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Author(s): Fran Martin

Title: Thinking Skills And Developing Understanding About Place

Pages:

Note: : Presented at the Register of Primary Research Seminar Conference ‘ Raising Achievement : Developing Thinking Skills’ University College Worcester Oct 27 2001

Available in Occasional Paper: No 2 2002 ISBN 0-9538154-1-2 available from the Editor, 9,Humber Road, Blackheath, London SE3 7LS

Abstract: Abstract: Thinking skills, used in good primary geography teaching, are explicitly incorporated into the National Curriculum. The skills are exemplified and related to the Geography Programmes of Study.The principles underpinning thinking skills approaches are summarised and activities used with teachers evaluated, in relation to Blooms’ Taxonomy and the National Curriculum Framework for Thinking.The outcomes of similar activities with Yr 5 children are analysed to illustrate the teachers’role and the place of thinking strategies in the context of collaborative learning across the curriculum. The response from those involved in this continuing investigation has been positive.(Editor abstract)

Level: Primary Education

Age Group: Teachers in ITT and CPD

Document type: Conference Paper

Subjects: Thinking skills; Geography Programmes of Study; Blooms’ Taxonomy; National Curriculum Framework for Thinking; teachers’role; thinking strategies; collaborative learning;thinking skills activities.

THINKING SKILLS AND DEVELOPING UNDERSTANDING ABOUT PLACE

Fran Martin

Senior Lecturer in Primary Education

Worcester University College

presented at the Register of Primary Research Seminar Conference ‘ Raising Achievement : Developing Thinking Skills’ University College Worcester Oct 27 2001

Abstract: Thinking skills, used in good primary geography teaching, are explicitly incorporated into the National Curriculum. The skills are exemplified and related to the Geography Programmes of study.The principles underpinning thinking skills approaches are summarised and activities used with teachers evaluated, in relation to Blooms’ Taxonomy and the National Curriculum Framework for thinking.The outcomes of similar activities with Yr 5 children are analysed to illustrate the teachers’role and the place of thinking strategies in the context of collaborative learning across the curriculum. The response from those involved in this continuing investigation has been positive.(Editor abstract)

Address for correspondence
Senior Lecturer in Primary Education

Worcester University College

Henwick Grove,

Worcester WR2 6AJ

Email

THINKING SKILLS AND DEVELOPING UNDERSTANDING ABOUT PLACE

Fran Martin

Senior Lecturer in Primary Education

Worcester University College

Email:

Thinking skills and their part in good primary geography teaching is nothing new to those of us who have always viewed the subject as one that helps pupils make sense of the world and their place in it rather than merely learning where things are. However, the government’s recent emphasis on the importance of thinking skills (McGuiness, 1999; Hinds, 2000) has led to their being incorporated explicitly into the National Curriculum. Under the heading ‘Learning across the National Curriculum’, thinking skills are seen to be a way of helping pupils focus on ‘knowing how’ as well as ‘knowing what’

(‘ Learning how to Learn’ DfEE, 2000 p.22).

These skills, and examples of how they might relate to the Geography Programmes of Study are shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Learning across the curriculum: Thinking skills related to geography at KS1 and 2

Thinking skills / KS1 / KS2
Information-processing skills / Tally chart of how people get to school
Sorting photos of features into sets – human and physical / Traffic survey
Database of shops in local street
Comparing and contrasting two localities
Reasoning skills / Explaining why you think an aspect of the environment is attractive or unattractive / Considering a number of alternative solutions for improving safety in a local street and justifying the preferred solution
Enquiry skills / These are specifically mentioned in both Programmes of Study (PoS) under the heading Geographical Enquiry and skills
Creative thinking skills / Act out the story ‘Katie Morag delivers the Mail’ – what was Katie thinking / feeling? What was Grannie Island thinking / feeling? / Role-play: develop characters who live in a village. In the role of your character take part in a village meeting to consider alternative routes to a suggested by-pass
Evaluation skills / Develop some simple criteria for making judgements about the quality of the local environment / Evaluate a geographical enquiry by considering – were we able to answer our question? Was the information we gathered helpful for answering the question? What would we improve next time?

The principles underpinning thinking skills approaches have been looked at in detail by Steve Higgins in the earlier section, but it is perhaps worth summarising them again here. Certainly these are principles that are underpinning the work currently underway in Worcestershire LEA and which we consider crucial to the effective implementation of such approaches.

  1. Pupils articulate and discuss
  2. Learning objectives – which focus on the purpose of the task – are explicit (and understood) by the pupils
  3. Pupils evaluate their own performance
  4. Pupils discuss and evaluate their own learning (metacognition)

Working with teachers

In Worcestershire a group of Primary School Teachers are working with the LEA to develop thinking skills approaches to teaching and learning in geography. During an initial In-Service Training session the following activities were undertaken which encouraged the teachers to look at the use of thinking skills in developing an understanding of Place and Settlement.

