It provides teachers with a manageable framework for teaching thinking in the realities of today's classrooms and combines sound principles for teaching thinking with sound principles for teaching and learning. The 'child and teacher-friendly' material introduces a broad range of thinking skills, considers how we can motivate children to want to use these skills and emphasises the development of metacognition to help children monitor and direct their own thinking. The programme was trialled in a variety of educational settings, with children of different ability and socio-economic background. Results strongly suggest that children using the programme made highly significant gains in self-concept, cognitive ability and creative thinking. The rationale for the programme design, its implementation, and research findings from the evaluation are discussed.
Participants have the opportunity to use and review the material.
The children taught synthetic phonics make better progress in reading, spelling and phonemic awareness than those taught by analytic phonics. Teaching phonological awareness skills in addition to analytic phonics leads to gains in phonemic awareness but not in reading and spelling. Furthermore, only the children taught by the synthetic phonics method are able to read unfamiliar words by analogy. Both have their difficulties. This project takes a middle way, seeking to enhance thinking skills by linking them to a transferable skill broadly applicable across the curriculum, in this case reading.