About the Project
The project is a training program for teachers on how to teach thinking skills to students while teaching the curriculum without the need for extra time and effort. This program aims to help teachers prepare teaching activities through which they can both finish their lessons and train students in at least one thinking skill every time they meet. It has been developed and tested over a period of more than 15 years and proved to work successfully. This program works for all kinds of knowledge-based subjects like languages, humanities, the sciences, etc. It works for primary, intermediate and high-school level students.
The training program is structured as follows:
- Thinking as a process is divided into stages. People go through these stages automatically without being aware of them. During each of the stages a number of skills are being used. The degree to which these skills are mastered varies from person to person. This is why people vary in their thinking abilities.
- These skills are identified.
- Each skill is correlated with a question. When a question is asked, the brain naturally starts looking for an answer to that question. This is a curious habit of the brain. If the right question is asked, then half of the problem is solved, as the brain will go in the right direction when looking for the solution. Training the brain to keep asking, and to ask the right question in the right situation is one step towards mastering thinking skills. The other one is to train the brain to find answers to these questions.
- Each question is correlated with key words that help in looking for the answer.
- Questions with key words for their answers are the framework for a class activity through which a lesson can be taught. Different types of activities are introduced for each skill. Varying the form and level of the activity according to the class grade is also part of the training process.
- The suitable types of lessons to train the students on each skill are identified.