Potential Development Using Thinking Tools: The Key to Flipped Teaching
Educators need to empower learners to be prepared for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, to be thinkers with the ability to pioneer the future. This book cracks teaching and learning myths that led to learners being perceived as knowledge duplicators instead of being knowledge creators.
Thinking tools move the focus of learning from mastering content to critical thinking. This requires the critical thinking toolkit, which is the mothership of all thinking. It engages learners’ forever-wandering minds with the learning task at hand, which is the substitute for the traditional expectations of “paying attention” and “memorising”. When employing thinking tools, learners become thinking engineers—taking ownership of what they must discover, create or solve.
Within this paradigm of teaching, teachers directly engage with learners’ brains, which goes beyond learner-centred teaching and defining learning as visual, auditory or kinaesthetic.
The book is based on examples of thinking tools sessions.
Dr Cas Olivier is a specialist on the thinking brain. In his work, he demonstrates how twenty-eight inborn thinking tools are integrated and holistically employed in thinking processes. This approach provides thinking roadmaps to gear learners towards developmental mindsets, and this thinking tools programme is registered with the South African Council for Educators. He provides online contact sessions to teachers, parents and learners, as well as businesses and entrepreneurs. He is also the author of The DNA of Great Teachers and a co-author of Critical Thinking: A Multi-Dimensional Approach in the Context of South Africa.
“Dr. Olivier surveys various teaching paradigms that historically have driven teaching and learning in schools. This context allows for a better understanding for the utility of various thinking tools that can be employed by both teachers and students to further understanding of interdisciplinary content. Understanding the limitations and thresholds for particular learning tools will help educators make more deliberate and genuine teaching decisions.”
Nathan Snyder, PhD
ELA Teacher, NYC iSchool; Lead Editor and Treasurer, Action Research Network of the Americas
“The text is reader-friendly, enabling a teacher, parent, student or practitioner to access information and start with the application of thinking tools without grappling with difficult educational theory or academic terminology. Given the importance of competencies that students need to acquire for coping with learning and life challenges in the 21st century and the fourth industrial revolution, the book provides a good and solid background for motivating a thinking tools-approach during teaching. The book is a welcomed and comprehensive text on developing thinking potential with application in mind.”
Mary Grosser
Extraordinary Professor of Cognitive Development and Critical Thinking Development, North-West University, South Africa
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