Red: The red hat stands for emotional, his feelings, intuition and spontaneity. He bases his judgment on what he feels instead of listen to facts.
Black: He’s aiming for the negative points. When there’s a argument or idea from others, he’ll be suspicious about everything. The black hat will always tell the negative points about an idea.
White: The white hat is always asking for facts. He can only be 100% sure about an idea when it’s proven by facts. The white hat is objective and most of the time he doesn’t say it’s wrong or right.
Yellow: The yellow hat stands for positivity and being constructive. He always looking for the positive aspects of a idea and refers to the positive points of an idea.
Green: The green hat stands for creativity, growth, energy and life. This person always brings up new ideas that sometimes are ‘out of the box’. His ideas give the others new things to think about.
Blue: The blue hat stands for the control of the process. He’s the one who leads in the conversation. He’ll have to take the lead and evaluate the arguments that have been made by the others. The blue hat will take the final decision.
We’ve tried to have a conversation with our classmates from the minor. We were allowed to chose 1 type of hat you wanted to be, but every type of hat had to be in the conversation. I noticed that the green hat really fits me. Most of the time I think positive about an idea and I think out of the box for new solutions or opportunities to solve a problem. I’m not always a green hat. Sometimes I can be a red, black or blue hat. This depends on the mood I’m in or what we’re talking about.
I really want to try to put on a white hat sometimes, because I’m not really a white hat. I’m more a person who’s lead by my feelings and not by facts. Therefor it should be new for me to let my feelings go and judge a conversation just by facts.
How can you use this in your class?
It’s really interesting to have a discussion in our class first without the hats. After this discussion you can talk with the children about the discussion. In this conversation you will talk about what went good and what went wrong. After that you can explain the different types of hats and let the children chose a hat they want to be and start the discussion all over again. I think it’s very interesting how the discussion will develop when the children got their place (hat) in the discussion.