I-THINK PART GIVES STUDENTS AND TEACHERS A NEW Traditional problem-solving can involve choosing from several options, all with pros and cons. However, rather than finding the best solution, oftentimes it feels like settling for the least-bad option. Integrative thinking, or I-Think, looks at problem-solving in a different way, and both students and teachers at Pickering College are reaping its benefits.
I-Think was conceived by Roger Martin, former Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, while writing his book The Opposable Mind. He interviewed leaders from a variety of fields, asking them how they approached problem-solving, and found they all had the ability to look at two or more opposing ideas, take the best aspects of each, and create a new and better solution. Martin dubbed this approach “integrative thinking� and developed a set of tools to cultivate curiosity and improve problem-solving, including the ladder of inference, the pro-pro chart, causal modelling, and prototyping. These tools encourage students to work together, slow down, take a step back from the problem, look at causes and effects, and not jump to conclusions. The I-Think team at Rotman trains educators to use the tools in the classroom. They were aware that teachers at PC had been informally using I-Think for years, so at the start of the 2017-2018 school year, Rotman proposed a formal partnership, inviting a small group of teachers to participate in an intensive one-year practicum to help them apply I-Think tools in their classrooms more comprehensively.
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