Greasley Beauvale Primary and Nursery School is working with ‘Thinking Matters’ to become a Thinking School.

Thinking Schools focus on explicit teaching of fundamental cognitive processes and uses a common language of thinking, which leads to a better understanding and effective construction of knowledge for our pupils.

Being a Thinking School means that our curriculum and teaching of the curriculum will enable our children to become reflective thinkers who are self-motivated and self-regulated. The children know a range of tools and strategies to use, not only in the classroom, but also throughout the whole of the school day. The vision for the development of our Thinking School also aligns with our already embedded Rainbow Values and ethos.

We use and implement 'Thinking Routines, Thinking Frames and Thinking Moves' within and across our curriculum. These thinking strategies allow the children to make connections, know the type of thinking they are being asked to do during each part of the lesson, organise their thinking and then deepen their learning and understanding.  

To become a Thinking School and achieve our goals, a whole school approach is necessary whereby all stakeholders, including our parents and our school governors are involved and committed to our school aims so that our children can achieve the best. We love to share our Thinking School journey with you so if you do want more information about how we use these, please get in touch.

We use 'Thinking Routines,' within our curriculum. These thinking routines allow the children to deepen their learning by making connections and asking questions. To find out which routines we are currently using, please have a look at the PowerPoint below. 

Our first full staff CPD day with our Thinking Matters consultant, Gemma, we learnt how the brain works, commits learning to the long term memory and how to retrieve this information to make connections to new learning.

To find out more about the brain and the science behind how we learn, please take a look at the PowerPoint below.

What is a Thinking Move?

We have introduced our children to the Thinking Moves A - Z, a scheme which was designed by Roger Sutcliffe in 2019. It is a metacognitive strategy which supports the way in which our children approach their learning. Instead of simply asking our children to 'think' about a problem, we use the Thinking Moves to explain clearly what type of thinking skill they need to use in order to solve a problem or complete their learning. 

Thinking Frames reduce the cognitive load as the children know how to present their learning with a familiar tool. The frames are designed to help children lay out their thinking in a specific way. The frames are used across the curriculum and at different part of the lesson. Children might produce a defining frame to retrieve previous knowledge, use a sequencing frame to retell a story or a connecting frame to connect decimals to fractions.