The Power of Making Thinking Visible

Practices to Engage and Empower All Learners

Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119626046
• eBook ISBN: 9781119626213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

The long-awaited follow-up to Making Thinking Visible, provides new thinking routines, original research, and unique global case studies

Visible Thinking—a research-based approach developed at Harvard's Project Zero – prompts and promotes students' thinking. This approach has been shown to positively impact student engagement, learning, and development as thinkers. Visible Thinking involves using thinking routines, documentation, and effective questioning and listening techniques to enhance learning and collaboration in any learning environment. The Power of Making Thinking Visible explains how educators caneffectively use thinking routines and other tools to engage and empower students as learners and transform classrooms into places of deep learning.

Building on the success of the bestselling Making Thinking Visible, this highly-anticipated new book expands the work of the original by providing 18new thinking routines based on new research and work with teachers and students around the world. Original content explains how to use thinking routines to maximum effect in the classroom, engage students exploration of big ideas, link thinkingroutines to formative assessment, and more. Providing new research, new global case studies, and new practices, this book:

• Focuses on the power that thinking routines can bring to learning
• Provides practical insights on using thinking routines to facilitate student engagement
• Highlights the most effective techniques for using thinking routines in the classroom
• Identifies the skillsets and mindsets needed to truly make thinking visible
• Features actionable classroom strategies that can be applied across grade levels and content areas

Written by researchers from Harvard's Project Zero, The Power of Making Thinking Visible: Using Routines to Engage and Empower Learners is an indispensable resource for K-12 educators and curriculum designers, higher education instructional designers and educators, and professional learning course developers.

PART ONE
LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR POWER

CHAPTER 1
Six Powers of Making Thinking Visible

To really focus on making thinking visible fundamentally changes the role of student and teacher. As I utilize thinking routines and document our learning, I notice my students speaking up more and guiding our learning. Focusing on students' thinking places the power in their hands and fosters a teacher–student relationship built on mutual trust and respect.

Alexandra Sánchez, Third‐Grade Teacher Parkview Elementary School, Novi, Michigan

When I make my classes' thinking visible, it's like putting a dipstick in to check the oil. I can immediately see what they do and don't understand. It's a cue to what I need to do next in my teaching. This is probably the biggest way that my teaching has changed since I started teaching 25 years ago. I'm now much more responsive to my students' thinking.

Cameron Paterson, Director of Teaching and Learning, Secondary History Teacher, Shore School, Sydney, Australia

Witnessing nonverbal students with moderate cognitive impairments shift from struggling to answer assigned reading comprehension questions to proudly displaying their thinking has forever changed my view of supporting learners with neurodiversity. Making thinking visible practices offer these students a path previously untraveled, giving them a voice, a purpose, and a sense of pride. I see a huge shift in attitudes regarding the learning outcomes and thinking abilities of these learners across our school.

Erika Lusky, Secondary Speech and Language Pathologist, Instructional Coach Rochester High School, Rochester, Michigan

Alexandra, Cameron, and Erika speak eloquently to the power of making thinking visible (MTV). Theirs are not isolated voices. In diverse classrooms from around the world, teachers have shared with us the difference MTV has made in both their own teaching and their students' learning. As researchers observing in classrooms, we have seen this for ourselves, witnessing a new paradigm of schooling emerge within the context of engaged, purposeful learning. This has propelled much of our research and development work since the original publication of Making Thinking Visible in 2011. In our ongoing collaboration with schools, we have sought both to capture the ways we have seen teachers engage students in thinking and make it visible, as well as to understand the difference these efforts have made. How do MTV practices change students and teachers? What makes this set of practices powerful? How do efforts to make students' thinking visible transform the traditional story of schooling we have known for so long?

In this chapter we articulate six ways in which we see MTV practices exert transformational change in classrooms. MTV has the power to:

• Foster deep learning
• Cultivate engaged students
• Change the role of students and teachers
• Enhance our formative assessment practice
• Improve learning (even when measured by standardized tests)
• Develop thinking dispositions

We explore each of these powers by drawing on the voices of teachers who have shared where they have seen the power of MTV practices in their teaching and in their students' learning. We expand on these commentaries by connecting them to relevant research. Finally, we explain exactly why and how these “powers” exist in visible thinking practices generally and thinking routines specifically. What is it about MTV practices that help establish this power? How can teachers realize that power in their own classrooms?

