24 - 25 MAY 2024

Registration

Registration (on Plaza level entry from Merivale Street). Delegates collect name badge and lanyard.

8:30 – Welcome by Anthony Stevens

Acknowledgement of Country

Introduction: Dr Peter Ellerton

Bio: Peter Ellerton is Curriculum Director of the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project, Senior Lecturer in the school of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, Affiliate Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for Critical and creative Thinking. Peter’s areas of focus include Public Reasoning, Science Communication, Argumentation and Critical Thinking in education. Peter has been a teacher educator and a syllabus designer for the International Baccalaureate Organisation, the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (QCAA) and the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA).

Peter was one of a small group of academics who developed V9.0 of the ACARA critical and creative thinking general capability and is on the working committee for the National Assessment Program in Scientific Literacy. He has consulted and produced papers for a variety of organisations including the European Commission Joint Research Centre, the NSW Department of Education, the Australian Defence Force, the Queensland Office of the Coordinator General, the NSW Ombudsman and many private and public schools. He has delivered professional development in Teaching for Thinking throughout Australia and internationally and has been invited to deliver programs at the University of California Los Angeles, Pepperdine University Los Angeles and Simone Fraser University in Canada. Peters’ passion is working with educators to enable a teaching for Thinking focus across all year levels and subject areas.

Session 1

Beyond Bloom’s Taxonomy

For a long time, Bloom’s taxonomy helped to foreground thinking skills and provided a language and conceptual framework for curriculum and assessment design. But I suggest that this taxonomy is now doing more harm than good, since the hierarchical nature of cognitions assumed by Bloom is wrong—research has shown that the relationship of the cognitions to one another is far more organic and contextualised. This workshop presents a new way of focusing on student cognition using a critical thinking lens. Participants will be introduced to a more actionable cognitive framework and provided with resources that can assist in learning experience and assessment design.

Morning Tea

Morning tea and networking

Session 3

Values of Inquiry

Determining what we value about something allows us to construct criteria for evaluation. But what do we value in good thinking? One way of approaching this is to understand what we value in good inquiry. By articulating these values of inquiry, we can derive a language and a conceptual structure to help us evaluate thinking. In this workshop, we will outline some key values of inquiry and show how they can be used to provide feedback on the quality of Student thinking.

Lunch

Lunch and networking

Session 3

Mechanisms of collaboration

Collaboration is a key 21st century skill and an essential part of how we develop better thinking. Collaboration as a concept is not well theorised, however and, as a result, developing practical ways of optimising student outcomes through collaborative inquiry remains a challenge. In this workshop, we will focus on the latest research that makes explicit the mechanisms of collaboration and use this to construct criteria for learning experiences and assessment that focus on the constituent skills of collaboration.