Welcome
Welcome to the Creek Street Thinking project. This is an interactive website for interested teachers to share their ideas and strategies for establishing thinking as a routine in their classrooms. This forum is one of 2 mechanisms through which teachers will be encouraged to communicate with each other. Through this blog, we will share examples of tasks and strategies that we are promoting in our classrooms, examples of student work, especially those with formative feedback, discussion about what particular strategies have worked and questions seeking advice in areas where others may help.The other mechanism will be school based with regular meetings between interested staff to develop tasks, lesson and unit plans and whole school approaches to establishing thinking routines across the curriculum.
Steve Tobias
3 comments:
I was greatly impressed with some thoughts that students came up with using the PMI and ISSUES MAP thinking tools. The thoughts were part of an assignment regarding nuclear power. I have recorded some of the ideas that students came up with below. it was great to see deeper thinking rather than just recall facts from a book.
- As other power sources deplete, nuclear will become more valued and in demand
- Is there a catalyst that will make nuclear waste safer quicker?
- Make people understand nuclear power so they won’t fear it as much
- I wonder if you could power a car safely with uranium
- Nuclear Power will put people who work in the coal industry out of jobs
- What would you think if a power station was set up next to your house?
- In Australia we have a lot of uranium which we sell to other countries, if we stopped selling it and started using it , not as much money would be coming into Australia.
- Demand for electricity is growing by 2.4% each year, there will always be a strong demand for electricity
- Is it ethical to pursue and develop expensive technological energy sources for our needs, when we could be living simpler self-sufficient lives, however, could be considered as ethically important as well because we need energy to help struggling countries.
- Politicians could be wary about the prospect of nuclear power because it is un-popular with some people, and they don’t want to do anything to damage their support and reputation.
I was quite impressed with how they used knowledge gained in class and through research for their assignment, and then took that to the next level and saw implications and interactions of nuclear power with our community.
PMI
recently I gave the Year 8 class a PMI task and was pleased overall with their thinking processes. The plus and minus components were quite obvious but it was the Interesting section that showed clearly those students who are able to engage in higher order thinking.
I would make sure the groups were smaller next time as there were some students who still allowed others to come up with all the suggestions. Three students per group would probably be an optimum size.
The students used sticky notes to write down their ideas about particular decisions Lot made in the story of Abraham. These sticky note comments were then transferred to the proforma as found in our Thinking folders and then each group reported to the class. There was opportunity then for other class members to make suggestions as we had all read all of the scripture passages.
This was an introduction to PMI so I would expect that they would develop their use of this tool with more experience.
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