A way of thinking decides what counts as the problem before anyone starts solving it. Leave it unexamined and a team will solve the problem its habits hand it, very well, and wonder later why nothing changed.
Most failed school initiatives were solved correctly. The team did the analysis, wrote the plan and delivered it. What went wrong happened earlier, when the situation was first described. A falling attendance figure became a behaviour problem, or a data problem, or a communications problem, and from that moment every sensible step made the wrong thing better.
Donald Schön called this problem setting and argued that it is where professional judgement actually lives. Problems do not arrive as problems. They arrive as messy situations, and someone names the things that will be attended to and frames the context they sit in. Whoever does the naming has already done most of the deciding.
Ways of thinking are the practised versions of that naming. Systems thinking describes a situation as structure producing behaviour. Design thinking describes it as a gap between what is and what is preferred. Critical thinking describes it as a set of claims to be tested. Computational thinking describes it as a process that can be broken down and stated precisely. Each one makes different things visible. Each one hides something the others would have caught.
The ways are not skills a person has or lacks. They are habits of attention, and the literature on thinking dispositions puts the bottleneck in an unexpected place. Perkins, Jay and Tishman argue that people often have the ability to think well and simply fail to notice the moment that calls for it. Teaching the method without teaching when to reach for it produces people who can pass a test on systems thinking and never once draw a loop at work.
The names are also doing more work than they should. "Design thinking" in a school usually means a five-stage workshop with sticky notes. "Critical thinking" usually means a general skill that Willingham argues does not exist apart from knowledge of the subject being thought about. Neither label is wrong. Both have been worn smooth. I use them because they are the words people arrive with, and then spend a while taking them apart.
Switching between ways is worth more than mastering one. A team fluent in one way of thinking is efficient and blind in a predictable direction. A team that can name which one it is using, and deliberately try another for twenty minutes, catches the error before it becomes a plan. That switch is the move this strand contributes to the toolkit.
I start by asking the group to state the problem in one sentence, and then I ask which way of thinking wrote that sentence. The answer is almost always one nobody chose. It came from the last initiative, or the funder, or whoever spoke first.
Then I restate the same situation in each of the other ways, briefly and badly, to show that the restatements are possible. Quality comes later. The first job is to break the sense that there was only ever one way to describe it.
And I try to leave behind a routine instead of a vocabulary. Ritchhart, Church and Morrison make the case that thinking becomes teachable when it becomes visible, through short, repeatable routines a class can run on any content. The same applies to staff. A named question the team asks every time a plan is proposed will outlast any training day on the four ways.
The moves
None of them needs a workshop. Each one is a question a team can ask in the first ten minutes of any planning meeting, and each gets better with practice.
Ask which way of thinking produced the problem statement on the table. The point is to turn an invisible habit into a choice. Once a frame has a name, a group can decide to keep it, which is a different thing from never noticing it was there.
Restate the situation in a different way of thinking and see what the new statement asks you to do. Dorst calls this frame creation and treats it as the core of expert design practice. It is the cheapest move in the strand and the one most likely to change a decision.
Run two ways of thinking on the same situation and put the results side by side. Where they agree, the finding is probably sound. Where they disagree, you have found the part of the situation nobody understands yet, which is where the attention should go.
Turn the frame into a short routine with a name: a question asked at the start of every planning meeting, a loop drawn before any intervention is agreed. Routines survive staff turnover. Workshops do not.
Limits
Every method in the toolkit has a failure mode, and teaching the tool without its failure mode is how a method becomes a ritual. These are the ones for ways of thinking.
Worked example
The strand taken out and used. Four ways of thinking, chosen on stated grounds, each followed through one school day as the same school reviews the same plan. Everything here is general and open. The people are illustrative.
There are dozens of named ways of thinking, and every one has a literature arguing it matters. A set of four is only useful if the discarding was done on stated grounds. These are the grounds.
Two distinctions, crossed. What comes out is not a ranking and should never be read as one. It is four ways of describing the same situation, different enough that switching between them changes what you see.
Hold one thing steady (the drawing, a dimension, a person) and let the four ways vary.
The toolkit’s worked situation, framed by each strand in turn. The ways-of-thinking framing asks whether the problem is the right one.
Unsettled
The honest list, and the part of this page I would defend least confidently.