Mindfulness by Design Artefacts – WoodleighSchool
Submitted by Richard Owens
Awareness Raising – Year 5 Newsletter Item
Persisting
"Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul."
Douglas MacArthur, Famous General
One behaviour we focused on in class is persisting, which means never giving up. During English, we sometimes spell words incorrectly. We needed to persist to get our spelling correct by keeping focused on our rules, letter patterns and the tricky parts of some words.
Zara, Yr 5
Striving for accuracy
"Every day you miss playing or practicing is one day longer it takes to be good."
Ben Hogan, Famous Golfer
A behaviour we focused on was striving for accuracy. During Mathematics, we did a shopping activity where we needed to visit shops, buy things, add up our expenses and calculate costs. It was important to strive for accuracy because one wrong sum could affect your whole result. I strove for accuracy by checking where I had made a mistake and changing the way I completed the problem.
Tomas, Yr 5
Finding Humour
"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."
Victor Borge, Musician
It is important to find humor because if you don’t have fun, it’s hard to work. If you focus on bad things, you might not be able to think clearly. Finding humor helps clear your mind. When working in a group, finding humour helps everyone complete their tasks by keeping you positive. It also gives you extra strength to do much better.
Ella, Yr 5
Deputy Head of Curriculum – Newsletter - Thinking at Minimbah
Perhaps most importantly in today's information age, thinking skills are viewed as crucial for educated persons to cope with a rapidly changing world. Many educators believe that specific knowledge will not be as important to tomorrow's workers and citizens as the ability to learn and make sense of new information.
D. Gough, 1991
With the teaching of thinking creating so much interest in the field of education over the past ten years, it is probably important to stop and consider exactly what we mean when we refer to this important area of our children’s learning. What do we mean when we talk about the teaching of thinking? The thinking curriculum can roughly be divided into three main areas –
- The first focus for teachers is upon student disposition – what children think about when they approach a problem or task. Some dispositions are, of course, more productive than others. By asking children to pause and consider their approach to their work, teachers are creating opportunities for students to choose more effective ways of learning and behaving. The Habits of Mind bring together a fine set of examples of such intelligent behaviours through their focus on dispositions such as striving for accuracy, persisting and gathering data through all the senses.
- A second key component of a thinking curriculum is the teaching of thinking skills. Specific complex reasoning processes help students extend and refine their knowledge in different subject areas. Some examples of thinking skills commonly focused on in school are comparison, classification and investigation. Students who are taught to develop a good understanding of these skills have in their possession a powerful tool that they can use in a variety of diverse contexts throughout their school and personal life. For example, the process of problem solving is often taught in mathematics, but has a much wider application. The first golden rule of problem solving – start with what you do know!
- The final component of a thinking curriculum addresses the deeper understandings of knowledge in and across different discipline areas. For students, this aspect of thinking focuses attention on what is essential and important in a given subject or in their overall approach to learning. For example, an essential question for the study of History is, how do we know what really happened in the past? An important understanding might be that there is more than one perspective about any important historical event.
For a school that is committed to affirming openness, independence, self motivation and initiative, the teaching of thinking plays a vital role. At Minimbah, students are encouraged to not only develop their foundation skills in key learning areas such as Literacy and Numeracy, but also establish and extend their ability to act as independent thinkers.
Richard Owens
Year 6 – Learning Journal – Media Unit – Student Reflection
System
A system is a process that includes parts/factors that affect howsomething works. For example if you wanted to paint a paintingyou would need a brush, canvas and paint; if you don’t havethese items the system wouldn’t work therefore you would notget your painting done on time.
Systems Thinking
Systems Thinking is a process that lets you analyse andunderstand different systems. It also allows you to examine thedifferent parts and how they work together to form a whole.
Thinking Interdependently Connection
Thinking interdependently is a process that, when put togetherwith systems thinking, can form a deeper understanding of asystem and its parts. For example if someone has finished his/herresearch on a part of a system, they can then go and work withanother team mate to research a stronger part of the system and improve the final analysis.
Improve A System
To make a system work better you use Systems Thinking toanalyse part of the system that isn’t working as well as the otherparts and improve it. For example if your train station had perfecttrains but no one was buying tickets, you must use a differentmethod of advertising.
Audrey, Yr 6
Thinking Routines and Habits of Mind
Thinking Interdependently
I used to think that Thinking Interdependently was about helping and supporting each other. Now I realize that thinking interdependently is not only about these things but also about adapting to new situation in order to help others finish their tasks.