Lincoln High School - Thinking skills

For many years teachers at Lincoln High School have experimented with teaching thinking skills, but continued to face the same two problems:

• • either they achieved the coverage of students but little transmission across subjects
  • or they achieved transmission across subjects, but only for a small group of students.

Teachers knew that the explicit teaching of thinking skills is important, but they hadn’t come across a programme or process that fitted well across the curriculum, and across year levels.

At their teacher only day in term one of 2007, Pam Hook and Julie Mills came to speak and run workshops. The SOLO taxonomy appealed to many teachers, and now, two-and-a-half years on, all learning areas are using it to some extent.

Read about the history of teaching thinking skills at Lincoln High School.

Thinking at Lincoln

The school has developed its own 'Thinking at Lincoln' poster (above) that is displayed in every classroom, and they provide three facilitated sessions a year for groups of teachers, from a range of learning areas, to progress their development.

Students are now familiar with the terminology. For example, a year 9 extension class student, asked recently about which strategies he found useful in helping him to 'aim high', explained, without prompting, that SOLO was key in this.

In many learning areas, activities are being coded with the taxonomy (Biggs and Colls, 1982), which aligns well with NCEA.

The next stage is to continue to encourage more teachers to use the set of thinking maps (graphic organisers).

You can view a short clip of Lincoln students talking about Solo Taxonomy on Youtube >>