Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners (Jossey-Bass Teacher)

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Thinking routines exist in all classrooms. They are the patterns by which teachers and students operate and go about the job of learning and working together in a classroom environment. A routine can be thought of as any procedure, process, or pattern of actionthat is used repeatedly to manage and facilitate the accomplishment of specific goals or tasks. Classrooms have routines that serve to manage student behavior and interactions, to organize the work of learning, and to establish rules for communication and discourse. Classrooms also have routines that structure the way students go about the process of learning. These learning routines can be simple structures, such as reading from a text and answering the questions at the end of the chapter, or they may be designed to promote students' thinking, such as asking students what they know, what they want to know, and what they have learned as part of a unit of study. Much more than just an instructional guide, Cultures of Thinking in Action offers readers a reflective journey into their own teaching, leading, and parenting while providing the foundation and concrete strategies needed to create and develop a culture of thinking for all learners. This book: Includes questions, exercises, and discussion prompts to inspire reflection by individuals and teams Making thinking visible isn’t difficult with the help of these 13 strategies. And helping our students observe critically, express joyfully, and reflect deeply is one of our most important responsibilities. Students can discuss the impact of words embedded in such paintings (or as the artist put it, “the evocative and artistic power of words”).

How do I ensure that the tasks I assign students remotely are worthwhile and will actually produce learning versus just keep them busy?

Making Visible Thinking a Priority

As they evaluate their ideas, they can use the compass points from Making Thinking Visible, which can easily work well in a graphic organizer. The compass points stand for the following: A selection of different thinking routines can be used throughout a programme to target different areas of thinking and keep the programme lively. Create an art gallery in the classroom by posting images of art around the classroom. You may select art that connects to the curriculum topic/standard or use a random variety of art. Of cours there are many other possibilities for the use of thinking routines and distance learning than just these two. Around the world, educators are coming together as a community to share their practices and help others. Some of these that might be helpful are: Next, ask students to contemplate Ruscha’s painting entitled “Won’t”. Begin by looking at the artistic qualities of the work (you could use an Artful Thinking routine, such as such as Colors, Shapes, Lines to facilitate this) and then analyze the multiple meanings and impact of the actual word.

Routines that cultivate students’ capacity to look beyond their own perspective and to consider others’ experiences, thoughts, and feelings. In a math class, students might look a set of data and ask about trends. But it might also be an opportunity to have students create their own questions. I love Dan Meyer’s notion of “What can you do with that?” Here, students look at a picture or a video and then develop their own questions that they eventually solve. A deeper understanding of how to make the invisible parts of thinking more visible -to both students and teachers. As students make sense out of their ideas, they can begin to organize information visually. This might be something like a spreadsheet or a graph or it might be an outline or a slideshow. As teachers, we can help students organize information by providing easy-to-use graphic organizers. For example, you might provide a flow chart to understand systems. You might have students create Venn Diagrams for comparing and contrasting information. Many of these small graphic organizers work well as a way to add structure and accountability to breakout room discussions in virtual class meetings.In some cases, teachers might go more open-ended. Students might look at a photograph in social studies and answer, “What is going on in this picture?” However, you might provide a graphic organizer with the five senses and have students focus on what they would see, feel, smell, hear, and taste in that moment. A more advanced option from Making Thinking Visible is the Step Inside routine, where students watch the video or look at a picture and then answer: The key point is that any strategy should be memorable enough for you to easily recall where you are in the discussion. Another option is a concept map. Here, students create a web of concepts and share connections between the ideas. A concept map is a bit like a snapshot of the mind in the way it captures how students conceptualize information. Unlike a traditional web, a concept map is not a spoke and wheel. Typically, there are multiple lines moving between ideas. Sometimes students put verbs between the ideas. Other times, they create symbols or use the shapes and the colors to create an organizational system for their maps. I first learned about visible thinking about six years ago when I read Making Thinking Visible. A colleague had recommended the book to me and I realized that I had been using specific visible thinking routines for years after observing a colleague who was an expert at getting her students to think about their thinking. I had been integrating elements of visual thinking into our design thinking and inquiry-based projects as well as our curation process, research process, and brainstorming process.