PMI Critique

Positives
Students learn to identify the type of thinking required for each graphic organiser, reducing confusion.

Thinking Maps can be used cooperatively to help expand or clarify thinking.

Thinking Maps claim that over time, when used with a class of students the thinking maps become a shorthand for a particular type of thinking that you want them to perform. For example:

As soon as you say “ let’s do a double bubble on….” they know immediately that they are being asked to carry out an exercise in which they are expected to identify characteristics of two items and then sort them into things that are different between them and things they have in common. In other words it tells them that you want them to do some compare and contrast thinking (www.response-education.org).

Thinking Maps are a richly developed, efficient and manageable graphic organiser framework that helps students instantly visualize their thinking.

Thinking maps are based on a simple yet profound insight: The one common instructional thread that binds together all teachers, from pre-kindergarten through postgraduate, is that they all teach the same thought processes (http://dft.designsforthinking.com/?page_id=17).

Our brain thinks in pictures (visually), as well as auditorily, and kinesthetically. By giving students control and possession of these tools, it is a breakthrough in formative assessment as it allows teachers to see the progression of students thinking. It gets teaching away from to much teacher talk (auditory), because their in control of those tools, which engages them in taking part in their learning (Hyerle, n.d.)

EOTC link: As the students internalize the richly developed thinking maps over a period of time, it will help them to mentally image their thinking in scenarios where access to technology and physical resources are limited: such as learning experiences outside the classroom (EOTC). For example, If a class were doing a bush study and were required to compare two trees, they could visualise a double bubble map.

Negatives
No suitable map for concurrently comparing more than two things. For example, the double bubble map can only manageably compare two things at a time, while a venn diagram can compare multiple things at once.

Requires school-wide consistency in order to maximize benefits and avoid confusion.

Could cause confusion when changing schools if organisers are used in differenet ways.

Restricts students to one way of visualising certain types of thinking. Murdoch & Wilson (2004) suggest while it's beneficial to become familiar with various thinking tools, these should not be taught in isolation.

Thinking Maps implementation for students, teachers, and leadership is a comprehensive, and presumably costly, whole school process for improving the teaching, leading and learning of all participants in a school system.

If it were in your schools long term plan to teach these thinking maps exclusively for a particular year, or for the whole school throughout it’s schooling years,  it could limit the use of more suitable thinking tools for particular types of learning. For example, if you were doing a unit on drama, De Bono’s thinking hats might be a more suitable tool for that unit to get in touch with the emotions and art of that learning.

Interesting
While some graphic organisers look like thinking maps they are used differently and are not the same thing (Source - http://thinkingmaps.com/blog/difference-between-thinking-maps-graphic-organizers/)

Consistent school wide use of thinking maps would increase the effectiveness and seamless integration into student's thinking.

The response-education website limits the Brace Map to the analysis of physical objects only. I believe this map could be used to break down any concept into it’s parts.

It's very clear that it's a framework that has been RICHLY DEVELOPED!