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An innovative education project to develop a carefully planned and thoughtful metacurriculum to run alongside the national curriculum that allows the skills and abilities for learnable intelligence to be developed in young people.

ThinkPlus is

  • a set of key realms which consist of thinking dispositions, mental management, thinking and creativity tools, and teaching for transfer, which — taken together — forms a new metacurriculum for young people to learn thinking and develop learnable intelligence,
  • a programme which young people contribute to and shape themselves,
  • a practical, flexible and systematic approach,
  • accessible to all schools and their teachers and students in various ways,
  • also accessible to parents and the community to ensure all children have the opportunity to create, and
  • based on current, on-going world’s best research and practice.

ThinkPlus is not

  • a project that can be delayed until children become adults,
  • something that ‘replaces’ other curriculum items,
  • a ‘banking’ view of teaching in which thinking tools are deposited into young people’s minds and then left there to flower or rot by chance, or
  • high-minded intellectual waffle.

We are all born with neural intelligence, or IQ — our raw raw ability to compute; how much ‘grunt’ there is in our brain, how big our ‘engine capacity’ is.

We gain experiential intelligence through our activities in a specific area, such as learning to play the piano.

We gain reflective intelligence by being aware of our thinking patterns, and the way we can change these patterns if we wish to.

Learnable intelligence – which is what ThinkPlus is all about – is a deliberate, structured combination of experiential and reflective intelligence.