Wildgoose Publications[1] produce a set of 4 playmats, which show oblique aerial photographs of different locations. These are ‘composite’ places representing a farm, a village, a seaside town and a suburban area.[2] We used them in a sequence of activities:

  1. Four groups each have their own playmat. Use key questions[3] to focus a discussion about this as a place.

Where is this place?
What sort of place is it?
What features can you see?
How did it get like this?
How is it connected to other places?
What do people do here?
How is it similar to, or different from, where I live?
How is it changing?
What might it feel like to be in this place?
What do I like about this place?
  1. Plenary to gain an overview of each group’s impressions of their place. Focus on pulling out key characteristics of each place, their distinguishing features.
  2. Give a few minutes for everyone to walk around and have a look at all of the playmats – state that this is necessary because for the next activity they are going to compare all four places.
  3. Pairs or threes then have a copy of the ‘Most likely to …’[4] sheet.

Where would you be most likely to …
Own a pair of wellies?
Know your neighbours?
See a fox?
Go to school in a car?
Be burgled?
Grow your own vegetables?
Walk to the shops?
  1. Evaluate the activity in two ways:

a)In terms of the thinking processes used

b)In terms of the understanding of settlement developed

Reflection and evaluation

How did you decide which place was most likely to?
What sorts of discussions were you having in your groups / pairs?
What sort of thinking was going on?
How does this help you understand what sort of places these are?
  1. Plenary – relate both activities to Bloom’s Taxonomy and the framework for the National Curriculum and what each of the sections require of children in terms of skills, knowledge, understanding and attitudes (Tables 2 and 3).

I find that as a staff development activity (whether with pre-service or in-service teachers) this works well because each group of people will respond to

Table 2: Bloom’s Taxonomy – this was developed by Bloom in the 1950s and provides categories for thinking that are reflected in the NC level descriptions

Category

/ Cognitive skill required
Knowledge
/ Recall of facts and basic understanding / observations
Naming and describing
Comprehension / Comparing, contrasting, describing, explaining, interpreting facts
Application / Applying knowledge to solve problems, classifying, selecting and using information
Analysis / Drawing conclusions, making inferences, seeing patterns, finding causes, using evidence
Synthesis / Solving problems, making predictions, proposing, generalizing
Evaluation / Judging, evaluating, deciding, appraising

Table 3: Framework for Thinking in the National Curriculum (DfEE, 2000)

NC heading / Related Understanding
Knowledge and Understanding of Place / A ‘sense of place’ – ability to identify features that contribute to the places ‘character’ – and recognition of how places are linked
Key Concepts: Place, Location, settlement [size and function],
Knowledge and Understanding of Patterns / The way physical and human features are arranged in a landscape or occur in an environment (e.g. the layout of hedgerows in a farming landscape, the way streets are arranged in a town) – land use patterns; comparisons.
Key Concepts: Spatial pattern or distribution; similarities and differences.
Knowledge and Understanding of processes / A series/sequence of events that cause changes in a place or environment (e.g. flooding, river flow eroding the banks of a river; increasing traffic, closure of local shops)
Key Concepts: Change, cause and effect
Knowledge and Understanding of Environmental Change and Sustainable Development / Environmental change is clearly linked to geographical processes, but takes it further to consider the quality of the effects on the physical and human environment – includes notions of good and bad change, points of view, attractive and unattractive environments
Sustainable development then looks at how an issue relating to change might be resolved to improve environments or maintain environments in ways that are sustainable – i.e. do not deplete the earth’s resources, cause other bad effects etc.
Key Concepts: Change, cause and effect, sustainability, power [who decides], conflict

the tasks at their own level. This is because they are open-ended, discussion-based tasks to which there are no ‘correct’ answers.

Working with pupils

With the exception of point 6 above, these activities also work very well with primary school children. Activity 4 is also a much more engaging and meaningful way of developing pupils’ understanding of settlement than doing comparisons where they are asked to list e.g. ‘6 things that are the same and 6 that are different’.

This has been trialled with a Y5 class in a village school. It is the ‘most likely to …’ activity that begins to reveal pupils’ understandings about different places in terms of what it might mean to live there, the assumptions they make about places that are more beyond their own experience, and – perhaps even more importantly – some of the attitudes they hold which might need challenging.

The Y5 pupils worked in pairs and table 4 below shows the results of their initial discussions.

