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Sample Thinking Group Schedule

Notes from Thinking Group class

Sample Thinking Group Schedule (Six weeks)

see a sample Thinking Group session (2 hours) below

Week 

Topic

Skills
1 Introductions & Questions
  • mapping ideas
  • articulating what you know
  • understanding what you don't know
2 Inquiry
  • evaluating what you want to learn
  • framing a question
  • establishing enabling constraints
  • building community and collaborative structure
3 Field of Inquiry
  • process writing
  • refining a question
  • research strategies
  • working with material
4 Setting the Board
  • reading as process and writing as thinking
  • evaluating material
  • responding to material
5 Inquiry and Research
  • providing feedback (to yourself and others)
  • re-evaluating your question
  • exploring what you don't know
6 Ideas and Audience
  • thinking toward or with an audience
  • incorporating feedback
  • scaffolding a project

 

 

Sample Thinking Group Session

Week IV (Course modality: Online)
 

6:00 - 6:15 Discussion
 

Question: Do you keep a journal or have a personal archive? If so, what do you write in the journal (if you want to share) or what do you archive? What are your tools or strategies to figure out what you’re thinking and feeling? Do you have a daily practice?
 

6:15 - 7:15 Synthesizing the patterns in your thinking and identifying your core questions
 

30 min Synthesize patterns and form questions as a class with DuChamp's The Fountain, The Bear, and Woolf's A Room of One’s Own 
 

15 min - In your “journal”, identify patterns in your thinking across resources. 

What are you noticing about work, what you like, and what questions are sticking out to you? And how can that help us reframe the question that we want to work on?

Outcome: finalize the question that you want to work on in your proposal
 

15 min - Class discussion: How do you know when you have a quesiton or a direction?


7:15 - 7:55 Working on your question: creating the space and building authority around your position
 

10 min- Journal through these questions

What’s at stake with the question you’re asking?

Why does your question matter?
 

20 min - Breakout Room Discussion: Discuss with each other your defense of your question:

Instructions: One student defends their question, and the other student connects them to resources to help with the defense of their question. You can add the suggestions to the resource bank you’ve been building. Then switch.
 

10 min - Students discuss their defense of their questions to the whole group, begin to brainstorm how their resource bank addresses their questions


7:55 - 8:00 

Concluding thoughts 

Next Steps

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.