, to yield different meanings.

For example:

• ‘I don’t know why you didn’t go.’
• ‘How can I answer that?’

*Become aware of the effect of sounds

Silent Film Show

Play a two-minute scene from a film, without the visuals.

Listen for clues in sound effects, voices, soundtrack.

Predict / speculate what is happening.

Show the film and attend to the way in which sounds contributed to meaning.

*Discuss listening and tone of voice.

Model different tones of voice. Start with ones that are easy to recognise and understand, like a cross voice or a scared one. Gradually build up this repertoire of voices and use them in stories and songs. Talk about when we use these different tones of voice and why. Ask the children to listen carefully to the way people talk at different times and spot their feelings.

Expand further by inventing voices that you can use for different activities: imagine the voices for different toys or puppets you may have in the classroom; count like robots of a day; recite a rhyme like the big bad wolf. The children will have fun inventing a wide and wonderful assortment of voices whilst refining their listening skills.

Expand the listening vocabulary

Collect words that tell you how people learn to listen attentively.

Relate listening to well-known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Being all ears

Listening between the lines

*Centring Activities

Use centring activities at the beginning of lessons to focus minds before the learning begins. Play music and ask students to focus on the associations that it conjures about places, people, moods and atmospheres.

Something wrong here?

Read a sentence or statement without expression, then read it again, once, with changes; no further repetition. Students have to spot the changes.

Listen for inference and understanding

Play recordings of, for example:

• One end of a telephone conversation: Who’s on the other end… What’s being said… How do you know?
• A dialogue: What’s just happened… What happens next… How do you know?
• Recognisable people: Who are they… What’s the evidence… How do you know?
• Unknown individuals talking: What do you know… Who could they be… How do you know?

*Visible Thinking Routine

What did (s)he say ?

This routine helps students to listen carefully for and to understand important factual information. It also encourages them to distil key points as they listen for key messages. The routine has two questions:

• What are the big ideas?
• What are the big ideas in your own words?

The natural place to use this routine is before students are about to listen to something – it could be a video, a You Tube clip, or even teacher exposition. The routine works just as well with small groups or individually.

*Listen and Draw

A short and enjoyable task that can only be achieved through careful explanation and attentive listening. Use it to stimulate a discussion about jumping to conclusions based on partial information.