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

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Includes questions, exercises, and discussion prompts to inspire reflection by individuals and teams

Students can use visible thinking strategies as a way to make sense of new learning and to generate questions that they will explore as they research or design their own experiments. Here, a teacher will provide a video, a graph, or a photo that work as a provocation for deeper learning. This might tie into students’ prior knowledge but it might also spark their curiosity. In a virtual science class, students might watch a video of a natural phenomenon or go off-screen and observe their natural world. The teacher can provide one of Harvard Zero’s visible thinking strategy, such as see-think-wonder. Students answer the questions: After exploring the art with the Artful Thinking routines What Makes You Say That? or Perceive, Know, Care About , have students brainstorm exchanges that might occur between two parties in the painting or two points of view inspired by the art. Since then I’ve developed my own approach to using Visible Thinking with art and museum objects. You can find out more about Visible Thinking in the Museum (VTM for short) here. Who is VTM for? Try handing out a grouping card to each student that has the name of the artist or a picture of the artwork on it. Give students 5 seconds to look around the room and spot the painting by the name of the artist or picture on their card and then 30 seconds to proceed to the group. Provide each group area with enough sentence strips and markers for each of the participants to have one of each. 2. Instruct each student to silently “read” the artwork for one minute. The central idea of Visible Thinking is simple: making thinking visible. The vast majority of what we think is hidden – it stays in our heads and we only articulate a small portion of it.

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Thinking routines are intended for repeated use, which enables participants to remember them and use them independently in no time at all

However, if you are an educator that wants to better understand how to build better THINKERS, this book is a must!After reading a story, small groups of students are provided with an illustration from the text. (This activity would work using a quote from the text as well.) This activity can be done orally with the whole class or by asking students to individually, or in pairs, complete an organizer and then share. When students answer What Makes You Say That ? they are practicing the art of summarizing and providing pertinent details they see in the art.

Summarizing is a skill that students will need to be able to do in every grade. Summarizing, in Bloom’s taxonomy, is found fairly low in the taxonomy- it is located in the cross between understanding and factual knowledge.Select a piece of art that has at least two characters or two points of view. Introduce examples of a two voice poem and discuss how this type of poem could be used tell a story. Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based conceptual framework, which aims to integrate the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. At the core of Visible Thinking are practices that help make thinking visible: Thinking Routines loosely guide learners' thought processes and encourage active processing.

Complete the first line of the template and then fold the paper so that the written response is hidden.The activity combines a sequencing exercise along with practice in identifying details. It involves a close observation of a 3-D artwork, such as a contemporary sculpture. It works best when the artwork chosen has a variety of pieces, objects or textures. As a former middle school ELL teacher, I used to use these structures as a way to introduce new ideas. Then I would reinforce them by using the visual and doing a Total Physical Response (TPR) for vocabulary. Students would fill out the information in a graphic organizer and practice the hand / body movements as a whole group. In a virtual environment, you can create videos (or have students create videos) of their TPRs and then practice the movement, visual, and definition during synchronous virtual meetings. This is more challenging for older students, where a TPR can feel childish, so it might work best to have students submit their own TPR routines in a video format that they share one-on-one with the teacher.