New Free Handouts and Posters!

We've posted a number of free handouts and posters for download here. Go to bottom of page to download classroom posters, guiding questions, progressive skills and more. Adding visual cues and reminders in your classroom, school hallways, libraries, etc. is a great way to encourage Patterns of Thinking skills in your school.

Knowledge evolves...again!

Once again, we can see knowledge evolving (evolutionary epistemology) all around us. Yesterday's CNN headline and Time Magazine featured new thinking about what really happened to the dinosaurs...Maybe an asteroid didn't kill the dinosaurs.

For our purposes in education, the question is, if knowledge is constantly changing, then the valid knowledge of today will differ from that of tomorrow. Some important questions result from this fact:

• How is knowledge changing? By what processes?
• What can we teach our children today that will still be of value tomorrow?

What do you think?

Introducing ThinkBlocks to Students on the Autistic Spectrum

"How best can I communicate with this child so that I can help them to learn?" This is a question often asked by teachers and educators of students on the Autistic Spectrum. Initial exploratory research and field experience is suggestive that ThinkBlocks and the Patterns of Thinking Method may be communicatively compatible with those on the spectrum, due to their processing style and learning profile of strengths and weaknesses. All well and good but how do we approach introducing the Blocks, which are designed to represent any concept at any level, given the potential for rigidity of thought with these students? This issue was highlighted by a special ed teacher who is using the Blocks and Method with some of her students with HFA.

So lets look at one possibility of how to first introduce or indeed to re-introduce the Blocks with these students. Perhaps the first step would be leave the blocks out and let the student play with them. Encourage them to write on them but let them direct this completely. So you are looking at the interaction as: child-active; adult-passive. You provide the student with the resources and materials but the emphasis is on free-play and exploration with the child exercising free unstructured choice. As they play with the blocks, wipe some scribbles, words or drawings off and put other ones on they may begin to make the connection that these blocks are what they want them to be in that moment. If the student is high-functioning then we can hypothesise that this connection will occour. With time you can then move from: child-active; adult-passive to child-active; adult-active where you are encouraging them to explore and experiment and where the learning becomes interactive and you being to scaffold the learning.

Knowing each student's profile of individual strengths and difficulties may enable these suggestions to be expanded, developed and perhaps changed altogether. Leaving the Blocks out for free-play and exploration and watching what unfolds may not only provide you with the clues needed to know how to best establish how you can more effectively communicate with your student but also how to create a system or space whereby the student can more effectively communicate their 'content' to you.

Can't Say Enough about Transfer!

Students who use the four patterns of thinking as they learn new content knowledge improve their ability to transfer. In other words, they can apply something they learn over here to something that shows up over there.

A word on transfer. Actually, Derek has a pet phrase for transfer, not just a word. He calls it the "Holy Grail of education." Transfer is the thing. You can leave your horse in the stable and let the suit of armor stand decoratively in the corner, but as a teacher and learner, go after transfer with all your heart and soul.

Why is transfer so crucial? Students can't learn everything in school. Even if they could, teachers couldn't teach them everything. The good news is that these limitations affect only what we choose to do in the classroom. They don't limit what students can deal with out in the world--whether in academia, the workaday world, or their personal lives. If they can transfer anything we teach them to anything they encounter, they're set for life.

Transfer isn't that mysterious or elusive. All learning involves transfer because we use what we already know to learn any new concept or procedure. Anytime teachers help students access prior knowledge, they're engaging with the mechanism of transfer.

We culled and paraphrased the following tips on transfer from How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, by the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (CBASSE), 1999. See chapter 3, “Learning and Transfer,” pages 39 - 66.


What promotes transfer?

Helping students learn deeply:

• give them/have them take time to learn
• make sure they come to a true understanding (Memorizing facts does not promote transfer!)
• have them practice/work with new knowledge
• give them/have them get feedback on knowledge gained (so they can see for themselves what they've attained)

Getting out of overly contextualized knowledge:

• teach things in multiple rather than single contexts (They'll see how something applies in more than one instance and be able to apply it again with something novel.)
• give them a similar case once they've understood something in one instance
• stretch their understanding with what-if problem solving ("What if we saw this again but with frogs?" "What if we changed this one piece--then how would the whole thing work?")

