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The rationale of thinking skills is to make explicit
the components of thinking, allowing children to control and extend these
skills to go beyond the specific present information to generalize to
other situations, academic and real life.
Because humans use many different symbolic systems to capture and communicate
experience, we all have different styles (verbal, pictures, images, actions
or "doing" etc) of acquiring and manipulating information in the mind.
Knowing this allows the learner to gain a self-control and mastery over
learning. The proactive learner is one who can use his or her knowledge
of their own learning style to select the learning experience in the way
that suits their particular combination of strengths and weaknesses.
In contrast to this meta-cognitive state, the normal state of early learning
is a bombardment of the senses by stimuli of which little sense can be
made. It is not gathered systematically or labelled efficiently and it
becomes difficult to consider more than one thing at a time. But usually
mother is there to help categorise the world and pick out patterns of
meaning so that young children are not victims of overwhelming information.
Schools can't always continue this development of the higher order reasoning
skills of hypothesizing, inferring, deduction, induction and insight,
despite the National Curriculum directives of promoting observing, describing,
investigating, comparing, classifying, discriminating, analyzing, evaluating
and seeing things from multiple perspectives. The lower level memorizing,
translating and calculating skills of the 3 R's are too necessary for
examination results.
As well, these Key stage 1 and 2 skills are usually taught as part of
a subject, consequently some children can't consciously reconstruct the
routes to a solution and thereby transfer the thinking skill from one
situation to another. The value of a stand alone thinking skill programme
is that the separate concepts of comparison, systematic search, hypothesizing,
modeling, making analogies, generalization and so on are taught explicitly
so that the child has a problem solving repertoire available for new learning
and the development of creativity.
Schools that have introduced thinking skills programmers have generally
found their pass rates in National Examinations to be improved as well
as a higher level of grades achieved.
For children with uneven learning, such as sequencing, spatial or verbal
weaknesses, these thinking skills help to bridge the gaps in their cognition.
There are some dozens of thinking skills programmes, most based on the
original Instrumental Enrichment Programme developed by Professor Raven
Feuerstein out of his experience in integrating oriental Jewish children
into the European type education system of the new Israel after the Second
World War. This was a spectacular success and many countries still use
it. There is an Instrumental Enrichment center in London, but this programme
is complex and needs specialist teaching. A U.K. developed programme based
on the I.E. programme is "The Somerset Thinking Skills Programe, published
by Blagg and Ballinger, in Taunton, Somerset. For under 7 years olds the
"Top Ten Thinking Tactics", published by Questions, is similar. Other
Popularized ones are Edward de Bono's various lateral thinking strategies
and the CORT programme.
Children with specific learning difficulties are likely to benefit tremendously
from thinking skills. Dyslexics are often visual thinkers, not the sequential,
logical thinkers that plan written expression and examination techniques
competently. Dyspraxics, usually are lacking the visuo/spatial and common
sense skills that make them popular on the sports field, the playground,
or in the music, art or Information Technology room. Both can benefit
from the spread of skills in The SSTS or Questions programme, taking what
they need and continuing practice on others.
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