Hexagonal Thinking: A Complete Guide to the Activity and How to Run It

Hexagonal thinking is a review and discussion strategy where a set of key terms, events, characters, or concepts from a unit each gets written on a separate hexagon-shaped tile. Participants, usually working in pairs or small groups, then physically or digitally arrange the hexagons so that any two tiles sharing a touching edge represent a connection the group can explain out loud or in writing. A hexagon has six sides, so a single tile can sit at the center of up to six different relationships at once, which is the detail that separates the strategy from a plain list of vocabulary or a two-column comparison chart.

The activity usually starts with a blank hexagon set generated from whatever the class just covered, a novel's major themes and characters, the causes and figures of a historical event, the stages of a biological process. There is no fixed center and no predetermined shape the way there is in a concept map built around one main topic. Instead, the group decides which ideas belong near each other, which means hexagonal thinking works as well for open-ended review as it does for essay planning, where the strongest connections often become the backbone of a thesis.

Hexagonal thinking sits in the same family as other visual review tools, including the mapping method of note taking and the eight-shape thinking map system, but it differs from both in one important way: nothing about the layout is fixed in advance. A tree map sorts ideas into a hierarchy and a flow map sequences them in order, but a hexagon set starts as an unordered pile, and the arrangement itself becomes the evidence of how well a student understands the material.

Most review tools test recall: can you name the term, can you define the event. Hexagonal thinking tests something harder, whether you can explain how two ideas relate and defend that explanation to a partner who might disagree. That single shift from recalling facts to justifying connections is what researchers call higher-order thinking, and it sits near the top of Bloom's taxonomy alongside analysis and evaluation, well above simple recall or comprehension.

The format also creates what learning scientists call a generation effect. Studies on study techniques consistently find that people retain information better when they generate a structure themselves rather than receive one ready-made. A concept map with a fixed center still hands the learner part of the structure before they start. A hexagon set hands over nothing but the raw pieces, so every connection drawn is a decision the learner made and can defend, not a blank filled in on someone else's template.

There is a social layer to hexagonal thinking that most solo review methods miss. Because the activity almost always runs in pairs or small groups, every proposed connection gets tested out loud before it survives on the table. A partner who challenges a weak connection forces the kind of justification that silent, individual review skips entirely. That live back-and-forth is part of why hexagonal thinking shows up so often as essay prep: an argument a student can defend against a skeptical partner in a five-minute activity tends to survive contact with an essay prompt much better than one that only ever existed on a flashcard.

The steps below work whether the hexagons are cut from paper, printed from a template, or arranged in a digital whiteboard tool. The mechanics stay the same across every format.

Hexagonal thinking adapts to almost any subject where a unit produces more than a handful of interrelated ideas. Two examples below show what a hexagon set looks like before a group starts arranging it.

Literature unit example (a novel study): hexagons might read Protagonist's Motivation, Antagonist, Setting, Central Conflict, Symbol: the recurring object, Theme: isolation, Theme: power, Turning Point, Narrator's Bias, Supporting Character, Resolution, and a direct quote pulled from a pivotal chapter. Groups often connect the symbol hexagon to both themes, then connect the turning point hexagon to the resolution and the protagonist's motivation, building the skeleton of a literary analysis essay in the process.

History unit example (a unit on a major conflict): hexagons might read Economic Cause, Political Cause, Key Leader A, Key Leader B, Turning Point Battle or Event, Treaty or Resolution, Civilian Impact, Long-Term Consequence, Alliance, and Propaganda or Public Opinion. Groups typically cluster the causes together first, then trace a chain from causes through the turning point to the long-term consequence, which mirrors the structure a cause and effect graphic organizer is built to capture, just without a fixed left-to-right layout forcing the order in advance.

In both examples, the value comes from what a hexagon set does not do: it never tells the group which connections are correct in advance. That is what makes hexagonal thinking a review activity rather than a worksheet with one right answer.

Most hexagonal thinking sessions that fall flat share one of a small number of avoidable problems.

The slowest part of hexagonal thinking is rarely the activity itself. It is building the hexagon set: rereading a lecture, a chapter, or a set of notes to pull out the 12 to 20 concepts worth putting on tiles in the first place. Notelyn's AI summary reads a recorded lecture, an uploaded PDF, or typed notes and surfaces the key terms, events, and themes actually covered, which is exactly the list a hexagon set needs before anyone starts arranging tiles.

Notelyn does not generate literal hexagon shapes, but its mind map feature lays the same source material out with a central topic and connected ideas branching around it, which gives a group a starting point for spotting relationships before they commit anything to a physical or digital tile. Comparing Notelyn's automatically generated connections against the ones a group builds by hand during hexagonal thinking is often more useful than either version alone, since disagreements between the two point to a relationship worth discussing further.

After the activity, running the same concept set through Notelyn's flashcards turns the terms that ended up on hexagons into a spaced-repetition review deck, and AI Q&A lets a student or group test whether they can still explain a connection days later, not just during the session when the justification was still fresh.

Hexagonal thinking is worth trying with a single unit before scaling it up across a full course. Pick a topic that just wrapped up, pull 12 to 15 key terms or events from it, write each on its own hexagon, and run one 15-minute session in pairs before a bigger review push. The details that matter most are keeping the set small enough to stay engaging and requiring a justification for every connection, since those two habits are what separate a genuine hexagonal thinking session from tiles moved around at random.

Once the format feels familiar, pairing it with other structured review tools rounds out a full study system. The mapping method of note taking works well for building the initial notes a hexagon set gets pulled from, and the broader thinking maps system offers a fixed-shape alternative for tasks that call for a specific kind of thinking rather than an open-ended arrangement. Hexagonal thinking earns its place specifically because it skips that fixed shape: the connections a group finds, and has to defend, are the actual product of the activity, not a byproduct of it.