Giving students abstract representations of knowledge:

• offer them a general principle or rule or formula behind the specific knowledge they're working with
• give them contrasting cases (They'll learn linear function better when you put it next to non-linear functions.)

In their words:
Here's a clip from p. 51 of How People Learn, cited above:

"Students who were trained on specific task components without being provided with the principles underlying the problems could do the specific tasks well, but they could not apply their learning to new problems. By contrast, the students who received abstract training [learned the general principle behind the specific problem] showed transfer to new problems that involved analogous mathematical relations."

In our words:

This boils down to content versus structure. When students learn specific content, they have a piece of knowledge that they can't transfer well to anything else. When students learn the structure of an idea, they can take that structure and apply it to new content.

The patterns of thinking give us the structure of all knowledge. We can apply them again and again to any content. Once we grasp how we're making distinctions, organizing part-whole systems, recognizing relationships, and taking perspectives with any idea we're working with, we're equipped to approach any new idea with confidence. Content can change drastically from one idea to the next; these four patterns--the structure--will remain the same.

For example, the structure of an analogy remains the same no matter the content. The first analogy - "Hand is to glove as foot is to shoe"
- has the same shape as the second - "Bird is to nest as people are to homes."Because students can separate the structure of the idea

from the content of the idea,
they can use this structure to organize new knowledge. That's transfer!

Pond Life and Thinking Skills in one Kindergarten Class

Last week, I had a chance to watch one of our Thinking Teachers in action. Her Kindergarten students had been studying frogs, tadpoles, and ponds for several weeks, and their teacher used the Patterns of Thinking to extend their learning.

The class created murals of the pond that included all of the parts of this ecological system.

The teacher used a ThinkBlock to represent each of the parts of the pond. As the class arranged the ThinkBlocks around the edge of their pond mural, they faced the reflective faces toward the mural. The teacher had the students act like a frog (fun!) and think like a frog, asking questions like "What does the pond look like from a frog's point of view? Why do you come to the pond? Why is it important to you?"

The students discussed all of the things that a frog might think about a pond ("a place to lay eggs," "I can swim there," "I hibernate in the bottom during the winter"). They came up with some amazing ideas, but the students were also interested in the many relationships among the pond-dwellers. Who eats whom? What's food for the frog? What's food for the fish? What's food for the lily pads?

A really fun sorting activity could have helped them answer these questions. From a turtle's point of view, what is food? What is NOT food? From a frog's point of view, what is food?
What is NOT food?

Yes, they're learning more about pond life. At the same time, students learn that the boundaries we draw depend on our point of view. The line between what's in and not in is always shifting. Or phrased another way: Distinctions depend on perspective.

If the students had only generated this many animals in the pond, the duck would have gone hungry.

There haven't been any starving ducks in the news, and thankfully the students realized that their pond should also include aquatic plants. And they also found out that ducks eat some fish after all.

By modeling the relationships among members of this ecological community, students could easily see when they are leaving out important pieces. For example, what is food to the aquatic plants?

Stay tuned for a video recap of this cool lesson. And if you're doing something similar in your class, feel free to use these images (PDF) that we made. Just print the pages, cut them out, and stick them on large ThinkBlocks!

Thinking Skills in Every Lesson, ThinkBlocks not required

During workshops, one thing that some teachers struggle with is how to use ThinkBlocks. "Can't I teach thinking skills without those?" they ask. Although there are some real benefits to using tactile manipulatives (a topic for a future post), the answer is a resounding "YES!"

The goal isn't to have students graduate from school as adept ThinkBlocks users. No, they'll need to be adept thinkers, builders of ideas. So it's great to see educators using the Patterns of Thinking sans ThinkBlocks. On a recent visit to Fairfax County Public Schools, I saw just that when one of their resource teachers wowed us with a lesson plan her team had put together.

