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.
01
Every named way of thinking with a real literature
Candidates came from the fields that have written most about how professionals think: design research, systems science, philosophy, computer science education, cognitive psychology and the school thinking programmes. A candidate needed a body of published work behind it, not only a workshop format.
02
Four tests, stated before any cuts were made
Each candidate was asked four questions. Does it describe a situation differently from the others? Can a school team use it on a real decision within a week? Does it have a known failure mode? Is it already a strand of this toolkit under another name?
03
Two axes that separate the survivors
The survivors were placed on two distinctions from the literature: whether a way of thinking is mainly for understanding what is or for making what could be, and whether it attends to wholes and relations or to parts and steps.
04
Record what was set aside, and why
Every candidate that was cut is listed below with its reason. A set that hides its discards is asking to be trusted, and a reader who disagrees with a cut should be able to see exactly which test did the cutting.
Inputs
Design research
How designers work on ill-defined problems. Cross, Lawson, Schön, Dorst, Buchanan.
Systems science
Feedback, delay, stocks and boundaries. Forrester, Meadows, Senge, Checkland, Churchman.
Philosophy and informal logic
How claims and arguments are evaluated. Ennis, Paul and Elder, the Delphi Report led by Facione.
Computer science education
Thinking in terms of processes that could be carried out. Papert, Wing, Brennan and Resnick, Grover and Pea.
Cognitive psychology
Where reasoning goes wrong, and how knowledge shapes it. Kahneman, Willingham, Kuhn.
School thinking programmes
How thinking is taught and made visible in classrooms. Perkins, Ritchhart, Project Zero.
Method
It would have been easy to pick four ways of thinking I like. The four tests exist to stop that. The one that cut hardest was the second: can a school team use it on a real decision within a week? Several candidates with excellent literatures failed there, because they need years of disciplinary knowledge before they do anything useful.
The fourth test cut two candidates for a different reason. Futures thinking is a way of thinking in every sense, and it is also the whole of the futuring strand. Putting it here as well would count it twice.
The first axis comes from Herbert Simon. In The Sciences of the Artificial he separates the sciences, which describe how things are, from design, which is concerned with how things ought to be. His line is that everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. Some ways of thinking are built to understand a situation. Others are built to change it.
The second axis is older and plainer. Some ways of thinking work by taking a situation apart into steps, claims or components. Others work by refusing to, and insist that the behaviour lives in the relations between the parts. Most arguments between practitioners of different ways turn out to be arguments on this axis.
Crossed, the two axes give four cells, and each of the four survivors sits clearly in one of them. That is partly luck and partly the reason these four survived. A candidate that sat on top of an existing one failed the first test.
Placing a way of thinking in a cell exaggerates it. Computational thinking includes abstraction, which is about wholes. Critical thinking is used to decide what to do, not only what to believe. The positions are about where each way starts and what it reaches for first under pressure. They are not claims about everything each one can do.
Tests
Distinct
It describes a situation in terms none of the others use, so switching to it changes what is visible.
Usable within a week
A school team with no specialist training can use it on a live decision, badly at first, within days.
Has a known failure mode
Its literature names how it goes wrong. A method with no known failure mode has not been used enough to trust.
Not already a strand
It is not the futuring or complexity strand under another name.
What survived
Each of the four has a strong version and a version that keeps the name and loses the substance. Most of what schools meet is the second. The strong version is on each way’s own page.
A team draws the loop that explains why every fix for staff workload has made it worse, and stops adding fixes that feed the loop.
A poster of interconnected circles, drawn once at a retreat, which everyone agrees is very complex and nobody uses to change a decision.
A team watches how students actually use the library, reframes the problem from shelving to belonging, and tests three rough changes in a fortnight.
Five coloured stages, a morning of sticky notes, and a solution chosen by the most senior person in the room.
A department asks what evidence would change its mind about a new reading programme, writes it down, and then goes and looks for it.
A poster of question stems, and a habit of doubting every claim equally, which is not the same as weighing them.
A team writes down exactly what happens to a student absence report, step by step, and finds the step where it waits nine days on a desk.
A coding club renamed as a thinking curriculum, and the claim that learning loops in a block language makes students better at everything.
Set aside
Every one of these has a serious literature. Each failed one of the four tests, and each says which one and how.
Futures thinking
Failed the fourth test: it is already a strand. It is the futuring strand, which has its own page and worked example.
Ethical thinking
Failed the first test, in its own way: it is distinct, but it cuts across the others instead of sitting beside them. Every way of thinking hides a value judgement somewhere, so each of the four pages asks where its values sit.
Complexity thinking
Failed the fourth test: it is already a strand. It is the complexity strand. Systems thinking stays here because it is the teachable, diagrammable part of that territory.
Scientific thinking
Failed the first test: it is not distinct enough from critical thinking. It differs mainly in its emphasis on generating and testing hypotheses. In a school decision the two are hard to tell apart, so it is folded into critical thinking. Deanna Kuhn’s Education for Thinking treats them as close kin.
Historical thinking
Failed the second test: it is not usable within a week. Seixas and Morton’s six historical thinking concepts and Wineburg’s work are powerful, and they depend on disciplinary knowledge a mixed team rarely has.
Lateral thinking
Failed the third test: it has no known failure mode. De Bono’s techniques are widely used, and there is too little independent research on when they go wrong to state a failure mode with any confidence.
Metacognition
Failed the first test, in an unusual way: it is not one frame among others. Thinking about your own thinking is what switching frames requires. It is the move this strand teaches, not one of the frames it switches between.
Reading
The works behind the tests and the axes. Each of the four ways has its own reading list on its page.
Simon, H. A. (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press.
The distinction between describing what is and devising what ought to be. The source of the horizontal axis.
Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
Problem setting as the real work of a professional, and the frame as something chosen.
Perkins, D. N., Jay, E., & Tishman, S. (1993). Beyond abilities: A dispositional theory of thinking. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 39(1), 1–21.
Why people who can think well often do not. The case that noticing the moment is the bottleneck.
Ritchhart, R., Church, M., & Morrison, K. (2011). Making Thinking Visible. Jossey-Bass.
Thinking routines as the unit of teaching. The model for turning a way of thinking into something repeatable.
Dorst, K. (2011). The core of ‘design thinking’ and its application. Design Studies, 32(6), 521–532.
Frame creation as the part of expert practice worth transferring.
Kuhn, D. (2005). Education for Thinking. Harvard University Press.
Inquiry and argument as the two thinking skills schools should teach directly.
Seixas, P., & Morton, T. (2013). The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts. Nelson.
The strongest candidate set aside, and a model of a way of thinking made teachable.
Wineburg, S. (2001). Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. Temple University Press.
Why disciplinary ways of thinking take so long to learn.
Unsettled
Choosing is the easy half. Everything below is about whether the grounds for choosing were the right ones.