Cognitive flexibility is the ability to shift thinking easily in order to solve problems. It includes the ability to adapt to unfamiliar or unexpected situations, the combine concepts creatively and to integrate different representations.
Teaching shifting strategies in the classroom:
- Introduce and define the concept of shifting strategies
- Model shifting strategies and explain what, when and how to do this
- Provide opportunities for active student learning
- Reinforce shifting strategies by embedding opportunities for doing this in the curriculum
- Reflect on students' use of specific strategies
- Challenge students and extend flexible strategy use to other academic areas and tasks
Warm-up activities that promote flexible interpretation of language and flexible approaches to reading, writing and maths
- Present ambiguous words and sentence to students in the form of riddles or jokes. This helps students use context clues to analyse words with multiple meanings.
- Encourage students to identify different ways they can use specific objects. This encourages them to shift approaches rather than getting ‘stuck' in one approach and helps them to understand that objects and words can have different meanings.
- Ask students to categorise weekly vocabulary or spelling words in a number of different ways
- Ask students to identify several different ways in which selected multi-meaning words can be used (e.g. cut paper, cut in line, cut class)
- Encourage students to write a short story from the perspective of an object to teach perspective taking
- Play word and maths logic games to help students manipulate words and numbers in different ways
Teaching students to develop metacognitive mindsets and strategies for shifting flexibility in selected content areas
Subject Area |
Strategies |
Oral language |
*Teach students to recognise and analyse ambiguities in words and sentences, and to shift between different meaning *Require students to identify multiple-meaning words by using contexts clues, etc. |
Reading decoding and spelling |
*Teach students to recognise which words can be analysed by using phonics and which words depend on sight vocabulary *Provide sentences-reading tasks where students need to shift between phonics and sight words. Require students to verbalise the difference, so they develop a metacognitive approach to decoding and spelling *Teach students to access their knowledge of prefixed and suffixes and related words in spelling |
Reading comprehension |
*Teach students to differentiate among main ideas, important ideas, important details, and less relevant details. *Require students to identify multiple-meaning words, as above |
Written language |
*Help students develop personalised checklists that help them differential between relevant and irrelevant details |
Maths problem solving |
*Require students to generate maths language for each operation. *Teach students to shift from the language used in word problems to the computational details and back again. *Require students to estimate the answers to word problems and to compare their solutions with their estimates. Teach students to ask themselves, "Doe it make sense?" |