Thinking, cogitating, pondering, dreaming…eureka!

First class in today for the Visible Thinking project. The plan is to get them to think about “thinking” by asking them to come up with as many words as they can that involve thinking.

They sat in groups, and I passed out sheets of paper and post-its, explained the work and away they went. To begin with, they were very confused about what was required, so myself and the class teacher, SM, wandered around starting to give them ideas about situations when they might have to use their brain e.g. what went through your mind on the day of your English exam?

I then asked all the groups to put their post-its on the board, with the intention of letting them organise them under different headings. Unfortunately, there were far too many of them, and they were far too big for this to work. Only about a third of the class were able to even see the board. It also took ages because of the number of words they had come up with, and the post-its kept falling off

To try to move on, the class teacher and I removed the juvenile comments on the post-its and then I  removed a few of the clumps off the board and read them out, asking the class for their opinions about whether the words belonged together or not and this did have some success. Examples of their discussions included:

• Could words to do with reading be included e.g. skimming, scanning. They decided against the idea
• Is Eureka! a thinking word?  This remained an open discussion

In addition, with such a big class, it was difficult to let everyone speak who wanted to, and easy to miss those who were being rather quieter. Even using cooperative learning techniques to have one person report back per group, there were still too many wanting to share. It was fantastic to see them so enthusiastic, but I need to find an alternative methodology.

At the end of the lesson, I explained that the next stage of this exercise was to start them thinking about a topic for debate, and that the topic was Compulsory PE. There was an immediate reaction to this, with pupils keen to share their opinions, but I asked them to think about the idea for the next class.

I also explained that if time allowed, we would actually have the debate and have a debate between the classes and that really got the enthusiasm flowing. I was delighted by their response: they were already coming up with ideas, things they had heard from people, asking if they could talk to the PE department. It was fantastic.

So overall, I think it was a valuable exercise, although I have reservations about some elements of the lesson, mostly due to my inexperience with this, and I need to re-evaluate how they work:

• how to get everyone involved in the analysis of the topics, allowing for numbers, heights, and juvenile behaviour
• how on earth I’m going to have time to write up all these thinking words, never mind pin them up, and this is from just one class!