A Thinking Skills course for Y7 and Y8 students
This is a two-year course in thinking skills that I devised in my last years as a teacher in a comprehensive school. The aims of the course, as laid out in the Year 7 teacher’s guide were:
- to teach students how their own brains work, and how to make the most of their brains,
- to equip students with a basic set of tools for Thinking and Learning...such as VAK learning styles, Cluster Maps, Peer reviewing and teaching,
- to build up a Learning Community, where students value and support each other, as teachers and learners, and also
- to support students’ learning in their mainstream subjects.
I drew on other published resources, and tried to adapt the material to timetabled lessons, and to a definite course. So, there are homeworks, a progress record, a learning diary, revision, and end-of-year exams – just the sort of things you would expect for a “normal” academic course, like science. There are notes for each lesson – probably more than was needed, but then I was devising things for the first time, and trying to explain the rationale for a team of teachers. The material is all in WORD 2003 format.
Year 7
The Y7 course is divided into 3 units:
- Unit 1 – “My brain and my learning”
- Unit 2 – “VAK and learning skills”
- Unit 3 – “Myself as a teacher and a learner”
Within each unit the lessons are numbered consecutively. So, “07-1-4” refers to Y7, unit 1, lesson number 4, and it has a teacher’s guide, a PowerPoint presentation and a student worksheet.
Resources for individual student use are indicated. The teacher’s guides should make clear what resources need to be prepared for each lesson, such as worksheets, cards, OHTs, resources on the school’s computer network, and so on.
Year 8
The Y8 course is divided into 2 units:
- Unit 1 – “Myself as a teacher and a learner”
- Unit 2 – “My thinking and learning skills”
The resources are named as for Y7.
The Y8 course ends with an exam.
The last document summarises some of the feedback from the first student cohort.
Educational subjects and fashions come and go, but there will always be thinking and learning, using neural networks that have been around for several hundred million years.
Feel free to use this material in any way you wish. I hope you find at least some of it interesting and useful, and I wish you well.
Any constructive feedback is welcome, and I can be reached via the email address below.
Andrew McNeil
andrewmcneil48<at>gmail<dot>com
October 2021