A Brisbane school has developed a ground-breaking project to promote effective thinking across all educational practices - academic, wellbeing and co-curricular - thanks in part to Hannah Campos Remon who is passionate about helping teachers and students to develop their thinking skills.

As Director of Organisational Learning and as a teacher at Brisbane Grammar School (BGS), Dr Campos Remon played an integral role in the project, called Effective Thinking Cultures, by leading and developing research initiatives that made a huge impact on its success.

“We’ve been able to extensively investigate the beliefs, values and behaviours of teachers and learners, both individual and collective,” she said.

“This has given our team incredible insight into how educational institutions really work, and how strategic growth can be achieved, with fidelity, on a large scale.”

As part of her extensive on-site research, Dr Campos Remon provided three monitoring and evaluation reports on the progress of the project, culminating in the Effective Thinking Framework, which sits at its heart.

She also had a key role in establishing what's now called the Effective Thinking Learning Progression - a one-page matrix that offers a bite-size summary of what students do according to 12 thinking indicators, as well as five levels of increasing sophistication of thinking.

It has now become a core resource at BGS, and a cohort of seven teachers at the school trialled the progression in 2021 in partnership with the University of Melbourne's Assessment Research Centre (ARC), who conducted psychometric analysis on the data the teachers gathered.

Dr Campos Remon observed classrooms, conducted focus groups with students and teachers, interviewed staff one-on-one, observed departmental meetings and professional learning activities, and analysed curriculum documents as part of her tireless efforts to pull these elements together and gather insights.

The project builds the specific thinking abilities that teachers and students need to respond to immediate demands of learning or assessment, as well as abilities that will serve students throughout their lives.

And the insights have played out everywhere in the school, with teachers reflecting on and improving their practices, on how their students come to learn, and in fostering an effective culture in the classroom.

“I’m regularly humbled by seeing thoughtful and intentional practitioners turn their attention to critically reflecting on their practice, by using these resources as theoretical tools,” Dr Campos Remon said.

“It can be nail-biting to realise that something that started at my desk as an idea of how to bring theory to life, is now out there in the world being used by our staff. So far, I’ve been well-rewarded by the satisfaction of these ‘pinch-me’ moments.”

Dr Campos Remon was also instrumental in establishing the Learning Organisation Team, which supports educational improvement at BGS. The Senior Leadership Team is also using her improvement process to improve school-wide strategic planning.

What our students will need to ‘know’ in the future, she says, cannot be predicted.

“But we do know that knowledge in the sense of recalling a canon of information is becoming increasingly irrelevant to how to they will succeed in the world,” she said.

“Better to focus on supporting them to develop control over how, how well and why they think.”

Dr Campos Remon is a finalist at the Queensland College of Teachers TEACHX Awards, in the Innovation in Teaching category.

Winners will be announced October 27th, on the eve of World Teachers' Day in Queensland.