We offer a range of supporting resources to help you build Thinking Movesinto your teaching and learning: Students at Sandringham Primary, Newham, London could remember all 26 Thinking Moves in their very first session with facilitator, Paul Kell The simplicity, they are basic words that seem quite obvious but they have made a big difference because I can think about organising my thoughts and answers explicitly. Metacognition is embedded throughout continuous provision and is accessed by all children through personalised interactions. Enhancements are offered across the curriculum and metacognition forms a vehicle on which targeted teaching is delivered. For example, by combining thinking moves together, we have created thinking grooves. By using certain moves together, the flow of thinking is explicit. Thinking Moves A – Z is a vocabulary of 26 types of thinking. The Moves are understandable, comprehensive and memorable. They make metacognition simple for teachers and learners, bringing big benefits in school and everyday life.

Thinking Moves A – Z supports every step of the EEF’s recommended framework for metacognition and self-regulated learning. The thing I love most about Thinking Moves is that it enables my pupils to take control of their own learning and access learning opportunities independently. Once they are familiar with the 26 different ways of thinking (and their innumerable synonyms), pupils spontaneously use this knowledge to independently apply all types of thinking to all scenarios of their studies. To me, Thinking Moves A to Z is emphatically empowering!” - KS2 Class Teacher, Liverpool Stephen Walshe is the Co-Principal of the Fortune Kindergarten in Shanghai, and an accredited Thinking Moves trainer. Our thinking ability is what makes us distinctively human. Yet we have no generally accepted approach to teaching thinking – and no common vocabulary to describe different ways of thinking. This, when you think about it, is extraordinary. Imagine trying to teach or learn maths if we did not have commonly accepted terms such as add, subtract, multiply and divide.People who think in this philosophical way about their lives and their learning grow in a sense of agency – standing up more confidently for what they care for and value, whilst becoming more creative and collaborative members of their communities. If we can put names to the cognitive moves we make – if we can recognise and become aware of them in ourselves and others – then we can reflect on their purpose and value. If we can do that, we can begin to make conscious decisions to apply them – to take control of our own thought processes. That might lead to better thinking, better learning and wiser decisions – a better way of being! Brain development between birth and age five is immense. There is no other period in life where our brains develop so much or so rapidly as they do in those first few years. Even a PhD student does not make as many intellectual leaps and bounds during their studies as a young child does as they just learn to be a human. There is also a Thinking Moves Sign Language. Children love movement that is meaningful and connects to what they are learning. The most intriguing thing about introducing Sign Language to assist children use, notice, and identify their thinking moves and the moves others make, is how readily and naturally the children take to signing. The idea that this is another language, a language that people who have hearing problems use for communication, really captures the children’s imagination and attention. Connecting the Moves

The integration of the symbols into the classroom environment has ensured that there is conscious intent to implement metacognition within all areas of the curriculum. Teachers use the symbols as prompts. Children use the symbols to help them articulate their thinking and as an aid to knowing what strategies will help them further.They provide a way for me to dive deeper into a topic with the knowledge I already have and find new links I may not have found otherwise.

The language of Thinking Moves has become part of discourse in school. The subtle interplay between cognition and emotion has enabled staff to seamlessly manipulate metacognition into a tool to support emotional regulation and prosocial behaviour. This means that metacognition is not seen simply as twenty-six petals to sprinkle throughout a lesson, but instead metacognition is seen as the roots that anchor all interactions. The way we think, speak to each other, behave with each other, use materials, interact with the world . . . is rooted in metacognition. For anyone wanting to explore a metacognition approach to early-years practice then Roger’s Thinking Moves A-Z and my book, Beautiful Thinking, are a great place to start but you also have the tools already available to you right now. Just take a peek inside the early-years framework, Development Matters, and you will find that the whole of the Characteristics of Learning are metacognition skills. School Improvement Liverpool (SIL) supports educational settings to enable children and young people to be safe, develop, learn and achieve. To this end, we have developed a collaboration with Dialogue Works with a view to enhancingacademic progress, especially for lower attaining and disadvantaged students. Teachers have expressed their enjoyment incorporating the Thinking moves in their classes. They have remarked about how easily they can be embedded into any topic and how students are now able to use them naturally and without prompting. New teachers to our school are always very impressed at how well the students can remember them and how the students are able to continue using them over the span of their primary school journey.”

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Stephen Walshe argues that children, even children as young as 5 years of age, can be introduced to a vocabulary that helps them access their thinking. Metacognition has been identified as a powerful lever for learning. Of course, this complex activity involves more than one cognitive move. We are also using the Move DIVIDE in the sense of making a distinction, and numerous other Moves from the A-Z. At a more advanced level we use the notion of Thinking Grooves to consider the sequences of Moves we make in different contexts. But for the purposes of teaching for early metacognition it may be useful to focus the children’s attention on the idea of connection and generalisation, and to encourage them to reflect both on what they have learned about changes of state and on how making connections between different examples of a phenomenon / concept is a useful way of developing our understanding. We might even be able to support the pupils to CONNECT this use of the Move to other contexts in other subjects where its use might be profitable, so increasing the likelihood that they will make the deliberate decision to apply the Move independently.