Cindy, a Resource Teacher in the district's Office of Preschool - 6 Instruction and Library Information Services, shared these materials with us. Here is a Topic Organizer (PDF) they used during a unit on natural resources. Students make distinctions between trash and not trash. They're also looking at trash from multiple points of view: the trash collector, the playground, a park.It's great to see the Patterns of Thinking woven so seamlessly into the unit. The teacher uses the same strategies that they used in the past: K-W-L, Morning Greetings, Field Trips, Big Books etc. And differentiation is there. Teaching thinking skills doesn't mean pitching everything else out the window, only making the thinking explicit. This leads to metacognition and transfer.

It's a great topic organizer, and the Cindy clearly understands the universality of the Patterns of Thinking. Thinking skills can and should be taught in any subject, any grade.

Blogroll: Assessing Thinking Skills

A recent workshop about assessing thinking skills is generating quite a buzz on our blogroll. Our friends over at Elementary, My Dear, or Far from It wrote about it in a recent post.

While learning about the "groundbreaking progress report," the author thought back to a former student who would have benefited from this assessment:

"We talked a little on Saturday about students who would be successful in the patterns of thinking but not in the traditional content areas. I immediately thought of a student of mine from 5 years ago. He had a learning disability and was almost completely unable to decode text. As a result, he was convinced he was stupid. However, when I read a book aloud his comments and questions were the most insightful in our class. I'm not sure if it was his learning disability or his lack of confidence that made school so difficult for him, but I am sure that he deserved better. I think if he had been able to see his strengths on a progress report like this one it would have made a world of difference for him."

That's an interesting thought, EMDFFI, and one to hang onto as your colleagues start using this method of assessment. Will it foster thinking and learning in all students?

The comments are worth a read, too. One reader is looking for to the conversations this assessment will inevitably start between educators, students, and parents:

"It is so exciting that you are using the Patterns of Thinking in this progress report. This is so smart. Even if the actual progress report doesn't work out exactly as you hope, the talk around it has got to be amazing and making huge impacts on assessment and parent communication."

In case you're just joining us, here is our post about the assessment workshop and the original News article.

Thinking Scientifically about Plants

Your students are starting a unit on plant growth and life cycles. Of course, they're planting seeds in paper cups and watering them every day. Maybe you've plowed up a patch of ground outside your window and planted a small garden. What could you do to help students think scientifically about these experiences?

This activity was developed for children in elementary school to help increase understanding of the scientific method and a curriculum module involving plants and plant growth. At the same time the kids learn about plants, they are also learning scientific thinking, as well as deeper thinking skills that are essential for the 21st Century.

Step 1: (Note: You don't have to use pre-made ThinkTiles, but they are good for smaller children if you don't want them to be encumbered with writing on the blocks. If you don't want to use ThinkTiles, simply use the dry erase marker directly on the ThinkBlocks).

Take the ThinkTile kit developed for this activity and lay them onto the table.


Step 2: Separate out the 6 tiles associated with the scientific method (scientific method, Observe, Question, Learn More, Experiment, Create Meaning, Tell People). Place the scientific method tile onto a large ThinkBlock. Place the remaining 5 onto Medium ThinkBlocks and place them inside the large ThinkBlock. We will use this system of concepts later in the exercise and it will be important for your students to actively "pull" each part of the scientific method out of the large block.

Step 3: With the remaining tiles on the table, ask your students to look at the concepts and tell you anything they know about any or all of the concepts. For example, you might prompt them with, "Do you know any of these?" or "Where have you seen them?" As they share their knowledge, they will invariably come across gaps in their knowledge. Have them note these gaps or questions (they could write them down or each student could have an L block where they add questions they have on M blocks).


Step 4: Have each student choose a question they would like to explore about these concepts. You might encourage them to look at two Tiles in the pile and ask, "What's the relationship between X and Y?" Or, "How are X and Y similar or different?" Because science is often the process of understanding relationships between things, we will use a standard relationship between two items in this example, but your children could use any question of interest.


