Thinking Skills teacher on Comenius course

Shirley Atie, a teacher of Thinking Skills within the Department of Education, recently attended a Comenius in-service training course, entitled "Strategies for Promoting Critical Thinking". Her participation in this programme was set up through the local Socrates Office.

Educators from England, Finland, Cyprus, Italy, and Spain also took part in the course, which was held in Vilnius, Lithuania, between June 9 and 13.

The course was designed for educators seeking ways to support the democratisation process through classroom instruction. The aim of the course was to help educators reshape classroom instruction with a coherent set of teaching methods that promote critical thinking and independent learning - and also to set up models and methods of staff development that can be used after the completion of the course.

Time was allocated to hands on practice of the different strategies learnt, including Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy and also introduced a framework for teaching and learning. The framework is a three-phase model that basically describes a process of thinking about the process students must engage in before, during and after a learning experience to truly benefit from that experience.

Ms Atie had the opportunity to highlight the work being carried out in Maltese state primary and secondary schools with regards to the direct teaching of Edward deBono's Thinking Skills. Ms Atie has now established links with the other participants who are all highly interested in Critical Thinking and how the strategies can be adopted across the curriculum.

The local Socrates Office and the Department of Education have given Ms Atie the required support which made it possible for her to attend this in-service training course.