Futurelab: Thinking Guides
01 January 2010
Thinking Guides can support independent and group research projects with frameworks for thinking, planning and enquiry. Print them, edit them or use them as inspiration to make your own.
This pack provides a series of ready-made interactive 'thinking guides' or 'frameworks' which can support students' projects and research. Thinking guides support the thinking or working through of an issue, topic or question and help to shape, define and focus an idea and also support the planning required to investigate it further. These thinking guides can be used as a basis for whole class discussion, or emailed to individuals or groups to complete. They can also be used as a presentation tool to share your findings and thinking with others.
With this pack you can:
- Use our ready-made thinking guides
- make a new thinking guide from scratch
- use it to set class projects
- print them out for each student
- change and customise thinking guides, you can add or change text, shapes, images etc.
- as a teacher, you can set up the sequence that you want the thinking guide to be revealed in, so that you can stage the thinking activity
- you can present your project
- you can send your thinking guide to a whole group of people
- work in groups on the same thinking guide.
These thinking guides were created as an editable and printable resource that can be used easily in the classroom (as well as other spaces where guides are needed to help structuring thinking and planning). They built on Futurelab’s work with young people and teachers to scaffold enquiry and project work.
The guides built on Futurelab’s Enquiring Minds programme. Enquiring Minds was a three-year research and development programme, run by Futurelab and funded by Microsoft.