Six Thinking Hats: Examples of Benefits
Although I started learning Six Thinking Hats only in Feb 2010, I do feel I have some experiences now. I read several Prof. de Bono's books, read the CD materials, practiced with my children, and provided several training seminars to ~70 engineers and ~200 operators. But I found I could not enforce people to think, even to my children, which may end up with an opposite effect. The thinking process is not really an attractive process for the younger generation when comparing to playing a video game.
I also encountered several people in Hong Kong that were officially trained in Six Thinking Hats classes, but I did not find they are practicing it. They just treated this as one of their knowledge.
When they use Six Thinking Hats, they found they need to spend some more time but they did not realize the benefits (although I did find some improvements). I found I lack something to motivate people to treat thinking as an important part of life so that they can put effort to improve them.
I start this thread with the target to get some real examples. How life was changed after practicing Six Thinking Hats? These may be good stories to tell during classes and to talk to people for motivating people to spend more effort.
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on -
Some additional questions related to the topic:
For a graduate student to obtain a PhD, he/she can show the ability to solve a problem (probably with some publications and a well written thesis). For a primary school student to show he/she understands math, he/she can show the marks in exams. These can be objective information for a person to tell his/her capabilities. But how can we grade thinking ability? How a person can tell other his/her thinking capabilities? How a person can tell his/her thinking capabilities is not enough so that he/she needs to improve?
-
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on
-
I am thinking to find a way to "Grade" the results using Six Hats. So that Six Hats learners will know how to further improve his/her thinking skills.
The following are two examples with my children. It is quite obvious that the first one is more mature than the second one.
Topic: Football camp
Red Hat: Exciting
Yellow Hat:
1. After summer I will become the first year student in secondary school, which has a soccer field. More students in the school play soccer compared with other sports. Learning the soccer skills will help to form the socialize network in the class faster.
2. It is a good sport
3. A good soccer field will be used in the camp
Black Hat: Open to learn the skills and be careful on the potential injury
White Hat: Need to check how to go to the camp and return to home
Green Hat: Change appearance after this camp as skill color will turn dark
Blue Hat: Open to learn the skills and be careful on the potential injury
Red Hat (at end): Still exciting, but a little bit worry for injury
Topic: Return to school in Sept
Red Hat: Not happy
Yellow Hat: Can learn more; Have more friends; Like sports in the school
Black Hat: Prepare course materials for the new year
White Hat: Prepare for new school year
Green Hat: Try to get No 1 or the last one in the class
Blue Hat: Prepare course materials for the new year
Red Hat (at end): Not happy; Wants more summer
-
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on
-
I am thinking to use a "thinking level" approach for grading. If the idea in one hat is directly related to the topic, such as "Can learn more in School", we give 1 mark. If the idea is one level deeper, such as "learning to play football relates to form a network", we give 2 marks.
Thus, for the six hats grading system, if the person give ideas directly related to the topic for all the six hats, he/she gets 6 marks. If he/she can think deeper, he/she will get another 5 marks (I assume Red Hat will always get one mark).
This may help children to think deeper.
-
Permalink Reply by Audronė Allan on -
Dear Raymund,
It is very intersting for me your idea to assess thinking and use "thinking level" aproach. Can you, please elaborate on the "level". How do you distinguish one level from another?
- Do you mean the levels of mastering "Six Thinking Hats" (SHT) as thinking tool?
- Do you mean the levels of exploration topic?
- Or do you mean something else?
Once I have tried to define and operationalise the levels of mastering SHT and use that for assessment. Would be very interesting share experiences with you.
All the best from Kaunas
Audronė
-
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on
-
Audrone,
I would like to put down a level for the deepness of the thinking process. I found my children sometimes give very obvious points. They did not brother to think more. I am hoping a grading/marking scheme can help them to think deeper.
I will post a few more grading examples.
-
Permalink Reply by Audronė Allan on
-
Thanks, Raymund, I see, you are trying encouraging deeper exploration of the subject matter by using grading / marking scheme.
All dBT (CoRT, SHT, Flowcharts etc.) supports deeper exploration. When students have thinking tools they can “dig” deeper and broader.
I think that teaching and evaluation methodology should complement each other. If teacher introduces thinking tools for deeper exploration, so evaluation should look at how students use these tools and how deep they “dig”
-
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on
-
Dobilas,
Thanks for the file. It was good to read the part showing different sequences of using the hats.
But I would still like to see some sort of thinking evaluation. This is different from the evaluation of knowing/understanding Six Hats. I would like to see if we can develop a grading system that evaluates the thinking process, particularly when using Six Hats.
The goal of thinking is not just to pick up something obvious and then put into the categories of the hats. The goal is to find a better solution. I expect it is very difficult to grade the solution. But it is possible to grade the deepness of the thinking process.
I do believe if we can develop a grading scheme for using Six Hats, we can help people to practice more, which helps people to truly develop the thinking habit.
I will first try provide some marks to my children on their six hat process, and will give some examples later.
-
Permalink Reply by Danny Stevens on -
A good thinking area Raymund. In schools here in Australia 6 hats is taught to kids when they around 8 years old but it never seems to be followed up. I taught my daughter to use the hats starting at age 5 and repeatedly used them when she had to make decisions or deal with things that came up. It is repeated use that brings the benefits. The spiral dynamics model is probably useful here, teach the hats at the simplest level and reinforce it, then introduce further complexities as competence grows. An example would be integrating other thinking tools with the hats, such as using the random entry tool with the green hat or having the blue hat call for harvesting and treatment.
