Term Four Week Three: Analysing

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This term we will start on the three key focus points for students preparation for the examinations and the ending of the course programmes:

  1. Listening – listen to where your students are at in their examination preparation or in the course completion.

  2. Questioning – what do your students need, what are they asking for, and what questions are you asking them.

  3. Analysing - identifying, clarifying and developing solutions and answers to the questions – fine tuning the learning and the examination preparation.



To analyse something is to ask what that something means. It is to ask how something does what it does or why it is as it is. Analysis is the kind of think-ink you'll most often be asked to do in your work life and in school; it is not the rarefied and exclusive province of scholars and intellectuals.

It is, in fact, one of the most common of our mental activities. Most people already analyse all the time, but they often don't realize that this is what they're doing. A first step, then, toward becoming a better analytical thinker is to become more aware of your own thinking processes, building on skills that you already possess, and eliminating habits that get in the way.

Toward this end, here are five moves to practice consciously, five activities people engage in when they analyse.



  1. Suspend judgment: As a general rule, you should seek to understand the subject you are analysing before moving to a judgment about it. Try to figure out what your subject means before deciding how you feel about it.

  2. Define significant parts and how they are related: Whether you are analysing an awkward social situation, an economic problem, a painting, a substance in a chemistry lab, or your chances of succeeding in a job interview, the process of analysis is the same: Divide the subject into its defining parts, its main elements or ingredients. Consider how these parts are related, both to each other and to the subject as a whole.

  3. Make the implicit explicit: Define the specific parts of the information that you have. Make the meaning of each part clear by taking the meaning and showing what they actually mean in the context of the work.

  4. Look for patterns: repetition or resemblance, organising contrasts, anomalies in the data that all add to the interpretation of the information.

  5. Keep reformulating questions and explanations: As you gather data you need to keep on questioning the new direction of your interpretation and then following the new understanding to the next stage of the question.

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