Thinking Skills & Personal Capabilities
Thinking skills are tools that help children to go beyond the acquisition of knowledge in order to search for meaning, apply ideas, analyse patterns and relationships, create and design something new and monitor and evaluate their progress.
Personal and interpersonal skills and capabilities underpin success in all aspects of life. It is important, therefore, that children’s self-esteem and self-confidence are explicitly fostered along with the ability to understand and manage their own emotions and to interact effectively with others.
Teachers should help children to develop thinking skills and personal capabilities by focusing on the following areas.
- Managing Information
- Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making
- Being Creative
- Working with Others
- Self-Management
Managing Information involves...
Asking, accessing, selecting, recording, integrating, communicating, for example:
- Ask focused questions.
- Plan and set goals, break task into sub-tasks.
- Use own and others' ideas to locate sources of information.
- Select, classify, compare and evaluate information.
- Select most appropriate method for a task.
- Use a range of methods for collating, recording and representing information.
- Communicate with a sense of audience and purpose.
Thinking, Problem Solving, Decision Making involves...
Searching for meaning, deepening understanding, coping with challenges, for example:
- Sequence, order, classify, make comparisons.
- Make predictions, examine evidence, distinguish fact from opinion.
- Make links between cause and effect.
- Justify methods, opinions and conclusions.
- Generate possible solutions, try out alternative approaches, evaluate outcomes.
- Examine options, weigh up pros and cons.
- Use different types of questions.
- Make connections between learning in different contexts.
Being Creative involves...
Imagining, generating, inventing, taking risks for learning, for example:
- Seek out questions to explore and problems to solve.
- Experiment with ideas and questions.
- Make new connections between ideas/information.
- Learn from and value other people’s ideas.
- Make ideas real by experimenting with different designs, actions, outcomes.
- Challenge the routine method.
- Value the unexpected or surprising.
- See opportunities in mistakes and failures.
- Take risks for learning.
Working with Others involves...
Being collaborative, being sensitive to others’ feelings, being fair and responsible, for example:
- Listen actively and share opinions.
- Develop routines of turn-taking, sharing and cooperating.
- Give and respond to feedback.
- Understand how actions and words effect others.
- Adapt behaviour and language to suit different people and situations.
- Take personal responsibility for work with others and evaluate own contribution to the group.
- Be fair.
- Respect the views and opinions of others, reaching agreements using negotiation and compromise.
- Suggest ways of improving their approach to working collaboratively.
Self Management involves...
Evaluating strengths and weaknesses, setting goals and targets, managing and regulating self, for example:
- Be aware of personal strengths, limitations and interests.
- Set personal targets and review them.
- Manage behaviour in a range of situations.
- Organise and plan how to go about a task.
- Focus, sustain attention and persist with tasks.
- Review learning and some aspect that might be improved.
- Learn ways to manage own time.
- Seek advice when necessary.
- Compare own approach with others and in different contexts.
