Learning at Schools 2012 - What is Good Thinking with Mary Ann Mills

Wow what an awesome two days to re-inspire you with different ideas to use in daily teaching!!!
The first session I attended was all about thinking and giving children the opportunity to teach (or lack of). So often children do not recognise opportunities to ask questions to further their thinking or understanding. Ways around this was to keep a journal of things at home that were of interest and then ask themselves further questions around that topic. Or to do a similar thing with newspaper articles or stories that raise further questions and therefore thinking. She started the session with an interesting activity showing us a picture of around seven different footprints, she got us to tell a buddy what the story behind it was. Following our sharing she asked what questions it raised and what assumptions we made from the picture. (If you want to see how this works check out http://ohthethinksyoucanthinkatvardon.blogspot.co.nz/ shortly, our new thinking blog for Room 11).
Thinking is one of the key competencies but Mary Ann challenged us to look at the way we are teaching this skill of thinking. Particularly the higher order thinking as looking to the future so much of NCEA is based around the higher order thinking. She showed us some great examples of children furthering their own thinking through personalised projects which got me thinking....so much of our topic time is teacher driven in regards to the overall theme or big idea that we choose to teach. I then asked myself....What high standard work would we get, especially out of our reluctant learners if they had two weeks to conduct an individual research project (IRP) under teacher guidance/facilitation?
Coming home that night I had lots of ideas buzzing around thinking about thinking. I went home and set up our Room 11 thinking blog attached to our class blog. In the first week I want to set up a voicethread giving each child the chance to explain what they think thinking is/means, this is something we can then revisit. As well as experimenting with the picture idea that Mary Ann began her session with. Further ideas for the thinking blog is children's personal inquiry...responding to articles with their questions...responding to quirky artwork.
I look forward to what this thinking brings and the added spin off that it may have in children's questioning skills during reading time.