Teaching Thinking Skills across the Primary Curriculum. Edited by Belle Wallace. David Fulton pound;16.

These two books promote very different types of thinking. Robert Fisher’s book is really concerned with (and would be more accurately titled) thinking about values. Its emphasis is very much on moral education, with the main body of the book consisting of a selection of stories, poems and pictures with suggested questions aimed at promoting contemplation of the identified themes.

In his introduction, Fisher speaks about “strategies to extend thinking”, “Socratic questioning”, and a “community of enquiry”.

But he is short on practical suggestions for achieving these, and some of his own statements seem only half thought through. When he says, for example, “There is a clear link between values and the thinking skills which underpin children’s understanding and their developing skills and attitudes,” is he saying (and I take it he is, though it’s an obvious enough point) that children’s ability to articulate and engage with values is linked to their thinking skills? Because of the ambiguous double “and”, the sentence could be read any number of ways.

The rest of the book consists of flogged-to-death assembly stories such as “The Two Metre Chopsticks”, “The Bishop’s Candlesticks”, “Diogenes and the Barrel”, and the one about the 17 camels that have to be divided between three sons.

Teaching Thinking Skills across the Primary Curriculum is a more useful and practical book. Despite the fact that the book is published in association with the National Association for Able Children in Education (NACE) and its editor also happens to be editor of the journal Gifted Education International, its subtitle “A practical approach for all abilities” turns out to be accurate. Be warned - to get the full benefit from this book you need a strong stomach for flow charts and other conceptual diagrams. As a means of reinforcing the Thinking Actively in a Social Context (“TASC”) approach, teachers are advised to use the TASC wheel to help pupils through the process of gather and organiseidentify generatedecideimplementevaluatecommunicatelearn from experience.

The book espouses the kind of hands-on approach to learning that recent trends in classroom practice have all but suffocated. For the benefits in cognitive development to take place “children needed a practical activity in which they were interacting as a group, so that they could reflect on their actions rather than just talking hypothetically about them”.

Indeed, the fuzzy black-and-white photographs of children engaged in different practical investigations look as if they have been snipped from a book produced in the Plowden era.

Michael Thorn is deputy head of Hawkes Farm primary school Hailsham, East Sussex