Saturday, 15 September
Conference Hall "Abava"

Chair person: Deirdre Jennings, Vilnius International School, Lithuania

 

09:00 - 09:35    Deirdre Jennings, Vilnius Interational School, Lithuania. Teaching and Learning Through the Thinking

Approach.

We live in an information age where it is simply not possible to keep up with and retain all the information, old and new. The requirement now is that each person can be able to search for, identify, manipulate and manage information to solve challenges. Students need to be able to analyse, evaluate their own work, peers work and even information sources, they need to be able to create among other things lab reports, original investigations and effective tools for evaluating work and sources. TRIZ is an excellent basis for training young minds in learning about and applying thinking models such as ENV to these kinds of tasks. I worked with middle school students aged 11-15, adapting some of their lesson cycles and tasks to incorporate thinking tools and their uses. I learned that a) middle-school students are well able to learn about thinking models, b) some models which I was applying in the science classroom were applicable across the full range of subjects i.e. the skills and processes which the students developed are general and transferrable and c) the skills learned gave better access to answering higher order type questions (according to the widely accpeted Bloom's taxonomy) such as analysing, evaluating and creating. 

09:35 - 10:10   Alla Nesterenko, Teacher Training and Re-Qualification Academy, Moscow, Russia. Developing Research Skills in Maths Lessons.

This talk is focused on presenting specific tools for teaching students how to examine and define properties of mathematical objects, independently construct mathematical concepts, develop formulae and derive patterns. The presentation is based on materials of a Maths teacher Galina Belova and her colleagues, primary school teachers. 

10:10 - 10:30   Willem Bustraan, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands. Science & Art, a perfect

combination to promote creative and logical thinking.

The scientist as well as the artist creates models of the experienced world. The creative cognitive process in both cultures, science and arts is based on imagination and metaphorical language. The experience of art as well as the scientific thinking process starts with observation and interpretation of sensoric perception. Interpretation is influenced by preconceived opinion. We will inform you about the design priciples for a science methodology course for student-teachers. We combined art and science activities to challenge students’ imagination and metaphorical thinking and at the same time to confront them with their prejudices. We will show and discuss some examples of lesson materials for lower secondary school pupils designed by the student-teachers during the methodology course.We will elaborate on the students’ opinions and experiences and on the first experiences in lower secondary schools.

10:30 - 11:00   COFFEE BREAK

11:00 - 11:25    Krishnakali Gupta. International School of Bergen, Norway. An Overview of Thinking Tools in Science.

In my experience, teaching of science has been all about delivering content and developing skills and testing for overall understanding. Applying exactly the same methods, students emerge with different levels of competence. Some of them demonstrate high levels of creativity and are able to successfully approach the scientific process of learning that they take away and use in future. However, a vast majority take away nothing but some hazy unclear ideas. There have been several attempts at addressing these concerns in the teaching of science at schools. The fundamental  reason that drove me to the Thinking Approach was its claim that there is a way that EVERY student could become a creative thinker. I was looking for specific ways to equip them with methods that would take away the uncertain aspects of science and make predictions more and more precise. Through the course of the two years that I spent working with the team at Thinking Approach, I delved into some tools that are useful in making every student creative in class room and outside. The ENV model proved to be extremely useful, simple and effective in helping my students develop a strategy of work. The other  model, Theory of contradiction is useful when students/learners come up against roadblocks.  The multiscreen model is complex but could be very useful in creating overviews and perspectives as also focussing on progress and evolution. My understanding of the tools grew out of working with my students in the age groups 12- 16 at the International School of Bergen, as a teacher of science.  

11:25 - 11:45   Sergei Modestov, Saint-Petersburg State University of Service and Economics. Using the Theory of

Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) on Biology & Ecology Lessons.

Modern TRIZ has gained experience in solving different pedagogical problems. It is clear that introducing TRIZ to school lessons is a way to increase effectiveness of the pedagogical process. School teachers can use TRIZ on their lessons in several ways:

• To teach TRIZ to students or to teach some elements of TRIZ “as it is”.
• To include in their syllabi some TRIZ tools and methods based on the content of the syllabi. 

1.1. These can be special tasks and methods of solving these tasks.
1.2. These can also be methods of task creation.

• To use some elements of the course Creative Imagination Development.
• To include some creative (“TRIZ-made”) tasks in the syllabus and offer students to solve those tasks using non-TRIZ tools: method of focal objects, brainstorming, morphological analysis etc.

My presentation is focused on making and using creative TRIZ-based tasks on biology and ecology lessons.

11:45 - 12:10   Willem Bustraan, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands. Learning by Design. A

Methodology to Stimulate Pupils’ Thinking.

Many pupils in lower secondary school (age 11 to 15) dislike science lessons. They lack (or they think they do) the cognitive abilities to understand the abstract concepts and to learn how to reason in a logical (scientific) way. Quite often science teaching means that pupils are confronted with products of science: facts, concepts, laws and formulas. Hardly any time is devoted to develop pupils’ scientific reasoning skills and a positive attitude towards science as a human activity. We challenged teachers, student-teachers and teacher educators to design together science projects based on a  Learning by Design concept. We will show how we tried to motivate pupils via a design process: they construct an object. They use their own object to do experiments and by discussions and presentations they develop their thinking skills on planning, visualization of ideas, asking questions, conducting experiments, analyzing data, preparing presentation.

12:10 - 12:30    Austra Reihenova. Riga State Gymnasium No. 3, Latvia. Students’ Mathematical abilities and thinking.

The aim of this reaserch is to study students’ mathemetical ability to think and how to determine it. The research contains three parts:
1) Mathematical testing method – different mathematical problem solution and analysis. Identification of students’ thinking;
2) Defining Pupils' mathematical ability and creation of the human logarithmical spiral using well known scientist and student astrological data.
Pedagogical-psychological characteristics of the highest and the human consciousness, mind, thinking and brain, using cosmology and quantum physics.