On the second day of Tech-mas, while Christmas lights were blinking…
I learned about hexagonal thinking!
Have you ever heard of hexagonal thinking?! It is a strategy used to consider connections between people, places, or ideas through discussion and critical thinking.
Cult of Pedagogy does a great job explaining how it works:
When you place an idea on a hexagon, it has six sides where connections could be made to other ideas. When you place many ideas on many hexagons, the discussion about where to connect what will be different every time.
If you gave the same seven idea cards to seven people, do you think you’d get the same seven webs of interconnected hexagons? Would the people explain the connections in the same way?
Nope.
And really, that’s the beauty of hexagonal thinking. It provides a springboard for a totally creative discussion. When you give a small group of students a deck of hexagons and ask them to connect them however they choose, every group will come up with a different web for different reasons. Along the way they’ll hopefully question each other and dig deep into the concepts on the cards, arguing about which idea connects more to an important concept and which example deserves one of those precious six sides.
Check out more examples and ideas from Cult of Pedagogy or from Spark Creativity.
Get started today by using this Google Slides template and share it out with students on Google Classroom! Hexagonal thinking can easily be used with characters in a Benchmark Advance story or from a novel study or even key concepts in social studies, science, and math!
Merry Tech-mas!
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