News

Kindergarten, Pre-K teachers Attend Intermediate Training in Patterns of Thinking

April 17th, 2009

Fairfax, VA - Over the course of four days, a cohort of teachers in Fairfax County Public Schools moved one step closer to becoming expert teachers of thinking skills.

The series of workshops, led by ThinkWorks President and Founder Dr. Derek Cabrera and Vice President Dr. Laura Colosi, helped the teachers develop lessons that infuse essential thinking skills into their standards-based curriculum. 

The workshop represents a milestone for the group of educators in attendance -- mostly Pre-K and K teachers. They attended a workshop for novice users of the Patterns of Thinking Method toward the start of the school year. After several months of teaching thinking skills in their respective classrooms, they returned to share their experiences and develop Intermediate skills. Future workshops will help teachers continue to grow. In the next two stages of training, Expert and Ninja, educators will refine their teaching of thinking skills.

By approaching the skills at increasing levels of depth and difficulty, teachers learn together more effectively. The lessons they came up with during this workshop were phenomenal. “We know that educators need ongoing professional development. One ‘sit-and-get’ session is not enough,” Dr. Cabrera commented after the workshop. “And in their feedback, many mentioned that the Patterns of Thinking are incredibly deep. It's a comment on their receptivity too. Teachers are more than ready for a method of teaching thinking skills that works."

Dr. Colosi added that upcoming workshops will focus on assessment. “It's a natural fit: what we teach must be consistently assessed; what we assess must be explicitly taught. These two efforts should exist in a constant feedback loop to maximize our effectiveness at developing robust, lifelong thinking skills for all students.”

The next set of workshops in the Fairfax, VA, area will take place from Monday, April 27 through Friday, May 1.