Thinking Skills - Audience and Purpose

Overview:

This strategy enables students to give consideration to audience and purpose. The audience could be people of a particular age, from a particular region or with a common interest. The purpose could be to entertain, inform, explain, persuade, serve a practical need or decorative function.

The success of a ‘product’ is significantly determined by whether suitable components have been put together well to suit the purpose or need. Audience and purpose encourages students to think hard about why things are done and takes them into the realms meeting a need or a demand rather than just doing or supplying something.

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Thinking skills objectives:

Each lesson needs a thinking skills objective [which may run parallel with a contextual objective or stand alone]. This is then referred to throughout the lesson and unpicked during the meta-cognitive plenary.

Audience and purpose is particularly strong for addressing:

Evaluation: where students can judge the value of information against criteria developed by them.
Reasoning: where students make informed judgements and decisions and give reasons for opinions and actions.
Enquiry.
Creative Thinking.
Information Processing.

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Task management:

A: Groupings:

Groups of 2 - 3 pupils works well
Make sure they are all seated around a table so that they can see the materials clearly

B: Materials:

These may be a set of characteristics, a range of products, or a set of images. Given a set of possibilities pupils must choose those most suitable for a purpose. To do this they need to identify the criteria (this term may need further classification) for success or failure.
Make sure there are enough different options to make the choice challenging and open to debate.
An example might be to offer 4 - 6 products or descriptions of products. This could be in the form of menus and a group of different recipients. Groups of pupils then identify the most appropriate menu in each case.

C: Role of the teacher:

Try not to tell students the answers
If groups seem stuck, prompt them by asking questions
If the answers appear limited encourage further development of an idea.
Ensure you listen to all groups in discussion to provide examples of thinking which you can use in your metacognitive plenary.

D: Timings:

Timing will vary according to the complexity of the material and the students involved. Encourage students to spend at least 10 minutes to evaluate how they made their decisions. Whole class discussion should follow to allow each group to have an input.

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Role of the teacher:

Ensure the groups are seated around a table and that all students can see the ‘products’ easily. This encourages a better quality of discussion work.
Try not to tell students the answers!
If students seem stuck, prompt them by asking questions.
If the answers appear limited encourage further development of an idea.
Ensure you listen to all of the groups whilst they are working as this provides examples of thinking which you can then use in your meta-cognitive plenary.

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Metacognitive plenary:

Important questions to ask in order to unpick the thinking process are:

How did you start? Did you disagree? How did you come to one answer?
Which was the most difficult ‘product’ to deal with? Why?
What is a criterion? Why do we need criteria?
Why do we use different criteria at different times? Are some more important?
How could this be used in another subject? In life?

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Assessment for learning:

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Examples of lessons:

Click on the subject button for a list of materials. Each lesson will have a brief summary of how the teacher intended it to be used and copyright free resources. In some instances the teacher concerned has indicated where the resource used might be found.

Have you prepared a thinking skills lesson that has worked well for you and that you are prepared to share?

If so please complete the attached form [Word 35KB]

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