A simple rule yields results

A big part of the curriculum at our school is Learning to Learn, and I have been involved in teaching this now for a number of years.  This year our school launched it's TDU (trans-disciplinary units) course.  The course is project based, with students identifying and choosing questions to research.  They then gather analyse and evaluate information, the idea being that at times they are required to think like a scientist, musician, researcher at different times (hence the trans-disciplinary).  Students then present back their findings to help try and answer the big question framing that unit.

In the first term students had a practice project and one of the key things that I picked up upon was the way that they interacted (or didn't) with written materials as part of their research.  On the whole students would read sources carefully, but I was not always sure that they had constructed any meaning from what they had read.  The most common approach was to pick out the most important bits and copy them into their journal, thus comprehension was of mixed levels and very few students were able to synthesise their findings effectively.  With this being a practice project I allowed students to make mistakes, the idea being to be more proactive in the debrief to help students learn from these mistakes.

With this in mind I asked students to think of ways that they can interact with text, and many of them picked up on the use of thinking tools in the previous years' Learning to Learn course.  When I asked why they hadn't used thinking tools in TDU they said 'because it's not Learning to Learn.'

This answer not only gave me an insight into what is now a major target for our school, the movement from a discreet learning to learn course, to a learning to learn approach in all subjects, but also serendiptuously an opportunity to share with the class a session I had taken with GCSE students preparing revision programs.

As part of the session we introduced our GCSE cohort of students to Hyerle's thinking maps, and gave them opportunities to use them in fun situations such as 'bubble map a chav'.  As you can see from the picture below the use of thinking tools to revise collaboratively (which regrettably remains mostly interacting with text) was received very positively.

As a class we agreed to follow a rule that our Science department already use in their enquiries in years 7 & 8:

Reading -->  Thinking Tool --> Notes

This term my students have been looking at "How great is Great Britain?"  And to help them get to grips with using thinking tools to research, I suggested a line of enquiry "Are we America's lapdog?" and some resources that they might use such as George Michael's shoot the dog music video.

The resulting notes in student planners were consistently better that what had been recorded in the previous project, both in terms of the quality of the notes and the demonstration of understanding and meaning:

On reflection, some students had difficulties in choosing appropriate thinking tools and so as a result the next lesson I ran pretty much the same session I had taken with the GCSE cohort on Hyerle's thinking tools.  Looking back I should have done this first as for some of the weaker students having a smaller set of tools from which to draw upon has proved to be a much more effective approach, rather than asking them to remember tools that they had used in Learning to Learn over a year ago.

That said, my students are now into the "How Great is Great Britain?" project researching their own lines of enquiry and now use thinking tools as a force of habit.  We will see how it goes in terms of synthesising their findings to make a whole personal meaning later in the project.