How thinking skills improved students' attitudes towards learning

last updated:01 Sep 2007

Can thinking skills activities help students develop positive attitudes towards learning? Louisa Nichols, head of psychology and teacher of history at Raine’s Foundation School, a secondary school in London, wanted to find out.

Louisa designed a ‘collective memory’ activity based on thinking skills principles that she had been introduced to as part of her in service training. The task involved showing students a poster about their current history topic and asking them to work together, in mixed ability groups, to reconstruct it. Louisa researched possible posters for this task and identified two that contained lots of information and diagrams to support the scheme of work. 

The head of history supported Louisa and observed her teaching and the students’ learning and engagement.

When Louisa first introduced this task she found managing the behaviour of her students quite difficult but by the end of the project she had developed her self-confidence and saw an improvement in their behaviour.

Louisa found that at the end of the six months her students:

• were responding positively to the activity
• were working together sensitively
• were able to recall significant amounts of the information from the poster a few months later.

Students’ comments included:

• ‘It was such fun, I even think I’ll remember some of the stuff on that poster’
• ‘We worked really well as a group and we all helped each other remember things’.