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Hi, I'm Aimee, and welcome back to the VEX Classroom and our Habits of Mind video series. Today, we're going to be talking about the Habit of Mind: Thinking Flexibly. As you know, Habits of Mind are a set of intelligent behaviors that students need in order to successfully navigate the challenges of school and the world in general. We are discussing several of them in this video series, and while we are talking about them separately, I'd like to stress that they overlap and complement each other, working together to help students be successful. So, I encourage you to watch the other videos in this series.

All right, today we're going to talk about the Habit of Mind: Thinking Flexibly. We'll discuss what it is, how you can foster it in your classroom, and how using VEX Robotics can help support it. So, what is thinking flexibly? First of all, thinking flexibly is the ability to look at a problem from multiple points of view. If you're trying to solve a problem, you can see it from your perspective, perhaps have multiple perspectives on it, and also see it from others' perspectives. That's very important to being a flexible thinker, right?

It's also crucial for a good, flexible thinker to see things from multiple perceptual perspectives. For example, you can drill down and see the minutiae or details in a situation, but you can also back up, zoom out, and look at something from the big picture, or from a balcony or bird's eye point of view. This allows you to see how all the parts of the problem are interconnected and work together, using that understanding to help solve a problem.

Additionally, good flexible thinkers can react when new information comes in while trying to solve a problem. When new information arrives, flexible thinkers can assimilate it and use it to come up with a new solution for a problem. Finally, a flexible thinker can employ a variety of problem-solving strategies. Not only do you have a couple of problem-solving strategies, but you also usually approach a problem in multiple ways. You're okay with adjusting your thinking and use that to your advantage when you're a flexible thinker.

So, how do you foster flexible thinking in your classroom? You can do it through modeling, the experiences you provide your students, how you group your students, and the general environment you create in your classroom. Let's talk about modeling for a minute. Modeling is probably the most powerful thing you can do to help develop flexible thinkers in your classroom. When you share your metacognition while solving a problem, it lets students see how an adult thinks about solving a problem, how they look at multiple ways of solving a problem, and how they make decisions on which one to use, adjusting when new information comes in.

When you have an opportunity to think aloud and solve a problem in front of your students or with your students, absolutely take it. It will definitely help your students become better flexible thinkers. One example of this that I can think of is when I was a second-grade teacher. At the beginning of the year, I used to let my students help set up the classroom—not the whole thing, but little parts of it. One part of that was how we were going to set up our reading nook. Right then and there, I'm modeling flexible thinking because I'm allowing all the kids to share their ideas, and I am modeling how I'm going to see things from their perspective and try to come up with, or help them come up with, a solution for what the best reading nook could be.

Thank you for joining us today. I hope you found this discussion on Thinking Flexibly helpful. Please check out the other videos in our Habits of Mind series for more insights and strategies.

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One year, they thought it would be fabulous to drape a piece of fabric over a table with a little opening at the front. It would be sort of like a tent, and they could go in there and read in this cozy little nook. Of course, the first thing I'm thinking of as a teacher is all the problems that could happen. If they're reading inside a tent, then I can't see them very well, or they're not gonna get their work done. They're gonna goof around, they're not gonna be reading, they're gonna be silly. But that's a great opportunity right there for me to model my flexible thinking and say, "Okay, I'll entertain this idea."

So I did, and we talked through what we were gonna do, and it didn't always go smoothly. Sometimes the reading nook, the little tent reading nook, was a problem. But in a way, that was another opportunity to practice flexible thinking with my students. We could sit down together as a class and have a discussion about how we were going to solve this problem and how to use the reading nook a little bit better. I could have them share their perspectives, and then we could work together to solve the problem. So that actually provided an opportunity.

Looking for those ways in which you can model flexible thinking through what you're doing in your classroom is incredibly powerful. Also, in general, you need to be providing your students with experiences that promote flexible thinking. That means you're doing project-based learning, cross-curricular projects, arts projects, engineering projects—things that require students to adjust their thinking along the way and to spend time on a project that requires collaboration, deep thinking, and assimilating new information along the way. That's really, really important in terms of helping your students be great flexible thinkers.

Along those lines, let's talk about grouping for just a second. When you're grouping kids for projects, it's very tempting to put them into groups of kids that are alike, right? Kids that work well together, kids that think similarly, kids that maybe are on the same level. But if you don't give students the opportunity to be grouped heterogeneously with kids that aren't like them, they're really missing an opportunity to practice their flexible thinking. It's not hard to change up your groups a little bit now and again and allow students to work with other kids, so that they get a chance of seeing things from the perspective of someone that might be difficult for them to do that with.

In general, too, in your classroom environment, to foster flexible thinking, kids have to feel safe. They need to feel like it's okay to share their ideas and to share how they failed and how they had to think again about something, or the different ways they had to try to come up with an answer to things and what they were thinking about during that. You need to be able to give them space to be proud, not just of their ideas, but their ideating, so that the process is valued in your classroom. Chances for them to fail and start again are definitely helpful when you're learning to think flexibly.

Another really little thing you can do is just change your classroom routine up now and again. Students, especially the young ones, need the opportunity to see that it's okay to change your mind and change what you're doing sometimes and adjust based on the information at hand. I know that can be really difficult for some of our little ones, but it's a really important experience to have.

How does using VEX Robotics support the development of flexible thinking in your classroom? Well, for our STEM Labs, from 123 on up, all provide project-based learning and deep problem-solving opportunities in which students have to try multiple approaches to solve problems.

Thank you for considering these strategies to enhance flexible thinking in your classroom. Your dedication to fostering a dynamic learning environment is truly appreciated.

They will have to go through an iterative process, where they try something, gather more information, make a decision based on the information, and adjust their thinking. They have to think flexibly to work through the STEM Labs. The STEM Labs also all involve sharing and discussing the ways that you're solving problems. So students have many opportunities to share the types of thinking that they're doing, how they solve problems, and the places where they actually struggle to solve problems.

And finally, all of our STEM Labs are rich in collaboration. Working together in groups to solve these problems, you're having to speak about them to one another, to come to consensus, to listen to other people's points of view, and perhaps decide your idea maybe isn't the best idea, or that you can change your idea and adapt and take on some of other people's thoughts. Those are incredibly powerful experiences for learning how to think flexibly.

So using the VEX STEM Labs is a great tool that you have in your toolbox to help your students become fantastic flexible thinkers and problem solvers.

I hope that you enjoyed this video, and I certainly hope you will check out the other videos in the Habits of Mind video series. Also, please check out the links we have for the resources shared below and go over to our PLC and post your thoughts about this video. If you have any ideas about fostering flexible thinking in your classroom, we would love to hear them. I look forward to engaging with you there.

Have a great day and see you next time in the VEX Classroom.

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