Thinking Skills - Classifying

Overview:

Classifying is a thinking skill that we use naturally to organise information and ideas. It is a vital skill for processing information and for the ability to use and apply information in new ways. Students work together to sort information into groups that have shared characteristics, which establish criteria for a classification group.

Classifying develops students’ ability to identify common features, improves their ability to handle and interpret information and enables them to retrieve information from their long-term memories more easily. It encourages students to critically examine information. They construct categories and then test them. Through this process they have the opportunity to develop their own concepts. This then allows the students to gain an insight into the principles and structures of the subject for themselves.

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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.

Classifying is particularly strong for addressing:

Information Processing: where students are required to classify and sequence, compare and contrast and analyse part and whole relationships.
Reasoning: where students are required to justify their categories, thus explaining their decisions based on inferences and deductions.
Evaluation.
Enquiry.

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Task management:

A: Groupings:

A group of 2 - 3 pupils works well
Make sure the pupils are sitting together so that they can each see the materials

B: Sources:

The card sets should contain no more than 25 cards and use words, short pieces of texts, pictures or diagrams.
When creating your card set you must think carefully about what categories make sense and are challenging
Be careful not to impose your categories on students and ensure there are some cards which will provoke debate
The lesson is likely to begin with students making a free choice of characteristics and should develop, through teacher intervention, towards reclassification addressing more challenging subject specific criteria

C: Role of the teacher:

Ensure the groups are seated around a table and that all students can see the cards easily. This encourages a better quality of discussion work.
Try not to tell students the answers or a solution! Initially allow them to group the cards according their own criteria.
If students seem stuck, prompt them by asking questions that encourage them to think hard about their categories.
If the answers appear limited encourage further development of an idea. It may be useful to say that another group has already used that method of classifying and they therefore need to create an alternative solution.
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.

D: Timings:

Timings may vary according to the complexity of the task and the nature of the group, but is likely to take 20 - 30 minutes.

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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 card to deal with? Why?
How did you choose your criteria for sorting?
Did you change your mind at any point? Why?
What criteria did you use? Why?
Can you show me a set of three linked cards and explain the connection?
How could classifying 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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