Science/Thinking skills: Mind spinners

When delivering in-service training to teachers and advisers around the country, one of the activities I give to colleagues is a collection of true or false statements. The statements are intended as rich discussion points for small groups of three or four to engage with, in order to pinpoint what they know, what they don’t know, and what they partly know.

Sometimes the discussions reveal gaps in knowledge, misconceptions and stereotypes, which, for many teachers, can be a bit of a shock and embarrassing! Finding out that you have been unwittingly passing flawed information onto hundreds of children over the years can be painful. This is great news for professional development, though, because it champions lifelong learning. Teachers are able to take this new-found knowledge back to the classroom to challenge their children.

Common misconceptions

There are some statements that require little interpretation and are easily sorted in the minds of learners, whereas others cause all sorts of problems and argument. Of all the statements, ‘The Earth spins anticlockwise’ causes the most debate. From the dozen or so sessions I have delivered in the last year, most groups tend to answer in a fairly predictable way: the vast bulk agree and only a minority disagree, saying that the Earth spins in a clockwise direction. But who is right? The disagreement is hugely significant because it means some teachers are telling their children one thing and other teachers are telling their children something quite different. In this situation it’s tempting to just tell colleagues ‘the answer’, but drawing on secondary sources and relating a real-world experience here and there certainly helps to open eyes and widen minds.