Welcome to our thinking skills blog. Here you will find our thoughts, reflections and most importantly actions relating to thinking skills at Cockton Hill Infants’.
Let us tell you about a journey so far…
For around a year we have been encouraging the children to have a growth mindset in their attitudes towards learning. This has proved fruitful and staff have noticed a greater resilience in children when faced with challenges. Children are also beginning to celebrate their mistakes as learning opportunities.
However, we want to take this further. To build on our work regarding growth mindset, the children will be participating in weekly sessions designed to encourage growth mindset behaviours and attitudes in addition to emotional intelligence. Much of this will be centred around team work and problem solving activities.
We are also developing other curriculum areas by incorporating “thinking hats” into our lessons. Thinking hats as a strategy encourages deeper thinking and understanding of the topics we teach. Throughout the year the children will be introduced to the various hats and then will have chance to utilise them within a variety of sessions.
Finally, the school staff have recently received training concerned with “three storey intellects”. This will enable staff to use questioning to draw out higher order thinking from the children. We have recently changed our planning documents to ensure the concept of three storey intellects is considered during lesson planning.
