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Cognito Lessons Added to Timetable
04 November 2022
Creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving skills have been added to the timetable for Senior School pupils in the form of Cognito Lessons.
Cognito Lessons aim to nurture the core cognitive and non-cognitive skills that young people will need in the future. Since September, all pupils in Years 7 and 8 have been participating in a weekly dedicated 35-minute Cognito Lesson to develop the competencies they will need in the workplace to help get them work and life ready. Working individually and in group situations, girls have undertaken fun tasks and exercises that challenges their ability to think creatively to solve real-world problems.
Based around five core Creative Thinking pillars of Analytical ability, Communication, Open-Mindedness, Organisation and Problem Solving, the sessions use active approaches to learning and girls are given a clear understanding of what sorts of skills they need to hone and why they are important.
Director of Teaching and Learning, Dr Amit Rajp, said: “As automation, artificial intelligence and algorithms replace many of the routine functions that people fulfil, in order to earn a living the young people who will thrive in the future will be the ones who can do what machines can’t: reason, reflect, come up with new ideas and develop new creative solutions.
“As educators we’ve been hearing for a while about the chronic skills shortage in industry, but this is the first time we’ve carved out a dedicated space in the weekly timetable to explicitly work on honing these kinds of skills and competencies - all capabilities that will be highly transferable whatever career path our pupils choose to take.”
This term, pupils have been completing their background research, coming up with exploratory questions to help them whittle down several areas of interest in order to identify the exact topic that they want to focus on, ready for the next stage of the project - producing a statement of research. The initial areas of interest cited by pupils are incredibly varied:
- Why are scientific names so complicated?
- The diet of international cricket players.
- How can we protect bees from pesticide poisoning?
- The history of British shorthairs.
We look forward to following the girls’ progress.
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