FOSTERING DEEP LEARNING

The Visible Thinking project, which began in 2000, built on the preceding Teaching for Understanding project from the 1990s. These two ideas – understanding and thinking – are core to conceptions of deep learning. While no single definition exists of deep learning, The Hewlett Foundation, a major supporter of research in this area, defines deeper learning as the significant understanding of core academic content, coupled with the ability to think critically and solve problems with that content (Hewlett Foundation 2013). These core academic competencies are joined by the interpersonal and intrapersonal abilities of collaboration, communication, directing one's own learning, and the possession of positive beliefs and attitudes about oneself as a learner that serve to motivate one's ongoing learning.

Based on extensive research in schools and classrooms where deeper learning was occurring, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine (Mehta and Fine 2019) assert that deeper learning emerges at the intersection of:

• Mastery: the opportunity to develop understanding
• Identity: the opportunity to connect to the domain and develop as a learner with a place in the world
• Creativity: the opportunity to produce something personally meaningful

These opportunities are infused with critical thinking, grappling with complexity, challenging assumptions, questioning authority, and embracing curiosity – all core elements of what it means to learn deeply.

Erik Lindemann from Osborne Elementary School in Quaker Valley, Pennsylvania, sees these elements coming into play as he makes thinking visible in his third‐grade classroom. “The story of our classroom learning is dramatically different when we use visible thinking routines. The routines build learners' capacity to engage with complexity while inspiring exploration. As my students begin internalizing and applying these thinking tools, I become a consultant in their ongoing investigations. Curiosity and excitement fuel deeper learning as my students take the lead,” he observes. Erik's remarks attest to the transformative power of making students' thinking visible. They move teaching beyond the realm of transmission, focusing on transformation not only of the content but also of the learner.

Secondary math teacher Jeff Watson at the International Academy in Oakland County, Michigan, has also noticed this movement from transmission to transformation. “Math classrooms that I have visited have mostly been lecture‐oriented, teacher‐centered environments. Many times, the only interaction is a response to the question ‘Are there any questions?’” he laments. In contrast, Jeff notes that “thinking routines are an incredible way to change the entire classroom dynamic, as learning naturally turns over to the students and places them in a more active role. The best part is that while the changes are so powerful, they don't cost any money, require any curriculum changes, or sweeping reform.”

As we have identified, an agenda of understanding and thinking rests at the core of deeper learning and are both central to the effective use of thinking routines. In using a thinking routine, teachers need to situate its use within the larger context of building understanding: How does this particular lesson fit within the larger enterprise of understanding I am striving for? Teachers can then begin to focus on the goals of a particular lesson: With which ideas do I want students to begin to grapple? Where are the complexities and nuances that we need to explore? How can I push students' understanding and move it forward? With these questions answered, teachers are ready to identify the source material and the kinds of thinking that might best serve the exploration of that material. Only then are teachers in a good position to select a thinking routine as a tool or structure for that exploration.

CULTIVATING ENGAGED STUDENTS

Reflecting on the difference MTV practices have made in the learning of her third‐ and fourth‐grade students, teacher Hardevi Vyas from the Stevens Cooperative School in Newport, New Jersey, notes the power of thinking routines to engage learners: “The continued use of thinking routines when exploring primary and secondary sources, as norms of conversation, as prompts for thinking has been the driving force that moves students from a place of interest, to deep engagement, to a real desire to take action by identifying the steps to take to make a difference. Thinking routines emotionally engage students, leading to a high level of intellectual rigor and ethical reflection.”

Hardevi's comments identify three specific types of engagement: (i) engagement with others, (ii) engagement with ideas, and (iii) engagement in action. In engaging with others, we recognize that learning unfolds in the company of others and is a social endeavor. We learn in, from, and with groups. The group supports our learning as well as challenges it, allowing us to reach higher levels of performance. At the same time, learning demands a personal engagement with ideas. Whereas we might be able to receive new information passively, building understanding is an active process that involves digging in and making sense. We bring ourselves to the learning moment. Sometimes this is identified as cognitive engagement, to distinguish it from mere engagement in activity. It is cognitive engagement with ideas that leads to learning. Exploring meaningful and important concepts that are connected to the world often means students want to take action. Providing opportunities and structures for them to do so encourages students' agency and power while making the learning relevant.

We found this three‐part framing of the nature of engage...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR POWER
• PART TWO: EIGHTEEN POWERFUL ROUTINES
• PART THREE: REALIZING THE POWER
• REFERENCES
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT