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The Trust is founded by Jerry Rhodes to bring his original research and teaching on creativity and metacognition into the home. ‘Metacognition’ is derived from Greek: meta ‘above’, and Latin: cognition, ‘thinking’: you step outside the normal flow of thought to observe and understand ‘how you are thinking’ in the moment. Then you can modify, steer and grow your thinking to be more effective.
Jerry’s unique approach to metacognition brings you the Thinking-Intentions, transformed into the magical cartoon characters, the Thunkies. Children love them. You will not find them anywhere else. They represent all the fundamental skills of thinking, with a special understanding of the place of imagination in your children’s world of thought.
Thunkies are a new and fresh way to bring metacognition to children at home, including even home schooling families. ‘Thunkies’ is a registered trademark.
Parents are the most important educators of their children. The Trust promotes activities for the family that, as much as possible, are real and physical. It can be hard for parents to achieve a healthy balance with screen time for their children, who don’t ever get their precious childhood back again.
Rhodes Effective Intelligence Trust is registered for trading as ‘Thunkies’ in the website shop.
Our Thunkies Team sends regular newsletters with home activities and thinking tips for parents which embed the thinking skills of metacognition. They offer parents and children ways to play together and learn about ‘thinking’ together with the Thunkies.
Jerry has been researching and teaching for over forty years on how to make thinking work better, with businesses, universities and schools. This first arose because, as Head of Training in Rank Xerox he was looking into ‘creativity’ and discovered he was a prolific generator of ideas.
It made such a difference to his understanding that he founded his own consultancy. This led to the collaboration with Philips Eindhoven, and their joint investigations into creativity and metacognition.
Jerry published his first book in the 1980s to introduce metacognition for people at work. It proved such a success and so useful that its methodology, Effective Intelligence, is still being adopted by organisations on each continent and in seven languages, including Chinese.
Many people, who found Jerry’s teaching so helpful in their business life, have asked for it to be made available beyond the workplace: “Why not at home?” In order to do this, Jerry has established the educational Trust. Creativeness and how to foster it has been a leading force in what he has brought to organisations and he sees it as an essential skill for learning, at whatever age.
After Oxford and from his early career as schoolmaster, Jerry has always been keen on helping people make the most of their talents, especially children, who are growing the very foundations of their life. He has four children, grandchildren and many nephews and nieces.
Sue has worked alongside Jerry Rhodes for many years, assisting with the writing and design of his training materials and websites. She started out from university as a journalist; this experience equipped her with the editing and proof-reading skills to ensure that documents (nearly always) read well. Her training as a teacher of the Alexander Technique took her into the study and practices of changing habits of thinking and behaviour. As she started working with Jerry, she learned about the deep causes of thinking habits through his unique research.
Sam began working with Jerry soon after completing her degree in Graphic Design. Over the years she has assisted him in moving from print to an online format, and along the way she has developed formidable technical skills, enabling Jerry’s ideas to be presented to a wider audience via the web. After over 20 years she is still working with Jerry, which speaks a thousand words…
Lively Designs is hosting our website with green energy.
The internet is responsible for roughly 2% of the world’s carbon emissions, that’s the same as the airline industry! This number is expected to grow to around 14% by the year 2040.
To combat this, Lively Designs provides green hosting which runs on renewable energy and for every amperage that is used from the grid to power our website, that amount is then matched 3 times in the form of renewable energy, which gets put back into the grid!
For family activities and your thinking skills
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