ET Resources - STSC - Somerset Thinking Skills Course

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Somerset Thinking Skills Course (STSC)

The STSC Activities

Each module uses three kinds of visual activity to teach and practice important thinking skills:

Stimulus activities are playful tasks to promote creative thinking, risk taking and hypothesis testing in small and large groups. They are visual puzzles with many possible interpretations at different levels of sophistication (both literal and metaphorical). They also promote multiple connections between different content areas relevant to each module.
Artificial activities teach and practice important vocabulary, thinking skills and thinking processes. They are novel abstract puzzles which have little or no familiar subject matter. Hence students of varying ability often find they are operating on a level playing field.
Naturalistic activities check that students are able to apply the thinking skills and processes that they have explored and practiced in the stimulus and artificial tasks. Naturalistic tasks are so called because they are more closely related to problems in the real world. They are set in personal and social contexts and apply to many different curriculum areas.

ET Resources STSC Sets include the following handbook and seven modules:

The STSC Handbook explains the theoretical model and how the course has been structured and organised. It offers advice on timetabling, classroom management, effective mediation and diagnostic applications of STSC. The Handbook also includes useful checklists for both student and teacher.

STSC Module 1 - Foundations for Problem Solving establishes the meaning and purpose of STSC and teaches skills and attitudes that are a necessary pre-requisite to progress in later modules. The logo and conventions used throughout the course are introduced. The activities concentrate on reducing impulsivity (encouraging more thoughtful, systematic approaches) building confidence and communication skills and the ability to work in small groups.

STSC Module 2 - Analysing and Synthesising explores the significance of these processes to school and personal life. The STSC activities teach the thinking skills that lie behind analysis and synthesis and help the students to apply these skills systematically in problem solving situations across many different personal, social and curriculum areas.

STSC Module 3 - Comparative Thinking teaches the processes of describing, comparing and classifying and applies these to a wide range of personal problems and learning tasks.

STSC Module 4 - Positions in Time and Space revisits numerous thinking skills developed in earlier modules whilst developing student understanding of reference systems in time and space to help describe, order and make sense of experiences, thoughts and ideas.

STSC Module 5 - Understanding Analogies builds on the comparative processes developed in Module 3. It takes students through a series of increasingly complicated transformations and comparative processes to explore the nature of analogy, simile and metaphor.

STSC Module 6 - Patterns in Time and Space builds on Module 4 in developing an understanding of patterns and relationships in time and space and their relevance to planning, anticipating and making predictions.

STSC Module 7 - Organising and Memorising is a supplementary Module that can be used at any stage in the course. It explores techniques and strategies to facilitate the memorisation, recall and understanding of different types of learning material.

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