AIM: to make the students' evolve the characteristics of a thinking task

Materials: the worksheet devised by the TA group (www.thinking-approach.org): De Bono's text on thinking as a skill and the follow up tasks.

 

Task: read the text, then read the tasks and classify them into those that require thinking and not. Explain.

Procedure: The students worked first individually, then in groups of three.

Timing: The introduction of the task took 10 minutes. Another 15 minutes went to reading the text and  come up with their classifications. The discussion of the suggested classification took 40 minutes. Making conclusions about the characteristics of a thinking task - 15 minutes.

Learners' outputs: different groups of students had similar results with minor differences - one-two tasks.

Teacher's role: introduced the task, elicited the comments on their choices, on the differences, elicited the characteristics of a thinking task form the pupils, explained how to do the task they did not understand :'exclude each word in turn'.

Overall reflection:  the students managed to distinguish between the thinking and non-thinking tasks. Some of the tasks had the word 'think' in the instruction. With the guiding questions of the teacher they noted that this word alone did not guarantee that they required thinking skills. And vice versa. The definition of a thinking task they worked out together was: it requires more than one step to be done; it requires special skills or tools; it does not depend on the formulation  and on the language; it is not (only) the formulation but  the way you approach/do it makes it 'a thinking task'.

In terms of steps of the framework - in my opinion, we  passed step 1 (decide on which tasks are thinking and which are not), step 2 (deduce the characteristics of a thinking task proceeding from your experience = create the steps to identify a thinking task). And we did not do step 3 (reflect how the stairs helped).°