Step 5: Have the children put their two chosen concept tiles onto two L blocks. Write a question mark in between to represent the relationship. Replace the question mark with a Medium ThinkBlock with a question mark on it. this helps your children to see that they can take implicit relationships and make them into explicit ones.

Becomes

Step 6: Have your children set their "relationship barbell" aside. Take the scientific method block and show them it. Have them pull out the parts and think about each one. Tell them that there is an order to the process. See if they can find the order (or skip this and do it for them).

You may also want to take this part of the activity further and explore the parts of these parts. Ask them to think about examples and non-examples of each of the steps in the scientific method. Place small blocks in each medium as they identify these examples and non-examples.


Step 7: Now take the medium ThinkBlocks out of the scientific method and place them in a circle (in order -clockwise) around the child's "barbell relationship". Have them point the reflective sticker at the barbell to represent looking at the relationship they are curious about from the view of each of the parts of the scientific method. Each perspective will help them to identify and answer questions.

How would I observe? What would I observe?
What questions do I have about this relationship?
Where could I learn more about this relationship?
How could I design and conduct an experiment?
What kinds of data will I need to gather to make the case?
Who do I want to tell about my findings?


Step 8: It is important that you give your students time to reflect on how their thinking has been an important part of the process. Making this explicit will help them to value and be aware of how thinking plays a role in their lives. As students reflect on how the Patterns of Thinking helped them frame their research question, they are practicing metacognitive skills that will increase transfer.

Explain to them that, ""You've thought it through, now its time to go and do" or "Well begun is half done." Now that students have build a cognitive structure of their research question, it’s time to execute their plan. There are many remarkable and powerful experiential ways they take this next step.

Time magazine Says: 21st Century Skills Need 21st Century Standards

I came across a blog that referenced this Time Magazine article: it was a fascinating look into the possible future of educational standards in America. Teaching students to think is only part of the solution; we also need to asses their thinking skills. The Time Magazine article emphasizes the need for universal "21st century standards" in American education. This is particularly exciting because of work we've been part of to create a pilot program designed to include thinking skills assessment on reports cards.

In the News: Assessing Thinking Skills and Teachers become Intermediate users of Patterns of Thinking

We just posted two items to the News section of the website.

1. Assessing Thinking Skills - In an exciting project, a large school district will pilot test a new report card next year that measures students' development of thinking skills.
   
   
2. Teachers become Intermediate users of Patterns of Thinking - After nearly a year of infusing thinking skills in their standards-based curricula, this group of educators came together to share best practices. Were you there?

The next set of in-service days in Fairfax, VA will be next week, April 27-May 1.

And I'll be visiting many classrooms in the next few weeks to observe thinking skills in action. Using the Patterns of Thinking in your classroom? Shoot me a line at gregw@thinkandthrive.com, and I'm there to see it!

Professional Learning and Thinking Skills

Let's say that you're going to explore a topic with a team at your school. Or maybe you're going to present your research at a conference. How can you use the Patterns of Thinking to unpack ideas like "Assessment" or "Family Learning"?

Here's an example of these thinking skills in the context of "family events that support parent-child learning activities." But you could use the same thinking skills to explore any topic.

First, let's define what we mean by "parent involvement." List examples of what it is and - just as important - what it is not.

You could continue to list examples and non-examples to define the boundaries of "parent involvement."


As educators, we know that we want to strengthen parent involvement. Our actions can affect parent involvement, but we don't have direct control. What are some things we we can do that will strengthen parent involvement?

Some ways that educators can strengthen parent involvement might include:

• Communicating with parents frequently
• Inviting parents to participate in school activities
• Providing reading materials so that parents can read to students at home

No doubt, you can come up with more ways that educators can increase parent involvement.

Let's think about a holistic picture of a child's learning. Where do children learn? Is it only at school, or do they learn elsewhere? Obviously, a student's home life also plays a significant role in their learning.

