< Previous | Contents | Next >

Education Forum on Teaching Thinking Skills Report

Introduction: Can Thinking Skills Be Taught?

Valerie Wilson, Scottish Council for Research in Education

'Can thinking skills be taught?' is the question which we are here to discuss. During the past ten years, increasing interest in 'thinking skills' has developed in numerous countries. However, as MacBeath (TESS, 20.6.97) reports, all are quick to admit to 'being only on the edge of understanding the inner magic of the thinking brain'.

I wrote the literature review paper which was circulated prior to this meeting, and which will, I hope, aid your discussions today. I do not want to go over the paper in detail now as I have already had 'my say' in writing, but rather to give you some indication of the way I approached the task and my own conclusions from having searched the published literature. I hope this will provide insights to the review and point out key areas which still need to be addressed.

My main aims are threefold:

Context

In Scotland, as in other countries, there has been much interest and increasing activity in teaching thinking skills, amongst both teachers and teacher educators. Although there are as yet few published accounts or research reports describing this work, some networks have already formed. Our discussions today should be located within an overarching context.

Education Forum on Teaching Thinking Skills

It is now over fifteen years since Professor John Nisbet, formerly of Aberdeen University Education Department, undertook his earlier work on thinking and learning to learn which he published in The Seventh Sense with Janet Shucksmith. Since that date, others have joined the debate. More recently Dr Carol McGuinness of Queen's University Belfast reviewed the evidence for the Department of Education and Employment and I think this signifies how much the topic has moved up the policy makers' agenda. I know some of you attended the seminar at the DfEE to launch that review and are, therefore, familiar with the direction this debate has taken.

A question of definitions

What then do we mean by the word 'think'? Here I would like to stress three main points all of which impact on our discussion. The first is that it is important to demythologise the topic. Reading through the published work, it becomes apparent that much of the literature is couched in terms which are less than clear and helpful to informed decision making.

The practical implications for teachers are, I believe, that it is becoming more difficult, if not impossible, to separate out the physical influences on children from the complex mental processes of learning. We see this demonstrated in classrooms but what do we mean by 'thinking'?

Once we have cleared away some of the myths that surround this topic, we are still left searching for an essential definition which will allow teachers to apply it in their classrooms practices. As a way forward, I think it is helpful if we separate the two concepts: thinking and skills?

This distinction was the starting point for my review. I tried to make sense of the literature by posing a series of questions: questions which I thought teachers might ask and which need to be answered. These include:

By working with the published research, it becomes evident that there are two, possibly three ways in which others have approached the issue of teaching thinking skills. This finding is supported by both John Nisbet (1993) and more recently Carol McGuinness (1999). These approaches are:

Both are problematic. If on the one hand teachers choose to use one of the many commercially produced specific thinking skills programmes, then they very quickly encounter difficulties of transference. How can they ensure that their pupils/students can apply skills learnt in one context to other situations? Alternatively, if teaching thinking is embedded in a particular curricular area, there is no guarantee that learners can isolate it from its context and apply it more generally to other situations. This is a dilemma which we need to explore today.

Does the evaluation evidence help us resolve this underlying dilemma? Again there is no simple answer to emerge from published sources. I would argue this results partly from the magnitude of the problem: it is inherently difficult for an evaluator to 'prove' that any educational intervention is associated with a specific set of outcomes. We all know just how complex learning is and the many factors which affect pupils' performance, so to seek a definitive answer is to misrepresent reality. But what clues do we find in the literature?

Coming to the literature as someone who has no prior connections with teaching thinking skills, I encountered what I would describe as the almost proselytising zeal of much of what is written. This may be a reflection of legitimate enthusiasm and I may be an over-cautious researcher. Carol McGuinness, a respected researcher, argues that there is now sufficient accumulated evidence for us to formulate a framework with which to move forward. This may be the case. There are certainly implications from the evidence of which we need to be aware. I think these are:

Researchers are often criticised by practitioners for not focusing sufficiently on problems which practitioners face. I suspect that I am conforming to type today by 'sitting on the fence' and forgetting that you must make decisions about what to teach and how to teach it. What conclusions then have I reached?

Robert Fisher is one of the best known advocates of teaching children to think, and I know some of you have already benefited from Dr Fisher's approach through in-service events in your authorities. He summarises the factors which influence problem-solving and represents them as a Venn diagram. I find this particularly helpful because it accords with what we already know about the importance of situated learning: learning is not just about improving the processes of thinking or cognition. I do not need to remind you of how important children's previous experiences and attitudes are to achieving positive outcomes. This does not, of course, imply that technical processes cannot be improved and, therefore, what we are really here to discuss is not teaching thinking per se, because most humans do that naturally, but rather how children can be helped to become more effective thinkers.

I look forward to hearing your discussions today. I hope the paper previously circulated will provide a framework for those deliberations and that we will identify and share the work which teachers are undertaking in Scottish primary and secondary schools. Perhaps the final word should go to a headteacher rather than a researcher who observed:

References

De Bono, E. (1991) Teaching Thinking. London: Penguin Books.

Fisher, R. (1990) Teaching Children to Think. London: Blackwell. (reprinted 1995)

Gardner, H. (1993) Multiple Intelligences: The theory in practice. New York. Basic Books.

MacBeath, J. (1997) Unlock the secrets of the thinking brain. Times Educational Supplement. 20 June, p.22.

McGuinness, C. (1999) From Thinking Skills to Thinking Classrooms: A review and evaluation of approaches for developing pupils' thinking. Nottingham: DfEE Publications.

Nisbet, J. (1990) Teaching Thinking: An introduction to the research literature. (Spotlight no. 26) Edinburgh: SCRE.

Nisbet, J. (1993) The thinking curriculum. Educational Psychology, 13 (3 and 4) 281_290.

Nisbet, J. and Shucksmith, J. (1984) The Seventh Sense: Reflections on learning to learn. Edinburgh: Scottish Council for Research in Education.

Ryle, G. (1962) The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson.

< Previous | Contents | Next >