Critical Thinking

The higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) agenda across the whole school at Northampton High is based on the work of Robert Fisher and Edward de Bono, among others.

The idea of’ ‘thinking skills’ has a practical use in focusing attention on ‘knowing how’ rather than ‘knowing that’ – on learning how to learn. 'Such processes include remembering, questioning, forming concepts, planning, reasoning, imagining, solving problems, making decisions and judgements, translating thoughts into words and so on’. (Fisher, R.  Teaching Children to Think, Robert Thornes 1995) 

In our own approach and design of our HOTS programme we used 5 key areas to encourage students develop their capacity to think in conscious ways to achieve certain purposes. These are encapsulated in the Thinking Skills jigsaw, the individual pieces of which cover the key skills needed to become more independent learners. These are highlighted below. 

It's important to note that thinking skills are not a replacement for the essential hard work involved in embedding knowledge and understanding. They go alongside this, giving students the tools to develop effective and active learning processes. Metacognition, or thinking about thinking, is important for this to happen and our jigsaw is a good starting point.