But what if we could make this system even more robust? What if there is a strong connection between a student's family life and school life? The learning that happens at home could reinforce what happens at school, and the learning that happens at school could reinforce what happens at home. Instead of two disconnected pieces of learning, what if these two spheres of learning were in a positive feedback loop?

How can a classroom teacher create that feedback loop? One way would be to incorporate home life into lessons at school. The teacher could ask students about their family responsibilities, traditions, and routines.

The idea of "Family Learning" is a rich one, and it's worth looking at it from several stakeholders' points of view. What does it look like from the perspective of the Head Start Program, the parent, and the child?

From the Head Start Program's point of view, family learning may include a language-rich environment and social skills. The Head Start teacher may think of family learning as the foundation for what happens at school.

From the parent's point of view, however, family learning looks different. They may think of it as their household routines (e.g., my child learns responsibility when they clean their room). Chores in the neighborhood may be part of family learning. For example, trips to the supermarket, post office, or library teach their child more about the community they live in. Ultimately, the parent may think of family learning as time spent with their child. Compare this to how the Head Start Program thought of Family Learning, and you'll see the huge difference.

From the child's point of view, we construct family learning differently. The child may think of learning as what they do every day. Maybe it's not something they think of as out of the ordinary. In fact, those trips to the library and supermarket are fun. The child may not even think of this as learning; these are activities that are as natural as waking up every morning.

This concept of "family learning" could be constructed many different ways depending on one's point of view. As educators, we're fundamentally interested in what we can do to foster that relationship between family learning and school learning. By using the Patterns of Thinking to build these ideas. we've been to clearly define our terms and identify places where we should focus our efforts.

Another great teacher blog about Patterns of Thinking Method

Be sure to visit this great teacher blog about the Patterns of thinking Method training: http://welcometoorganizedchaos.blogspot.com/2009/04/thinking-about-thinking-long-and.html

Jack Black teaches Patterns of Thinking Method

Recently saw this hilarious post about a Patterns of Thinking Method training: http://splatypus.blogspot.com/2009/04/patterns-of-thinking-by-jack-black.html

Chicken in Paris

For the last year I have had the opportunity to participate in several workshops with Dr. Derek Cabrera and Dr. Laura Colosi. Little by little the Patterns of Thinking really do become part of your life and you find yourself thinking more about thinking. Sometimes ThinkWorks can invade your mind at the oddest moments. On Spring Break last week, my daughter and I were strolling through the Bastille open market in Paris, France. The display of poultry on sale reminded me of Derek's comment about how Americans like to purchase chicken. Americans tend to like their chicken packaged in such a manner that it no longer resembles a chicken. Obviously the French do not think the same way...

Teacher Training in Fairfax County

I had the pleasure of accompanying Dr.'s Derek Cabrera and Laura Colosi to a training in Fairfax County this past March.  Because I am new to the Patterns of Thinking Method, it was extremely helpful to see Derek and Laura's entire presentation in action.  I was inspired when I heard success stories from teachers using these methods in the classroom.

Mary Ann Ryan, the Director of Early Childhood and Elementary Education in Fairfax County Public Schools, kicked off the event with a great introduction, I've posted an excerpt below:

Derek's talk highlighted the vigorous debate raging between two parties in the educational field.  In the first camp are supporters of 21st Century Skills, or process, the second are supporters of content driven education.  As a former Academic Advisor, I have felt torn in this debate as well.  For some reason, I was under the impression that I had to choose a side and forever hold my piece.  It was quite a relief when Derek explained that educators should never have to choose between content and process.  In fact, it is the combination of these two elements that will prepare students for challenges awaiting them in the future.  When framed this way, it makes the debate that I myself was caught up in, seem ridiculous:

When they returned from lunch, educators attending the conference seemed excited to 

"get their hands dirty" and start implementing some of the theoretical seeds that Derek had planted earlier that morning. 

