The students were encouraged to write higher order thinking questions, so they were framing their work with ‘evaluate’ or ‘analyse’ so when asking the questions they could write answers that did more than simply demonstrate knowledge or understanding. As a starter they wrote questions on each face of the cube. The questions were based on the learning from the previous lesson, and will be used next lesson as part of a student led plenary. I also thought that placing the blocks on top of each other would create a 3D questioning prompt, which learners could use in a meaningful way to inform essay writing or planning- giving them an essay tool kit of questions to help them frame their answer. Another activity to promote higher order thinking is creating evaluative bunting. During the previous lesson I had used SOLO taxonomy so that my learners had multi-structural knowledge on theorists on social deprivation and educational attainment. You can find out more about this here I wanted them to be able to apply this knowledge in an evaluative way, so I asked the class to form groups to draw the theorists’ ideas on bunting, with one theorist per flag. Of course, the focus was not on the art work and there were stickmen aplenty! They then swapped work with another group and tried to label the drawings with the correct theorists. I encouraged them to write on each other’s work, and to be comfortable with making mistakes. It was an excellent
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opportunity to promote some positive learner characteristics about celebrating effort and risk taking. They were then tasked with creating the physical bunting and were asked to string in so that each flag had an evaluative relationship with the ones next to it. This was much enjoyed, and my classroom is now festooned with higher order bunting. In addition to that my learners are now comfortable talking about higher order thinking skills, and being creative in order to advance their academic skills. One learner commented how proud she was to see her work up in the classroom, and how lovely it was the see a physical product of a class working together. To consolidate this activity, the class used hexagons and drew on relational links, to reinforce the evaluative links created by the flags. They did his individually, but drew on the work done in groups. I should also mention that the class were live tweeting their learning, which I have written about before here and is an excellent tool if you have the confidence with the technology. Using twitter in the classroom is an excellent