Recently, I worked with a wonderful colleague teaching a program called "The Amazing Brain". In this program, we brought 19 students together to learn about the brain, and how we think. Our goal was to have the students learn about their thinking, how their brain works, and to help write their own Individual Education Plans. We asked ourselves the following guiding questions in our planning:
- How can we make students more autonomous and responsible for their own learning?
- How can we empower them to direct their own learning?
One of our activities was to get them to think about what their own thinking would look like. My colleague asked this question of the students, and then has them draw, diagram, and collage what this looks like. This is a wonderful process to engage in, and gets the students to think about their thinking - a great way to engage in metacognitive processes. We should all think about how we think and what that would look like.
So I asked my 11 year old son, "What does your thinking look like?"
"My mind is separated into different sections. It is a city in my mind, with different ideas. Two cities, actually: one is my school and my Need City, for learning, and then there is my Enjoy city, the buildings there are about what I like to do in my spare time. Reading, which I like to do is in my Needs City, although I use it for enjoyment as well.
What does it look like?
"A city; a neon city, not like New York, but tall buildings made of light and different colours. The colours are compatible; red and green are together; like the colour wheel, complementing each other".
What does your thinking look like? I think this is such a great way to engage learners and to get them to conceptualize how they think. Is your thinking like a city, or a highway? Does it involve colour or is it black and white? It is organized or compartmentalized? The wonderful thing is that there is no right answer, but only insight into how we conceptualize our thinking worlds.
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