The Six Thinking Hats
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One for the teachers, not the pupils…
We started term today with what the rest of you will no doubt also have experienced – an INSET training day, with the usual fears of being bored silly, waiting until it all ends, so you can go to your classroom to actually get on with preparing for the start of term.
Well, today I was pleasantly surprised by our INSET session which involved a couple of hours with Kim Wells from Caterham School. He is the Director of Learning and Teaching there but delivers these workshops to schools, businesses, and even the judiciary(!). He talked to us about ‘meta-cognition’ – that is, thinking about the thinking process, and focussed on De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats as a thinking tool for group discussion. You can read an overview about it here.
Like many of these things, I would say it’s a process that needs to be seen in action to see its worth, rather than just read about.
In our subsequent department meeting, we were thinking if there was potential for use of the Thinking Hats in Economics.
We will be trialling it with our Junior Economics Society session next week and I will let you know we get on!
Rather than different people having different ideas simultaneously, the Thinking Hats tries to get everyone to think in parallel, that is focus on one aspect of an issue together, before moving on to another area. In this way, you have a more structured and coherent response in the end, rather than a confused mess.
The hats are (and yes there were physical hats!):
Red (emotional/intuitive response);
White (Informational/data focused);
Yellow (Logical upside / positive benefits);
Black (Caution / flaws / barriers) – but logical ones, not to be confused with red hat
Green (Alternatives / possibilities) – the ‘what if’?
Blue (Overview / process) – the thinking about your thinking.
I thought it would be a good way of teaching certain economics topics, such as when looking at policies to solve a certain market failure, which lends itself to knee-jerk reactions (red hat) and both positive (yellow hat) / cautions (black hat); whilst also offering evaluation techniques with more information questions (white hat); alternative proposals (green hat); and a conclusion (blue hat). This is something we could trial as a lesson plan for say “should the rich be taxed highly?”; or the best way to tackle alcohol or cigarette consumption. I imagine the red-hat response would be to say yes to banning it, but would be interesting to see if they can think of problems with banning it.
We also thought the Hats could be a good way of thinking of how to structure an essay, particularly for the weaker thinkers in the cohort.
This could be used to complement the WEESTEPS method for evaluation that has been mentioned on tutor2u before.
As I say, it needs to be seen in practice to see its worth, and whilst usually I am a big cynic of these things, this did actually catch my eye.
Below is a clip with Kim explaining it himself:
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