Six Hat Thinking: An Introduction

If I am asked: How do I get started with Six Hats? my answer is: Buy Dr de Bono’s book: Edward de Bono, Six Thinking Hats, Penguin Books.

That text, first published in 1985 contains the essentials. The book is simple to understand and apply. It provides the information needed to understand how The Six Thinking Hats Framework is truly ‘an alternative to argument’. Each of the hats is described in detail. The book provides an update on application of the framework, internationally, in business and education. It concludes with a review of the benefits of the Six Hat method as a New Thinking method.

Dr de Bono also published a set of books about the application of Six Hats in schools: Edward de Bono, Six Thinking Hats for Schools, published by The McQuaig Group. In a number of ways, for teachers, these four volumes are superior to the text mentioned above because they have a graduated approach – junior school to senior school – and include superb resource materials. The pdf attached at the end of this post is a summary of Dr de Bono’s comments from Book 4 of the set. The resource contains a comprehensive description and an introduction to ‘sequences’.

For a variety of reasons, The Six Thinking Hats Framework is popular in primary schools. There are two reasons for this choice. First, Colleges of Education often claim to train prospective teachers in the method. Second, Six Hats is perceived as being ‘simpler’ than the CoRT Programme, a misconception to be explored in a future post.

Before delving into future posts that look at the essence of The Six Thinking Hats framework in detail, I suggest reading the attached file and, if interested, purchasing Dr de Bono’s popular, practical and readable book.

The pdf is an intentionally full description of each hat and the sequences recommended by Dr de Bono. It is a resource I use for teacher training. Other sequences can be designed according to the situation being reviewed using this simple and very powerful collaborative thinking method.

sht-for-teachers.pdf