As Lead of Thinking in a multi-academy trust, I am often asked what the ideal starting point for the ‘thinking journey’ is. Of vital importance is the context of the school and their needs, but regardless of these, I am always keen to involve Tony Ryan’s Thinker’s Keys at some point near the start of my ‘dream journey’.
Thinker’s Keys
The Thinker’s Keys are a collection of 20 activities designed to ‘engage and motivate’ learners. I find that some are quite linear and some very creative. What I find most effective about the Keys is that they can be used in lots of different subject areas and contexts across all key stages: a BAR (Bigger, Add, Replace) Key, which is used to evaluate or sometimes as a redrafting tool, works just as well with my Year 13 class as they self-assess a partner’s writing as it does with a Year 4 lesson where I’ve observed students ‘BAR-ing’ models of a castle. Of course, the vocabulary is more developed in the Key Stage 5 class and the reasoning for each part of the BAR is more reflective, but the general concept is very similar and just as purposeful in the Key Stage 2 example. A BAR for evaluating own strengths and weaknesses could even be used at a Key Stage 1 level. This Key in particular is easily transferred into different areas because the focus of it is relevant to many areas of the curriculum, as well as the pastoral system. It encourages students to reflect carefully with an easy-to-remember acronym.
This example demonstrates one of the reasons we have seen such benefits from introducing and embedding the Keys in primary and secondary schools within our Trust—because the majority of the time the students know that the insertion of a Thinking Key in to their lesson is more than to merely entertain them—its relevance is to motivate them in the task or towards meeting the learning objective and engage them in the content being studied. We have found that when thinking is closely entwined in the domain, students are not only more likely to involve themselves with it, but they are also more likely to remember what it was that we wanted them to remember—i.e. the main concept.
Getting the ideas to flow
However, the Keys can also be important when not linked explicitly to lesson content. I have spoken to many teachers who feel that a Key (such as the Interpretation Key) doesn’t need to be directly related to the task at hand. When doing a piece of creative writing, sometimes the Key serves a purpose at the beginning of the lesson, in getting the students familiar with sharing and discussing their ideas and improving the flow of ideas—it need not be directly linked to what the students are learning about. For example, when starting a new topic in History at Key Stage 4 on Russia, a teacher might do a quick starter activity using the Alphabet Key to identify different words which are associated with what students think they know about Russia. This is a great way of activating prior knowledge and sharing current understanding. It also provides the teacher with the opportunity to quickly identify any misconceptions and assess the quality of vocabulary being explored.
Independence of thought
Whichever way teachers choose to use them, the Keys have proven useful for improving recall of previous content, practising skills and providing a novel way of understanding new content. Offering all of these benefits can be useful to teachers looking for different ways to improve their practice, particularly in terms of encouraging learners to think more independently in a lesson. These Keys offer a common language for staff to share ideas much more widely than in their own key stage or curriculum area because this language breaks down many of the barriers which prevent effective sharing of good practice, in that it offers a way to discuss pedagogy in terms that everyone understands.
If everyone uses the same terminology with the students, then not only will they have less ‘extraneous load’ to distract them from their learning because they know the role of the Key and how it works, but it will enable staff to work with any other colleague because they can discuss how the Key was used and developed in the lesson, regardless of the content that was covered. Sharing outside of department areas thus becomes normalised and can be used to support aspects of teaching and learning in the classroom. Student cognitive load then decreases, because they can focus more on the content and not the task. The limits of working memory are not consumed by attending to the way the task is delivered; this becomes something about which the students already have previous knowledge.