The Patterns of Thinking Method is a revolutionary way to teach thinking from PreK to PhD. ThinkBlocks harness the power of the Patterns of Thinking Method and put it in the palm of your hand. Do you want to:
- Focus on how to think and what to think?
- Teach thinking and state standards?
- Build deep understanding rather than memorize facts?
- Integrate curriculum?
ThinkBlocks™ are like a tactile, 3D, graphic organizer that teach 21st Century Thinking™ skills that all people will need in the "knowledge age":
- Critical Thinking: to analyze, deconstruct, and evaluate ideas;
- Creative Thinking: to construct new ideas and lines of thought;
- Systems Thinking: to understand complex patterns of ideas in context;
- Scientific Thinking: to observe, hypothesize, predict,and validate theories with evidence;
- Interdisciplinary Thinking: to unify, transfer, and integrate across subject areas; and
- Prosocial/Emotional Thinking: to build relationships through compassion, concern, and shared experience.
Research in education and cognitive science shows that we don't "get" knowledge from other people like one computer transfers a file from another. Instead, we actively "build" knowledge. Even when we are being taught by an expert, we are constructing new knowledge independently. This is the difference between the old paradigm of thinking and learning, called instruction, and the new paradigm, called construction. ThinkBlocks are informed by our scientific research in cognitive science, psychology, and education that reveals four universal patterns that underlie the construction of all ideas. In order to develop 21st Century Thinkers, educators must focus on these four universal thinking processes called the Patterns of Thinking™ Method:
- Make Distinctions: Compare and contrast between similarities and opposites and test boundaries and meanings,
- Construct Systems: Sort, nest, and categorize using part-whole thinking,
- Recognize Relationships: Make connections, interactions, associations, and cause & effect explicit, and
- Take Perspectives: See new possibilities from different points-of-view.
ThinkBlocks are a revolutionary, tactile, educational tool that makes it easy and accessible to teach beginner to advanced thinking skills. The unique design of ThinkBlocks makes them ideally suited to understand and build basic or complex conceptual models. Anything you can think of you can build.
ThinkBlocks reinvents the classic industrial-age construction kits like Lego, erector sets, or the wooden block with a new twist – they are multifaceted, hollow blocks with dry-erasable and reflective surfaces that can be stacked, nested, clustered, and towered. The same four simple patterns of knowledge construction that underlie an infinite and evolving world of ideas are also incorporated into the design of ThinkBlocks...Want to know how to get started with ThinkBlocks? Click here.
