Six Thinking Hats
Six Thinking Hats is a time-tested, proven and practical thinking tool. It provides a framework to help people think clearly and thoroughly by directing their thinking attention in one direction at a time--white hat facts, green hat creativity, yellow hat benefits, black cautions, red hat feelings, and blue hat process. Dr. de Bono wrote this international best selling book in 1985.
Put on your thinking caps and stretch your ideas, look at things from different viewpoints to give a more complete study of the work you are thinking about.
Thinking is a skill that can be taught. One method we use with great success is that of De Bono's Six Hat Thinking. The children put on their thinking caps when they use their White Hat for facts, Red Hat for feelings, Blue Hat for reflection, Black Hat for checking ,Yellow Hat for optimism and Green Hat for imagination!
The Six Thinking Hats approach is designed to focus children's attention on different types of thinking about problems and can be applied in almost any situation or curriculum area. Each coloured hat is associated with a type of thinking.
Six Thinking Hats is a flexible and easy-to-use thinking process that leads to amazing results with innovative thinking, improved communication, and reduced meeting time. In traditional thinking we constantly find ourselves in conflict. Each side seeks to criticize the other point of view. The Six Thinking Hats method, however, encourages parallel Thinking where everyone explores all sides of an issue at the same time. Six Thinking Hats puts everyone in meetings on an equal playing field, keeps egos in check, depersonalizes criticism, and creates an open environment that encourages the unique contributions of each individual, even those who are typically more reserved.
All people are unique and so are their thoughts. People tend to approach problems and situations from different perspectives, which subconsciously influence the way each person thinks. De Bono’s six thinking hats is an
effective method to help your learners analyse a situation from different perspectives. Often conflict arises in the classroom because of learners having different ideas and learners seeing situations from different perspectives. De
Bono’s thinking hats take care of that conflict and develop a useful technique to accommodate all the different learners in a creative way. This method of thinking ensures that all learners are focused at all times and that all
learners are thinking about the same subject. Teachers often find that their learners experience team work as more productive when approaching it from the six thinking hats’ perspective and then the learners tend to be happier within that group. De Bono’s thinking hats are both fast, smart and efficient and increase the creativity of ideas within different groups. The thinking hats method ensures that all themes and topics can be taught without too much conflict and creates respect between the learners thinking from different perspectives.