Developing thinking skills
Keith Topping, director of the Centre for Paired Learning, University of Dundee
 

"Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare" Harriet Martineau "There is more to be learned from the unexpected questions of children than the discourses of men." John Locke

Thinking skills are in. Everyone is talking about the need to develop higher order thinking. For the busy teacher overloaded with the national literacy hour, numeracy hour, national assessments and school inspections, how on earth you fit it in is a problem.

Past approaches to thinking skills were of three types:

1. Teaching thinking skills embedded in a traditional curriculum subject (e.g. science).
2. Teaching thinking skills across the curriculum - infused into all curriculum subjects.
3. Teaching thinking skills as an abstract freestanding activity, using special activities, tasks or games.

There are some very successful examples of type 1 such as the Cognitive Acceleration through Science programme (see Speaking to learn, Literacy Today, December 2000), but do the gains transfer to other subject areas? The problem with type 2 is that it requires very gifted, well-organised and hard working teachers in every subject area. The problem with type 3 is that it gobbles up more timetable space, and there are even bigger doubts about the transfer of skills to other situations.

This article describes a fourth way: paired thinking. This links the development of thinking skills to another transferable skill which is already broadly applied across the curriculum and outside school, namely reading (but it could also be used with writing or research skills). So wherever reading can be found, thinking can go with it.

What is paired thinking?
Paired thinking is a framework for pairs working together. Some difference in reading ability is needed in each pair. The pairs can be peers of the same or different ages, parents working with children at home, teaching assistants working with children in school, or volunteer adults (such as senior citizens) working with children in school.

The advantages of paired thinking are many. It encourages active participation as both the helper and the helped child are busy thinking all the time. It is flexible and can be adapted for use in the classroom, at home or in the community. Since all children have an opportunity to participate, it is socially inclusive. Because it so adaptable it is more durable, since it remains effective when less than perfectly implemented or disrupted by pupil and teacher absence.

In piggy-backing thinking skills upon reading skills, the approach provides the potential for paired reading to include higher order reading and other skills.

What is paired reading?
The paired reading method has long been well known. It is a kind of supported or assisted reading, intended only for use with individually chosen, highly motivating, non-fiction or fiction books which are above the independent readability level of the tutee (but of course within the independent readability level of the tutor).

However, the name has been a problem - the phrase 'paired reading' has such a warm, comfortable feel to it, that some people have loosely applied it to almost anything that two people do together with a book. Of course, the effectiveness research only applies to the specific and structured technique of paired reading (described in Topping, 1995, 2001a).

In a recent review of the effectiveness of 20 interventions in reading, paired reading ranked as one of the most effective (Brooks, Flanagan, Henkhuzens and Hutchison, 1998). The paired reading method has now been very widely disseminated all over the world, and has been demonstrated to be effective with thousands of children in hundreds of schools. It has been the subject of many research reviews and there are many controlled studies demonstrating effectiveness. Follow-up studies indicate that gains are sustained and do not 'wash out' over time.
A recent large-scale project in Scotland involved cross-age peer tutoring using paired reading in many primary schools. Pairings were typically between whole classes of six- to seven-year-old and 10- to 11-year-old pupils. Pre-post reading test gains for both tutors and tutees were substantially larger than normally expected, and larger in experimental groups than control groups. Overall, the least able tutees gained the most on test, and the least able tutors gained the most. Low ability tutors produced tutee gains at least equivalent to those produced by high ability tutors. Overall, male tutors did better than female tutors in terms of their own test gains. So perhaps boys learn better by being tutors than by being tutored.

Social gains were also widely reported. Each participating teacher recorded their observations of child behaviour in the classroom during paired reading. Very few teachers did not observe a positive shift in the majority of their children. The effects on other subject areas and outside the classroom were not quite as strong, but still very positive, especially in motivation. Particularly striking were the improvements in pupil self-esteem and their ability to relate to each other.

How does paired thinking work?
Paired thinking usually involves starting with paired reading, then moving the pairs on to reading and thinking, expanding and developing the discussion inherent within the paired reading approach. Paired thinking involves training tutors and tutees to ask increasingly intelligent questions about what they have read together. It thus develops Socratic questioning - a thinking skills method about 2,500 years old.