By using ThinkBlocks in the afternoon workshop, Laura brought Derek's theories to life.  One teacher exclaimed: "This was the best in-service training I've been to in years.  Actually, it's the best I've been to ever."  There was certainly an exciting buzz in the room throughout the day, and I was thrilled to be a part of it.  

Connect Family Learning and Classroom Learning

We've been lucky enough to have worked with a very talented and hard-working group of Early Childhood educators for about a year now. They have used the Patterns of Thinking to infuse thinking skills in students' learning experiences. But what's equally impressive is that they're using the Patterns of Thinking in their professional practice.

For example, several people in their office explored the relationship between play and learning. During a recent in-service, they used the Patterns of Thinking to explicate this relationship and learn exactly what classroom teachers can do to bolster students' learning during free activity times.

We've recently been working with another team member on connections between family and school learning. She will present these materials at an upcoming conference, and I wanted to share some notes on that here. Yes, the Patterns of Thinking can help 4-year-olds build a better fire truck. But they're also how adults process knowledge.

This educator is specifically interested in "Family events that support parent-child learning activities." We broke it down on our Thinkipedia.

What ideas has your PLC been tackling recently?

Students see more details after Part-Whole activities

Mark, a school teacher (and dad and blogger), shared a fantastic success story with us this morning about how the Patterns of Thinking have impacted his son's learning.

B, as Dad calls him, had drawn Disney characters for the past year and a half. Because of the lack of detail in the drawings, others weren't able to identify the characters. But when Mark focused his son's attention on the parts of characters, the drawings changed:

"After drawing his Disney characters for more than a year as surrealist/cubist symbolic squiggles, B transitioned to the more detailed understandable representations in less than three hours."

Why the change? Mark chalked it up to a recent workshop on the Patterns of Thinking. Specifically, he thought back to the Guiding Questions about organizing systems into parts and wholes:

"Working with Whole/Part thinking patterns, B was able to get a glimmer that there were specific parts beyond what he was representing which should be included. He drew several different (each growing in complication) versions of all his Disney villains."

Students recognizing more details after organizing systems into parts and wholes? I think I've heard this somewhere before...

Oh, yes! That's what another teacher said about her PreK students. For years, she watched students build fire trucks out of cardboard boxes. The result was a rectangular prism slathered in red paint. No seat, no doors, no windows. And the kids would glue 4 wheels on its sides.

This year, however, the fire truck changed. The students decided that their box needed to be cut into two pieces: the cab and the engine. And it needed lights. Plus a ladder. When it came time to put on the wheels, the kids attached 6 wheels to the truck (just like the real thing).

Oh, yeah. And the teacher added that her students are on average 8 months younger than her previous Head Start classes.

Why the difference? Students had been breaking ideas down into parts all year (family, winter, birthday books). And they have transferred this skill into new domains of knowledge. Listening to this teacher's story of the firetruck and Mark's story of the Disney drawings, it's clear that these learners are making finer-grained distinctions, seeing more detail, and breaking ideas into smaller and smaller parts.

Many teachers that I've talked to have said that their first foray into the Patterns of Thinking was simply asking students "What are the parts of _____? What could _____ be a part of?" That's why part/whole is #1 on a recent Top 10 List.

What would this look like downstream? Imagine these learners out in the world. How would these thinking skills play out? Mark says this of metacognition and non-verbal students, but it's true of all students:

"When we can reach non-verbal students and teach them about how they think (the processes of thinking, what is called meta-cognitive processes), then we are teaching what is truly a life skill."

The rest of Mark's blog, devoted to online professional learning, is also worth checking out. His page about "What We Do" struck a chord with this former teacher.

Building a Learning Organization

This week, we're working with a team from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 4-H, and several universities. They want to transform the way people interact with water. That's a bold initiative, what some have called a "Big Hairy Audacious Goal." To achieve that vision, they know that they'll need to create a learning organization.