Table 4: Choices made by pairs of Y5 pupils in response to ‘where would you be most likely to

Where would you be most likely to? / Numbers of pairs of pupils selecting
Seaside Town / City Suburb / Village / Farm
Own a pair of wellies / 0 / 0 / 1 / 14
Know your neighbours / 7 / 3 / 5 / 0
See a fox / 0 / 0 / 5 / 10
Go to school in a car / 3 / 2 / 0 / 10
Be burgled / 3 / 10 / 2 / 0
Grow your own vegetables / 0 / 0 / 5 / 10
Walk to the shop / 5 / 8 / 2 / 0

The table itself could be said to reveal possible assumptions being made about the difference between rural and urban lifestyles, but it is the written justifications and responses to the two questions

  • How did you decide?
  • What discussions were you having in your pairs?

That really begins to reveal the pupils’ thinking.

How did you decide?

Responses fell into two broad categories:

  1. We based it on what we knew – you’d be most likely to own a pair of wellies in a farm because it gets muddy because of the animals
  2. We looked [at the aerial photos] carefully – you’d be most likely to walk to the shops in the suburb because the shops aren’t far away (they can be seen in the photo)
  3. Because we think that’s what it’s like – you’d be most likely to be burgled in the city because in cities it’s mainly rough

This is a marvellous way of assessing the level of complexity and flexibility in the pupils’ thinking and presents the teacher with the opportunity to challenge some of the pupils’ views and associated attitudes, for example, by producing a photograph of an urban fox with an article about how they are increasing in numbers. It was during the discussion in the plenary that the teacher enabled the pupils to extend their thinking and begin to open up to a wider range of possibilities.

What discussions were you having in your pairs?

Where pupils were able to articulate this they said things like – we said why we thought one thing; we talked about the way they looked. In general, however, they were unable to identify particular types of thinking – reasoning, evaluating etc. – that they had used mainly because they had not been introduced to these in an explicit way before.

The teacher’s role

It is important to consider your role while groups are working. In many thinking skills activities it is suggested that you can be most effective by

  • Not interfering!
  • Walking round with a pencil and paper making notes of the sorts of things being discussed to draw on during the plenary.

The reason for the first point is that we are aiming to encourage children to reveal their thinking and not to impose our own. The value of the second is that you will doubtless have some specific teaching and learning points you wish to make and if you can draw on what people have actually been doing and/or saying to illustrate these they are more effectively taken on board because they link in with pupils’ own experiences. Higgins and Baumfield (2001) give detailed guidance on the role of the teacher.

Putting thinking skills into the broader context

McGuiness (1999) and Higgins and Baumfield (2001) emphasise the importance of developing thinking skills and using thinking approaches within an overall framework. In this respect, the development and use of strategies for thinking could, and perhaps should, pervade all our teaching throughout the curriculum.

They specifically highlight the following as demonstrating ‘good’ practice in the development of thinking skills:

Because learners are active creators of their knowledge and frameworks of interpretation, thinking skills/strategies are best developed through collaborative learning approaches. TALK is an essential part of the process.

Tasks need to be open-ended with a degree of uncertainty to allow learners to impose meaning or to make judgements or to produce multiple solutions

If pupils are to become better thinkers, thinking skills must be taught explicitly

Individual skills should be developed within an overall framework so that there is continuity and progression in curricula, classrooms and schools

The methodology must ensure that learning transfers beyond the context in which it occurs. In this respect the learning must focus on the thinking strategies as much as the subject context

In Worcestershire we are continuing to explore the use of thinking skills approaches mainly within primary geography, but also across the curriculum. The response from those who have had a go so far has been overwhelmingly positive, with some commenting on how their pupils’ achievements have often been far beyond expectations. What more can we ask?!

My thanks go to Caroline Mathews, Advisory Teacher for Primary Geography, Worcestershire LEA and the Y5 pupils of Welland Primary School.

Bibliography

DfEE (2000) The National Curriculum for England: Geography London: HMSO.

Higgins & Baumfield (2001) Thinking Through the Primary Curriculum Cambridge: Chris Kington Publishing.

Hinds (2000) ‘Spare a thought for some old-fashioned reasoning’ The Independent – Education section February 3rd 2000.

Leat (1999) ‘Thinking about thinking!’ in Primary Geographer 39, 14-15.

McGuiness (1999) From Thinking Skills to Thinking Classrooms DfEE Research Brief No 115

SEAC (1993) KS1 Assessment Tasks for Geography London: SEAC

[1]

[2] An alternative would be the aerial photos provided in the SEAC (1993) pack provided to primary school for assessing geography at KS1. This pack contained a set of photos including aerial ones of four settlements of different sizes – hamlet, village, town and city. Although A4 in size, they are better than nothing. Equally many people use those aerial photo books that are often on sale in cut-price bookshops – they can be easily set up and made into cards.

[3]Primary Geographer Issue 38, July 1999 p. 11 provides a useful list of similar questions along with the type of thinking each requires to answer it

[4] This idea has been adapted from Leat (1999) ‘Thinking about thinking!’ in Primary Geographer Issue 39 p. 14-15