3 things to encourage Structured thinking in the Learning Commons

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This article on Structured Thinking popped up in my feed and although it was published last year I wanted to reflect a bit on what we are doing in our Learning Commons to structure the thinking of our students.

1. Maintaining an up-to-date curated Libguide collection which supports both content and skill-based learning.
   For example, when we create a libguide for Tim Winton's Cloudstreet, we also include Skills based pages to encourage students to Annotating their text or draft a comparatie analysis essay.
   
2. Creating Research Scaffolds to support the curriculum and structure the research process and encourage deep inquiry learning.
   These research scaffolds are used from Year 7 to Year 12, both in a generic format but also a customised form. As an A3 sheet, they can be used to show evidence of the research process and development of thinking on a topic.
   
3. Being available for students as a sounding board. We can proof read essays, listen to oral presentations or help students get their head arond a topic. Our Learning Commons is a "yes" environment, we will do anything (within reason) to assist students to further their learning.

I am sure that there us much more that we can do to help students structure their thinking, but this is where we are at the moment!

References:

Schwartz, K. (2017). When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges. MindShift. Retrieved 26 February 2017, from https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/03/31/when-kids-have-structure-for-thinking-better-learning-emerges/