Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats

What Edward de Bono is doing to teach people how to think may be the most important thing going on in the world today

(George Gallup in de Bono, Teach your child how to think, 1992, blurb)

Edward de Bono has done more for the way we think about thinking than anyone else in the modern world.  The Six Thinking Hats seem to have been around for quite a long time now but they are still one of the best and easiest strategies for helping children to organise and share their thinking in distinct ways.  We have presented various resources here that have been useful in our classrooms and are based on the wonderful books and other publications by Edward de Bono himself.  We recommend that you visit our annotated bibliography to check out some of the  resources available by Edward deBono, or check out his HomePage at  http://www.edwdebono.com/index.html for details of  his many other valuable publications and educational pursuits involving thinking skills.

A two page handout explaining the Six Thinking Hats for parents.  Useful for parent workshops.  Based on ideas presented in Edward de Bono's book  Teach Your Child How to Think (Viking, 1992).

A planning matrix that includes a useful explanation of the Six Hats as well as space for designing your own activities.  Based on ideas presented in de Bono's book Teach Your Child How to Think (Viking, 1992)

Choose one of these hat templates to design your own Six Hat activities for the classroom.  Enlarge them onto A3 or poster sized cardboard to use for group brainstorming activities. 

Display these posters of the Six Thinking Hats in the classroom or use them for thinking activities or group brainstorming. They include the name of the hat and prompting questions to guide discussions or problem solving.  Based on ideas presented in de Bono, Edward. (1992). Six thinking hats for schools (Books 1-4) Resource Book. Cheltenham, Vic.: Hawker Brownlow.

Click on the link above to download and print six brightly coloured posters of deBono's Thinking Hats available online from Swan Hill College in Victoria.

Planning and resources for a number of activities incorporating the Thinking Hats.  Use the white hat to develop factual knowledge of the major authors of Fairytales, use the red hat to explore feelings about fairytale characters, use the yellow and black hats to investigate the good points and problems of fairytales, and use the green hat to develop new ideas.

This booklet for students in years 1-3  includes a number of "hat" activities as well as other thinking tasks and graphic organisers that encourage students to respond to a variety of well-known picture books including Two Summers, Rosie's Walk, Shutting the Chooks In, Farmer Beans and the Pantry Frog, The Ugly Duckling, Queenie the Bantam, and other titles, thematically linked via the "farm" theme.  Click on the above link to download and print this booklet or adapt for your own educational purposes.

This one page overview breaks questions and prompts for discussing and responding to literature into six sections that correspond to deBono's Six Hats.  Use them to engage students with the focus literature and with this unique way of thinking.

Students can follow the guide (originally developed by Pam Ramsay and Gayle Mason (Hercules Road State school) to help them consider all ways of thinking about their book, and to help them write a Book Report using all Six Thinking Hats.

The purpose of these hats is to provide questions to guide students in responding to/ reflecting on activities.  Designed by Alisa Altmann to support a mathematics program, these hats can actually be used within all KLAs to respond to all sorts of activities..

Students use  this Math Reflection Sheet  to reflect on mathematics activities.  Children choose to respond using any colour hat of their choice by colouring the hat and responding accordingly.  A useful reflection sheet that could be adapted for any purpose.  Designed by Alisa Altmann.

Link above to access a variety of Six Thinking Hats resources on the In2Edu site including a range of posters and student awards in colour and black and white.  Scroll down the page to view the links to these resources.