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Quite often we’ll ask children to “Put your thinking cap on”. Empowering learners with the skills to think creatively and critically is a gift which we can facilitate as teachers. The Developing Thinking and Reading Between the Lines PowerPoints in the Literacy Toolkit provide professional learning resources for staff to engage with materials that promote thinking.

Many of our posts have referred to the work of Bloom; however, when I was at an Active Literacy CPD session in Falkirk recently, the Six Hat materials were mentioned during a round table discussion.

Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a tool which can be used by practitioners to promote thinking. Each hat colour represents a different aspect of thinking.

Some of the resources, tailored to middle/upper Primary and Secondary, suggest physically wearing coloured representations of the hats when beginning to engage with the materials. This way, learners are physically moving between the hats; therefore they are moving between the different modes of thinking.

There are banks of free resources that are available to support the teaching of thinking skills using the De Bono’s Six Hats materials. The Six Hats materials can be used in conjunction with other Higher Order Thinking materials. Check out the resources below:

CLICK HERE – Using Six Hats as a reflection tool
CLICK HERE – Using the Six Hats to Respond to Literature
CLICK HERE – Six Hats Display
CLICK HERE – Thinking Display
CLICK HERE – FREE De Bono Thinking Resources