Developing higher order thinking skills with your learners
Creativity thinking and evaluative skills are key to my students success. Without exam skills that demonstrate higher order thinking skills they cannot achieve a AB grade in the exam. I am an advocate for equipping my own learners with what they will need, not only for exam success but also for life after education- this means focusing on thinking skills and developing them not just for performance in exams, but also their progression as a learner in FE, and beyond.
With that in mind, I trailed a new idea this week where students made Question Cubes. These were made from a box net, and they were asked to generate 6 questions, one for each face of the box. Question led learning can be very powerful, and a good way of demonstrating pre-structural learning and thus progress in a lesson. The students engagement in their own learning is heightened when the lesson is led by questions generated by them rather than simply posed by a teacher. It allows them to demonstrate their understanding of key terms, as well as make links with learning from previous lessons.
The students were encouraged to write higher order thinking questions, so they were framing their work with ‘evaluate’ or ‘analyse’ so they when asking the questions they could write answers that did more than simply demonstrate knowledge or understanding. As a starter they wrote questions on each face of the cube. The questions were based on the learning from the previous lesson, and will be used next lesson as part of a student led plenary. I also thought that they could be used by placing the blocks on top of each other, as this would create a 3D questioning prompt, which learners could use in a meaningful way to inform essay writing or planning.
Another activity which I tried this week was creating evaluative bunting. During the previous lesson I had used SOLO taxonomy so that my learners had multi-structural knowledge on theorists on social deprivation and educational attainment. I wanted them to be able to apply this knowledge in an evaluative way, so I asked the class in groups to draw the theorists ideas on bunting- one theorist per flag, the focus of course was not on the art work and there were stickmen a plenty! They then swapped work with another group and tried to label the drawings with the correct theorists. I encouraged them to write in each other’s work, and to be comfortable with making mistakes- it was an excellent opportunity to promote some positive learner characteristics about celebrating effort and risk taking. They were then tasked with creating the physical bunting- an were asked to string in so that each flag had an evaluative relationship with the ones next to it. This was much enjoyed, and my classroom is now festooned with higher order bunting. In addition to that my learners are now comfortable talking about higher order thinking skills, and being creative in order to advance their academic skills.
To consolidate this activity the class used hexagons and drew on relational links which they flag also created. They did his individually but drew on the work done in groups. I should also mention that the class were also live tweeting their learning, which is have written about before and is an excellent tool if you have the confidence with the technology.
Improving our learners higher order thinking skills is really important. Not just for the exam but for their ability to be an effective learner in the long term. Making these evaluation part of a physical process has been successful for me- would be very interested to hear if you have tried anything similar. How else can we improve these skills?