We are helping them conceptualize their project and build that learning organization.
The cool part? This interdiscinplinary team of scientists, researchers, and management specialists are using the same thinking skills as these 7th grade students.

Stay tuned for more updates from this week's work. It was a pleasure to work with such a dedicated team of experts!

Want to learn more about their Vision-Mission statement? A detailed version is posted here.

Top 10 Ways to Start Teaching Thinking Skills Today

Here are 10 activities that you and your students can do today to start using the Patterns of Thinking Method.

1. List the parts of an idea. Whether it’s a fire truck (cab, ladder, wheels) or the French Revolution (Storming the Bastille, guillotine, Louis XVI, Reign of Terror), this activity teaches your students to look at the fine-grain details.
   We’ve found that students, especially younger students, often need to start with an idea they’re very familiar with like their family.
   
   
2. Look at an item from several points of view. For example, students could describe a piece of fruit from the perspectives of sight, taste, smell, and touch. What did you learn from each perspective? One elementary school teacher stretched this activity into an entire unit on Western Expansion.
   
   
3. Make a relationship between two ideas. Teachers have done this for years with mind-mapping, graphic organizers, and other techniques.
   But instead of just drawing a line and calling it quits, give that relationship a name, look for its parts, and see where else that relationship exists. This video is a great example of that:
   
   
   
4. After giving an identity - in other words, a name - to an idea, look for its other. For example if students name an idea “Fairness,” ask them to build the idea “NOT Fairness.” What would that idea look like?
   
   
5. Look for a larger whole that contains many ideas. A 7th grade science teacher did this in an earlier post. After studying several systems (circulatory, respiratory, digestive, skeletal, muscular), a teacher asked students what these are all a part of (the human body). Next, he asked, “What do we call many humans grouped together?” Students remembered the term “population.” The class continued, finding larger and larger systems that contained the ideas they were talking about. Over time, students understand the broader context of their learning.
   
   
6. Sort a group of items (buttons, stickers, pencils) from one perspective (color). Then, mix the items back up and sort them from another perspective (size).
   Your students are learning that the boundaries we draw (in/out, us/them) depend on our point of view.
   
   
7. Make a 2-way relationship. When students relate two ideas, these ideas have a mutual impact on one another.
   
   
8. Have students build a model of an idea. What are the parts of the idea? How are those parts related? If you change your point of view, how would the model change?

   
   
9. Discusses the many types of relationships. For example, correlation and causation are both types of relationships between ideas. How are they different from one another?
   
   
10. Take another conceptual point of view. For example, have students look at their school from an ecological perspective. They could describe the organisms living in and around the school. Students could then look at the school from the perspective of commerce. What things are being bought and sold here? They may come up with answers like school lunches, etc.
    

If you're using ThinkBlocks to teach the Patterns of Thinking, this is a good video for how to get started:



As you give these a try, give us some feedback. Which did you try first? What language helped these ideas click with your students? What are some other ways that you teach thinking skills?

High-fructose corn syrup and Distinction making

Recently Derek told me that high-fructose corn syrup (already on my personal banned foods list--if we must call it food) contains mercury. Yikes. I went home and dispassionately told my eleven-year-old daughter about this. Zeffi, who loves to have big reactions, was appropriately outraged. But added, "It's okay, Mama, there's nothing in this house with that in it."

"Except candy," I said.

She gulped (small gulp). "Oh." (Small oh.)

"Yup," I said. "Another disadvantage to buying conventional candy bars. High-fructose corn syrup."

"Mercury," sighed Z.

I let it go after that. I did not declare we had to throw out what's left of the Halloween candy. But since it's April that may tell you how often we get into it. But sometimes, when Mama hasn't come up with something more delicious (and more wholesome and less sweet), they open a mercury-chocolate bar and have it with whole milk carefully chosen to be free of growth hormones.

But Zeffi didn't let go. She and Aliya, her part-time stepsister at her other house, also eleven, went down to some store in the Ithaca Commons and started reading labels. They just thought this up on their own. They went through several candy bars, scanning the ingredients lists for the dreaded high-fructose corn syrup. I fondly picture them squinting over the bright wrappers.

