Search

The skills in shortest supply for the future workplace are not technical, but behavioural - creativity, problem-solving and critical thinking. Raising Thinkers begins with an exploration of this skills gap in developed countries across the East and West from a national, corporate and educational perspective. In Asia there is growing unhappiness with a school system that is too narrowly focused on rote learning and teaching to test. In the West there is much debate about the efficacy of school systems that either cater largely to the lowest levels of ability or that too blindly strive to top gl.

This accessible text will show students and class teachers how they can enable their pupils to become critical thinkers through the medium of picturebooks. By introducing children to the notion of making-meaning together through thinking and discussion, Roche focuses on carefully chosen picturebooks as a stimulus for discussion, and shows how they can constitute an accessible, multimodal resource for adding to literacy skills, while at the same time developing in pupils a far wider range of literary understanding.By allowing time for thinking about and digesting the pictures as well as the text, and then engaging pupils in classroom discussion, this book highlights a powerful means of developing children's oral language ability, critical thinking, and visual literacy, while also acting as a rich resource for developing children's literary understanding. Throughout, Roche provides rich data and examples from real classroom practice.This book also provides an overview of recent international research on doing ‘interactive read alouds', on what critical literacy means, on what critical thinking means and on picturebooks themselves. Lecturers on teacher education courses for early years or primary levels, classroom teachers, pre-service education students, and all those interested in promoting critical engagement and dialogue about literature will find this an engaging and very insightful text.

Classroom questions have traditionally focussed on testing the recall, understanding and application of content and methods. Research suggests that pupils require activities that encourage them to think flexibly about possibilities and to make independent judgements about information. Tricky Thinking Problems explores the advancement of creative and critical thinking, and the activities are designed to help pupils test and develop such processes. A series of fascinating challenges are used to stimulate cognitive organisation in areas such as categories, similarities, differences, ordering, analysing, predicting and many more. Pupils will enjoy developing their range of different thinking skills as they complete the resources based on topics such as animals, weather, communications and food. Rather than being told which particular thinking skill to use, the questions are designed to encourage pupils to pick and choose a range of skills and apply them creatively. The resources are fully photocopiable and are suitable for 6 -11 year olds.