Increasing Students' Recall and the Patterns of Thinking Method

A couple of teachers using the Patterns of Thinking Method wanted to share some classroom anecdotes about how this method to teach thinking skills has impacted their students' ability to recall information.

1. One Head Start teacher explicitly uses part/whole (Systems) when introducing new topics or reviewing them later. She puts a large ThinkBlock in the middle of the circle and gives each student one medium ThinkBlock. She asks students to tell her one thing about the idea (farm, store, or family, for example). They go around the circle, each student placing their block inside as they name an idea AND naming the ideas that have already been placed inside. This becomes a game similar to "I'm going on a picnic, and I'm taking..." The teacher reports that her students recall of each other's parts more than they did prior to learning about parts and wholes.
   
   This is a great activity for accessing students' prior knowledge in a non-threatening way. Even left-field answers that don't pertain to the topic have a place in the NOT pile (identity/other; Distinctions) outside of the large ThinkBlock. Because every response has a place, students feel that their responses are validated and are motivated to stay engaged in the activity.
   
   The ThinkBlocks also facilitate classroom management in this activity. At the start of the activity, every student holds one ThinkBlock. They know that they'll be called on eventually and devote less attention to being called on and more attention to their classmates' responses.
   
   
2. Another Head Start teacher uses the Patterns of Thinking Method to transition from group discussion to individual work. For example, students create a birthday book for their classmates by drawing a picture of a birthday. The teacher wasn't satisfied with their drawings and challenged them to include more details in their drawings. She used Systems (part-whole) to talk about the parts of a birthday celebration. Her students had lots of ideas to contribute. Before she sent them off to draw their next birthday picture, the teacher reminded them that the parts of the birthday they talked about as a group should also be the parts of their pictures. When the students began their individual work, she heard fewer complaints of "I don't know what to draw" and saw less off-task behavior. The drawings included more details from their group discussion.

Have a story about how the Patterns of Thinking affected students' recall (or motivation, creativity, etc)? Drop us a line!