When Emerie Lukas was hired to develop and teach a STEM Foundations course to middle school students at the Dayton Regional STEM School, she was starting from scratch. The stated goal of the course was to prepare students for more rigorous work in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) classes in high school, but Lukas knew that meant far more than academic preparation. She needed to teach her students how to give and take effective feedback, how to solve conflicts, how to organize themselves, and how to present, discuss and communicate their ideas. She knew without these qualities students wouldn’t be prepared for a rigorous STEM environment.
To get at some of these non-academic skills, Lukas thought she might be able to use strategies from “Six Thinking Hats” by Edward de Bono. “His idea with ‘Six Thinking Hats’ is that you can train people to approach a problem in a methodical, organized way,” Lukas said. De Bono used his strategy to coach employees at Fortune 500 companies, but Lukas thought she could adapt the strategies to her middle schoolers and in the process help them learn to give and take effective peer feedback.
The hats and the colors that go along with them can seem a little confusing, but their purpose is to help students think concretely about the kind of feedback they are giving. “Yellow hat” feedback is positive. “Black hat” feedback helps point out specific parts of the work that aren’t meeting the stated goal. This is not the time for suggestions on how to fix it, however, since there may be more than one solution. The “green hat” is when students can suggest ideas for fixing some of the issues raised during black hat feedback. These three hats are used most frequently, and some teachers Lukas has trained use only these ones.
[For more on this story by Katrina Schwartz, go to https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift...-effective-feedback/]
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