They had created their own distinction-making exercise: identity, high-fructose corn syrup; other, not-high-fructose corn syrup. Their self-imposed task was to find which candy bars contained which. Thus, the second level of distinction making was good candy bars (without mercurized syrup) and bad candy bars (with mercurized syrup).

Joy of joys! Zeffi's top-favorite candy bar (Aliya's second favorite), Butterfinger, is free of high-fructose corn syrup! And Aliya's top-favorite candy bar (Zeffi's second favorite), Nestle's Crunch, is free of high-fructose corn syrup!

They found a few other good bars and a bunch of bad ones and unceremoniously decided they would never again touch the bad. Time will
tell. . . . (And we can only wonder what might have resulted if the favorites had come out differently in the sorting.)

And aren't these girls amazing?

From a parental perspective: amazing
From a nutritional perspective: amazing
From a take-action perspective: amazing
From an independently motivated perspective: amazing
From a Girls Rule! perspective: amazing

I hear they're reading labels at that other house and letting the parents there know that the ketchup is bad and the jam is bad and . . . I hear this isn't being considered amazing.

But I love it! I find this sort of caring, active, self-motivated response to new information truly beautiful. It's also empowering and builds self-esteem. They could have said, So what, and popped another one in. Zeffi and Aliya created a great small way to learn that it's possible to respond in a positive way to an unwelcome piece of news through a simple act of distinction making. And life is sure to bring more unwelcome news.

I imagine this task translating easily for teachers to an out-of-class assignment. Get students involved in distinction-making exercises that mean something to them in some realm that's part of their world. My teenage stepdaughter, Claire, loves to find which musical artists and movie stars have strong principles that inform their work, time, and spending. She loves Bono! Audrey Hepburn was the best! Have them make distinctions that mean something to them and see where it takes them.

Teaching Thinking Skills + Human Anatomy

I had a chance to visit a middle school science class last Tuesday. The students were learning about systems in the human body (respiratory, circulatory, muscular, skeletal), and the teacher wanted to infuse thinking skills in this lesson. He used several of the Patterns of Thinking Guiding Questions to probe their thinking:

• What are the parts of this system?
• How does this part relate to that one?
• What would this process look like from an oxygen molecule's point of view?

The students came up with some interesting insights into their bodies. In this video clip, they notice that the same parts that connect the respiratory and circulatory systems also connects the circulatory and skeletal systems.

When I visited earlier, I asked the teacher what students struggled with in the past. He said that, while they were able to list the parts of the body and categorize them into systems, students had trouble explaining the relationships among these systems.

To address this, the teacher used some interesting procedures. He broke students into 4 groups, with each group focusing on 1 system. Students were comfortable with this task. Their only struggle was to describe how the parts within the system related to one another. How do the bones and soft tissue relate? What does the diaphram do for the lungs, and vice versa?
Each group built an elaborate model of their system like this:
As the group finished the model of their system, the teacher challenged them to connect their system to one at a neighboring table. He had two of the groups physically move their model over and find relationships between them:


Students initially wanted on to name the anatomical part that connected the two systems (blood vessels connect the respiratory and circulatory systems). By using the Guiding Questions, though, they were soon explaining what each system does for the other like this:

Soon, students were looking for connections with the other table. What does the skeletal system do for the circulatory system? How does the respiratory system relate to the muscular system?

This was the moment of truth - when every student looked for connections among all of the systems they had studied in isolation.


At the end of the lesson, the teacher asked students what all of these systems were a part of. "That's easy!" they said. "It's all part of the human body." But as the teacher asked them to think at larger and larger scales, the students were challenged to think.

• If we had many humans, what would they be a part of?
• If we had many different populations, what would they be a part of?
  

This summary activity helped students connect what they are learning in this particular unit (the human body) to the larger themes that they learn throughout the year.

Mr. Devoe's class also posted to their blog about the lesson.