20 Thinking Tools

Overview

Twenty Thinking Tools is designed to support the development of collaborative inquiry-based teaching and learning through class discussion and small group work. It introduces teachers to the theory and practice of collaborative inquiry, and provides an easy-to-follow guide to the tools that students will acquire as they learn to examine issues and explore ideas. Beginning with an Introductory Toolkit, Twenty Thinking Tools shows teachers how to strengthen students' abilities to ask insightful questions, to look at problems and issues from various points of view, to explore disagreements reasonably, to make appropriate use of examples, to draw needful distinctions, and generally to develop their imaginative, conceptual and logical abilities in order to gain a deeper knowledge and understanding of all kinds of subject matter. The Intermediate and Advanced Toolkits show teachers how to encourage students to make appropriate use of such things as counterexamples, criteria, generalisation, informal reasoning and elementary deductive logic. The Toolkits also include devices for distinguishing between different kinds of questions, for tracking disagreement and for recording discussion. Twenty Thinking Tools takes students from the early years of schooling right through to the senior secondary school, and is illustrated throughout with examples from the classroom, supporting exercises and activities.