To encourage metacognition – some initial ideas of activities that promote thinking skills. You will find examples of these in a range of Outstanding Lessons. See also 100 Great Teaching Ideas.
- Odd-one-out
- Categorising causes – increasing the level of pupil control
- Pictures from memory
- Reading photographs and pictures
- Pupils hypothesise about an event before studying it and test out their ideas against the evidence
- Pupils identify questions they need to answer about an event to frame their study
- Pupils forming conclusions and then re-examining them in the light of new evidence
- Mysteries
- Enquiry based approaches
- Lifelines/living graphs
- What if? Questions
- Discussion of what type of thinking a task requires and reflection on pupil’s use of them in the debrief. Teacher selects a number of words. Pupils encouraged to diamond nine of them for the particular activity and return to discuss this after completing the task
- Concept maps – helping
