Flexible Thinking Skills can be taught!




  • Mental flexibility, or the capacity to shift attention refers to updating or "shifting" cognitive strategies in response to changes in the environment.  



  • There are multiple types of set shifting, but they all require the ability to let go of one idea to consider another. 
Successful performance in school requires the ability to build new strategies 
and adapt to new information.

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Concrete learners like to memorize what they have read or learned and stick with it.  Flexible thinkers are able to take in new information and create new associations. 


When we teach a new way to do something we ask students to let go of their old way of thinking. Unlearning a habit, or changing a behavior pattern requires set shifting, shifting from one idea to another.


  


How do you build set shifting and flexible thinking skills?
  • Games are some of the best ways to build flexible thinking skills.  Coaching is required while playing these games to help your child develop new thinking strategies. 

  • The best way to coach a child in flexible thinking skills is to ask leading questions to help guide the child to find the answer. A child with a set shifting weakness may not know what to attend to in the game, so making a checklist and practicing the questions he can ask himself when he gets stuck, will help him when he doesn’t know what to do.


Flexible thinking skills require stretching what you know and taking a risk to make an educated guess that could be right. 

Being a flexible thinker will give your child the tools they need to thrive in school now and in the future.



The Flexible Thinking Program provides fun games and guided instructions on how to help your child to become more a more flexible thinker.

GAMES That require flexible thinking:

  • Q-bitz : Anyone who has taken the WISC IQ test will recognize this game as the Block Design test. I played it with my two children last night and they had lots of fun. My son who has some mild visual issues was a bit frustrated until I showed him how to “see” the relationship between the individual blocks and the design on the cards. Once he understood that he took off. We allowed a handicap for the youngest player of a four-block head start to even out the skills difference.
  • Blik Blok provides 3-D dimensional puzzles to be solved. Visual imaging skills are important for math, writing and reading comprehension. The ability to mentally rotate and “see” how the pieces go together develops the internal visualizations skills used to imagine how to create and develop novel ideas.
  • Gobblet is a hyped up tic-tac-toe game. The goal is the same as tic-tac-toe, to get four in a row, or three in a row on Gobblet Jr. The twist is that you have 4 (or 3) sizes of pieces that can “gobble” up another piece smaller than it. This game is quick to start playing, but your skills can continue to develop as you discover more strategies to win. I think that Gobblet Jr. is best for 10 year olds and under. Gobblet is a game everyone can have fun playing.
  • Mastermind has been around for a while, but it continues to be a favorite. To win quickly, deductive reasoning skills are needed.
  • Rush Hour is a wonderful one-person game. There are a number of puzzle cards, in increasing order of difficulty, to solve.
  • Connect 4 has become a classic at our office. The challenge of winning depends on the skills of your opponent.
  • Labyrinth is one of my favorites. I love the way paths are changed when players push their cards on the board. The constantly changing mazes challenge players to re-evaluate their plan after each move.
  • Othello’s outcome can change at the last minute of the game. Othello rewards players who can think ahead and gain access to key positions on the board.
  • Pix Mix requires players to quickly see visual options available. It is fun to try to see what objects are in the holders. My family laughed out loud at some of the things we thought we saw!
  • Set requires quick thinking and visual processing. Set builds categorization skills as the players try to get rid of all of their cards by matching them to target cards.
  • Spot it requires you to be quick and fast. When you spot a card with a match you say the name of the pictures that match before anyone else does.