De Bono's Thinking Hats display

Really useful resource thank you!

Thanks for sharing this useful resource. I am going to use it with a few great lessons this week.

Thank you this is exactly what I was looking for. Needed to know what sort of questions the children should be thinking of when they put on a hat.

Everyone complains about the purple hat. I just copied it into Paint, and changed the colour from Purple to Black using the Fill Function, which I then cut and pasted back into the word file. It is a 30 Second job, which I highly recommend. The posters themselves have saved me lots of time and I am pleased to have them!

What happened to the yellow hat? And yes, purple should be black to keep to a coherant theory that all can talk about - someone's obviously ran out of black ink or something. As for PC reasons, they need to step back and reflect: Black hat is very positive as all the hats are. It takes bravery and courage sometimes to step up and state things that are wrong, especially in a 'quiet' class of reticent pupils - whether a calculation, strategy or PSHE scenarios. Black hat or critical thinking is easily used by pupils when teachers nurture and organise groups in discussions with inbuilt turn-taking in speaking and listening. It's all about being critical and critical thinking; it has a close link with the red hat which includes likes and dislikes generated from feelings. However, I much prefer Bloom's, and with hats used only as cue-ful, helpful props, for Primary School pupils to grasp cognitive thinking skills. In this way, pupils develop a meta-language for learning and thinking when the model is taught discretely, with openness and transparency. Bloom's is consistent, uses single-word terms which have many child-friendly and practitioner-friendly synonyms. Stretching, open-ended questions are easily planned for, to start lessons with this model. The questions are easily scaffolded and therefore differentiated to include all abilities, once having made a start at the top for the tops, if GTs are to be a focus. Bloom's, compared to DB's, is less subject to confusing interpretations. DB's model tends to vary from organsiation to organisation, from school to school, seen in a wide range of DB's hat systems online, on many web sites. As GT co-ord in our school, I've used and modelled Bloom's and also worked as an AST and ECaW lead across 9 other schools over the last four years. As a result, I've seen an increase in expectations, curiosity, stretch, challenge, quality of questions, extension, enrichment, self-esteem and confidence grow with the use of this cognitive taxonomy embedded in planning, resources and learning activities, not to mention the numerous pupil requests of "Are you coming back to teach us miss?" and similar, and increased practioner enthusiasm! The model is effective in facilitating these qualities. I am currently trialing it with a deeper focus on current SDP priorities in our school, in an integrated MA project and will again later investigate in more depth, in further studies. By Elizabeth Amzil, MA practioner-researcher, studying at St.Mary's University, West London; teaching Y5 in a primary school in West London (26.10.11.). [This comment is part of my planned learning and teaching approach, prepared for publishing in an MA paper and article.]