Scoring hat use, I think, is a counter-productive idea because you will be providing the value frame work externally to your students, and it assumes that using more hats is always better, whereas a single use of one hat is very common, and most effective. Using more hats often dilutes the benefit when one worked so well. How about trying to get them to gauge "improvement over time" with repeated uses of the hats.
Also competency based training. How well do they understand the use of each hat? This has levels of competence. How well do they know how to combine the hats in sequences? This also has levels of competence but is very situational. How well do they identify appropriate moments to use the hats or to not use the hats?
-
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on
-
Danny, Thanks for the comments. They are very helpful.
Personally, I believe the thinking process should help to generate more matured results. Thus, for thinking training, I prefer my children to spend more time to think, not just following sets of sequences. I would like them to link to more possibilities. So far, I have been asking them to give ideas for all the six aspects. They can say one hat is not important, which is OK but they need to give the reason why it is not important. I believe this is the training on how to think with the help of using the aspects from Six Thinking Hats. I do not want them to remember the sequence of Hats A - B - C equals to Function D, and then treat using the sequence as thinking, which actually is just following a procedure, not thinking.
The measure of "thinking" is better output from the implementations. I believe we can assume the following relationship:
Output proportional to the depth of the thinking process
That means if the thinking process can generate better ideas, there are higher chances to have better outputs from the implementation. I expect statistically, deeper the thinking process, better will be the output from the implementation. Therefore, we can use "depth" to grade the thinking process.
In reality, I want my children to learn their subjects in school deeper than others, which means they will have better grades in school. Later, perform better in their life.
About spiral dynamics, this is the basic of the learning process. We (children and adults) all build our knowledge spirally. But with six thinking hats, one issue is that children may consider they already learned, and did not put more effort to there. Thus, I suggested giving some sort of grading so that they will see what is the goal and then have the driving force to learn more.
-
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on
-
Hi Dobilas,
I agree there is no obligation to follow a sequence. Here, I would like the children to think through. If one hat is less useful, just give a reason. When 6 hats is used, we already tried to put all the possibilities into 6 aspects. If I tell them to use "Black - Green" for improvement, I feel it may restrict their own thinking development. I believe they need to think why yellow is less important, but understand in some cases, they may also need yellow, e.g. they should not improve one of the disadvantages but changed one of the current benefits.
I did act as a chairman most of the time. I had some experience is using "Case Based Teaching". I more or less use the techniques to guide them to think and sometimes provide some hints.
I would like to discuss in more detail with you for the assumption of 'learn their subjects deeper than others' will mean they will 'perform better in their life'. I agree that there are many special cases. But I believe this is the basis of teaching 'thinking'. You may start a new thread for this discussion.
-
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on
-
Dobilas,
I totally agreed that success in life can come from numerous factors. Here, when we are discussing thinking training, the focus is what kind of thinking training can help a person to be more successful.
I found in one of your previous post mentioned that STH shows more obvious improvement to students with below average performance in school. I believe I experienced the same trend when I taught STH to the factory workers in China, who usually could not go into higher education institutes. I believe the main reason is that they do not know how to think and many actions are based on emotional feelings. STH provides a simple and structured approach for them to think and also helps them to control their emotional feelings.
But for students with above average performance in schools or top students, I believe STH can help them to do more. That is, help them to think deeper. With this, students need to put more efforts. In order for them to put the efforts, we need to build motivation into the training program. Marking or grading can be one approach.
-
Permalink Reply by Raymund Kwok on
-
The following is an example for grading. I discussed the topic with my 7 years old child. She provided the ideas while I typed into iPad. I suggested her to provide more at each hats. We first discussed red hat, then the other five hats based on the idea flow. We returned to a couple hats as she found out more ideas. At the end, we re-visited red hat. The discussion was about 20min.
Separately, I tried to provide a mark to the thinking process (note: here I would still give 1 mark if she say this hat is not important for the topic with a reason.) My simple marking scheme is 1 or 2 mark for each hat. If it is simply information gathering, I give 1 mark. If something more, I give 2 marks.
Topics: Back to school
Red Hat: Unhappy [One mark]
Yellow Hat: Learn more things; Meet friends; Play with friends; Like the physical exercise classes; Like to eat at school with friends [One mark as this is simply putting together information]
Black Hat: Wake up early; Need to focus at classes; A lot of homework; Less time to play [One mark as this is simply putting together information]
White Hat: New subject items in this year; New items can be found from the new school books; Need to find available extra-curriculum activities for this year [One mark as this is simply putting together information]
Green Hat: Need to spend time to think what activities to join, some possible ones are speech, skipping, ink painting, flute... [One mark, slight out of topic, probably she could not find anything really creative]
Blue Hat: Spend some time to prepare the new subjects while enjoying the remaining holidays; need to decide what activities to join [Two marks, I was surprised she has the action item to prepare the new subjects. ]
Red Hat (at end): Still unhappy; Some new activities may be exciting; Looking forwards to Christmas holidays
Total marks: 7
The marking scheme here shows the need to provide something more, or deeper into the thinking process. I expect we may not have 2 marks for red hat. So, the marks should be in the range of 6-10.
© 2013 Created by Administrator.
Powered by
