Thinking and the Paperclip

A while back, our Ian Gilbert was asked to put together an online webinar for educators at a large FE college.

The topic – critical thinking.

Pioneering work by Dr Spencer Kagan highlights how we need to move beyond Bloom’s Taxonomy when it comes to teaching discrete information processing skills.

He suggests there are fifteen thinking skills to develop in young people:

• Recalling
• Summarizing
• Symbolizing
• Categorizing
• Shifting Perspective
• Analysing
• Applying
• Inducing
• Deducting
• Calculating
• Brainstorming
• Synthesizing
• Predicting
• Evaluating
• Questioning

Choosing these as his focus for the webinar, Ian needed to come up with a series of activities that demonstrated each of Kagan’s thinking skill in a simple, quick, universal (and online) way.

Which is where the paperclip comes in.

Drawing on his experience of making thinking skills simple, accessible, enjoyable for all children and young people (Thunks and 8 Way Thinking are two great examples of his work), he created the following series of thinking activities around each of the fifteen thinking skills.

Enjoy!

Recalling

1. When was the last time you used a paperclip?
2. When did you first use a paperclip?
3. Draw one with your eyes closed

Summarising

1. Describe in the least amount of words what a paperclip looks like
2. Write a three-step user’s guide
3. Describe how a paperclip works using the words ‘torsion’, ‘elasticity’ and ‘friction’

Symbolising

1. Draw that three-step guide
2. Come up with three other names for a paperclip
3. Tell someone who is blindfolded how to use one

Categorizing

1. Fit it into 10 different categories
2. What comes next: banana, paperclip, x
3. What comes first? x, bridge, paperclip

Shifting Perspective

1. If you had never seen one before, what might you think it was?
2. How can a paper clip make you happy? Sad? Excited?         
3. How would you use it to teach empathy?

Analysing

1. Describe the three parts of a paperclip
2. Five ways it is different from a banana?
3. Five ways it is like a banana?

Applying

1. Come up with ten uses for a paperclip
2. How might a bricklayer/hairdresser/footballer use one?
3. How could you use it to hold paper together in a non-traditional way?

Inducing

1. Just by looking at it, how do you think a paperclip is made?
2. What does a paper clip tell you about paper?
3. What would an alien learn about human life by looking at a paperclip?

Deducting

1. Eleven billion paper clips are produced in the US each year (2011) – suggest five things you can deduce from this?
2. Norwegians used it as a symbol of resistance during WWII – why do you think that might have been?
3. Why do you think it was the British who invented the paper clip in the 1800s?

Calculating

1. 10000 tons of paper clips are made each year – how heavy is a paper clip?
2. How many paper clips are there per US citizen?
3. Guess how many different types of paper clip there are and why you suggest that number

Brainstorming

1. Come up with ten more uses for it
2. Redesign it
3. How would you double paper clip sales?

Synthesizing

1. What if you crossed a paper clip with a pen?
2. How would you entertain a small child with a paper clip and a banana?
3. If you were a paper clip artist, what would you do?

Predicting

1. Will number of paper clips being made go up or down in next ten years and why?
2. Will the price of paper clips go up, down or remain the same in the next ten years and why?
3. When might be the last ever time you use a paper clip?

Evaluating

1. Five reasons why the paper clip should be named best ever human invention
2. Five reasons why the paper clip should be named worst ever human invention
3. ‘The paper clip is a very dangerous little instrument’ – David Ogilvy - five possible reasons why he said that?

Questioning

Come up with ten questions inspired by this image:

How did you get on?

Were you able to answer all the questions?

Were some harder than others?

How you might you apply at least some of them to your lessons?

One of the good things about so many of these questions is that there are no rights or wrongs. This is a liberating state of affairs for the classroom with many benefits.

It also helps develop the sort of thinking in small humans that that AI can't quite replicate.

Not yet anyway... [ITL]

Drop us a line or give us a call on 01267 211432 for a free no-obligation chat about how we can help develop effective (and AI-combatting) thinking skills in children and young people in your classroom.