Start Thinking - Daily starters to inspire thinking in primary classrooms
Marcelo Staricoff & Alan Rees
Pub. Imaginative Minds Ltd
Reviewer: Barry Hymer, Director, Still Thinking UK Ltd
Start Thinking is a delight. It constitutes a significant and practical contribution to the canon of thinking skills resources, and is sure to prove popular as a classroom resource. Written by practising teachers for practising teachers, its core concept is disarmingly simple: it takes the form of a compendium of open-ended challenges which can be given to children at any time of the school day - but they have a particular role to play at the start of a school day - orienting children to intellectual enquiry in a playful, non-threatening context, and thereby setting the scene for the day ahead. After ten-minutes’ individual or collaborative work at a starter, the teacher can convene a plenary class discussion in which ideas are shared, fruitful and dead-end trails explored, implications raised and future avenues opened up. Only rarely will “right answers” emerge at this stage, but the genuine-ness of the enquiry will lead many children to take their explorations further - often in their own time. Even when children choose not to take their investigations further, the activity will have served to nurture many crucial learning dispositions and processes - such as connection-making, hypothesis testing, question-generating and coping with initial and subsequent uncertainties in pursuit of truth.
The starter activities are grouped into five broad areas (Number, Word, Science, Philosophy, Creativity Starters, and a slightly awkward catch-all category - “Extra Starters”). The boundaries between these areas aren’t always clear-cut. Nor, perhaps, should they be. Each starter is briefly summarised for Content (e.g. ‘Planets’) and for Processes (e.g. ‘inventing, remembering, improvising, devising methods’). Examples of children’s responses are provided, but no explicit suggestions for extension activities. These, however, are likely to develop from the children’s own responses and questions.
Start Thinking is not a resource exclusively for a pre-identified cohort of gifted and talented learners. It is an inclusive resource, promoting gifted and talented learning. In my experience it has, however, had a particularly useful role to play in intentionally problematising the learning experience for some able learners - especially those who have come to regard effective schooling as the public demonstration of the ‘rapid reveal’ - a headlong rush for the one correct answer. As Francis Bacon observed a good many years ago, “If a man will begin with certainties, he will end in doubts. But if he will be content to begin with doubts, then surely he will end in certainties.” Any resource which values and promotes children’s capacity for tolerating initial uncertainty, for generating their own questions and hypotheses, and thereby vitiating a crystallised curriculum’s tendency to do the opposite, is to be welcomed. For this reason alone, Start Thinking is hugely to be welcomed.
GEI Vol 21 Nos 2/3
