Coaching Thinking Skills

(I was unable to get on the blog last week. This post should have appeared at that time)

As usual, I found a lot of useful and applicable ideas in our Bean readings. I liked what he had to say in unit 7 section 7. This is the section on designing active thinking assignment. In this particular section, Mr. Bean talks about “Role-Playing of Unfamiliar Perspectives:” The rationale for assignments of this type is as follows: “By asking students to adopt an unfamiliar perspective or a ‘what if’ situation, we stretch their thinking in productive ways.” Reading this made me think of what I have seen done in business schools where students get instruction in De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. (www.cookps.act.edu.au/hats.htm) In De Bono’s role playing activity, students work collaboratively in a meeting to come to terms with an issue. Each member of the meeting wears a different colored hat – each color symbolizes a certain attitude or perspective that the student must adopt in the meeting. For example, the black hat represents negativity. The student who wears such a hat should respond critically to all suggestions in the mock meeting. Her job it to look for and find weaknesses in the logic or the idea, to find holes in the argument. I don’t know how useful it would be to adopt this method in the composition class, but it does show how the teaching of “active thinking” can have many applications far beyond the composition classroom. And I think is certainly a point I want to make with my students. The real Mr. De Bono’s is a scholar, but he also has a large business consulting company that makes a fortune helping business executives learn to think more actively and creatively.