Developing A Thinking School - INSET

Download this 33-slide PowerPoint to use for an INSET about thinking skills. This is an ideal resource for encouraging staff to foster ‘higher order thinking’; where learners can become more challenged and engaged, their experiences will be more enriched and their levels of achievement raised. This PowerPoint offers a framework for carrying out a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats), will promote discussion about the relationship between creativity, commitment to a task and ability – where high levels of achievement will result! It suggests using questions such as ‘Why?’, ’How?’, ‘What if?’ or unusual questions, how to use Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) and not 'more of the same' (MOTS), it defines Bloom's Taxonomy and shows how to create experiences that are relevant, engage children in active learning and are embedded in Bloom’s Taxonomy and action verbs. Develop your INSET by showing how to develop planning so that it extend children’s thinking, keep looking for lively, stimulating and challenging ideas to keep learning fast, dynamic and moving forward and become pupil-centred – taking note of children’s interests and learning styles! Finally the PowerPoint gives a flow chart (offering a fomat for planning and delivering a thinking skills curriculum) and suggests how to use PowerPoints as a stimulus, how to develop thinking skills activity sheets and home-learning suggestions in your school. A valuable resource that will help impact on standards in a 'thinking' school!