Paired reading should continue only for two to three weeks until pairs become fluent with the method, before moving on to paired thinking. Some pairs (and especially peer tutors) find the latter much more challenging, and want to return to the easy, comfortable, flowing routine of paired reading. Paired thinking has three stages (before, during and after reading). Within these ages, there are 13 activities - for example, looking at structure, author aims, prediction, summarising and evaluation, supported by prompt sheets of questions. These are available in four differentiated levels of complexity and difficulty, to suit different pairs and to provide developmental progression. However, tutors are very much encouraged to view the prompt sheet only as a training and fallback resource, and to generate their own questions of high relevance to the text and their partner. Additionally, there are 21 Tips for Tutors, available as a brief reminder sheet.

Thanks to the four differentiated levels of prompts, young and less able readers can participate, but the top level is certainly applicable to higher ability and age ranges. At all levels, the intellectual strain on the tutor is quite considerable. Indeed, among both researchers and practitioners, there is now more interest in the impact of being a tutor than on the value of being a tutee.

A paired thinking approach challenges both tutors and tutees by providing practice in critical and analytical thinking, with the tutee learning critical questioning techniques from the tutor. It can be applied flexibly to any reading experience shared by the pair, enables them to pursue their own interests and motivations, and encourages critical and analytic discussion in the pair's own vocabulary. Paired thinking also aims to help pupils to identify, review and evaluate the values they and others hold, and recognise how these affect thoughts and actions.

Evaluation of paired thinking
Measuring improvements in thinking skills is difficult. Paired thinking necessitates slower progress through books than paired reading, because much more time is spent in Socratic discussion, so crude reading ages might not be expected to rise so much. However, McKinstery and Topping (2001) used the technique on a cross-age tutoring basis in a high school, and found remarkable increases in scores on reading tests for the tutees - far beyond any normal expectations. Both staff and pupils gave positive evaluations of the process and outcomes. In terms of affective gains, tutors appeared to gain more from the implementation than tutees. Both tutors and staff thought that there had been a positive effect on the thinking skills of both tutors and tutees.

A criterion-referenced test of thinking skills was devised by Bryce and Topping (2001), and applied on a pre-post basis to cross-age tutoring in one primary school. One group started with paired reading then switched to paired thinking six weeks after, while another group continued with paired reading throughout. The tutees in the first group showed significantly greater gains in thinking skills than the paired-reading-only group, although this was not true for the tutors. Further research is now in hand, involving a more sensitive test of thinking skills and more detailed analysis of the process of implementation, actual tutoring behaviours, and the development of meta-cognitive skills.

A number of schools are currently experimenting with family involvement in paired thinking at home, and these results are awaited with interest.
 

References
Brooks, G., Flanagan, N., Henkhuzens, Z. and Hutchison, D. (1998) What works for slow readers? The effectiveness of early intervention
schemes. Slough: National Foundation for Educational Research.
Bryce, A. and Topping, K.J. (2001) Peer Tutoring of Thinking Skills in Primary School. Paper submitted for publication.
McKinstery, J. and Topping, K. J. (2001) Peer Tutoring of Thinking Skills in High School. Paper submitted for publication.
Topping, K.J. (1995) Paired Reading, Spelling and Writing: The handbook for teachers and parents. London and New York: Cassell.

Topping, K. J. (2000) Tutoring By Peers, Family and Volunteers. Geneva: International Bureau of Education, United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). http://www.ibe.unesco.org/International/Publications/EducationalPractices/prachome.htm
Topping, K. J. (2001a) Thinking Reading Writing: A practical guide to paired learning with peers, parents and volunteers. New York and London: Continuum International.

Topping, K. J. (2001) Peer Assisted Learning: A practical guide for teachers. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books.
 
 

Resources Information on the Read On project can be found at: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/eswce/research/projects/readon/ A video resource pack for peer tutoring in paired reading and paired thinking (Topping and Hogan, 1999) can be ordered online from www.bpes.com. The Thinking, Reading, Writing website associated with Topping (2001a) has many free resources. Summaries of this broader work are available on the Scottish Council for Research in Education website: www.scre.ac.uk/spotlight/index.html - Spotlights 82 and 83. For further information about peer assisted learning across the curriculum, see Topping (2000, 2001b). More information can also be found on Keith Topping's personal website at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/eswce/staff/kjtopping.php

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