Drawing on a long line of research on dispositions and enculturation, we developed a set of thinking routines: simple strategies for scaffolding thinking that were designed to be woven into a teacher’s ongoing classroom practice
Although our broader goal was to focus teachers’ attention on the issue of developing a culture of thinking, we had noticed in our earlier research that as teachers worked with thinking routines in earnest and over time, they soon found themselves thinking about the other cultural forces at play; most notably time, language, opportunities, and interactions
book that would both extend and complement the Visible Thinking website
At the core of this book rests the idea that it is important to nurture thinking in the daily lives
of learners and to make it visible so that a culture of thinking can be built and a strong learning community established in organizations, in schools, and in classrooms
Drawing on information from several lists, think as a word ranks somewhere around the top 125 to 136 in terms of frequency in print
If one considers just verbs, Oxford English Dictionary rates the word think as the twelfth most used verb in the English language! Clearly
When we tell someone we are thinking, what is it we are actually doing
If we want to support students in learning, and we believe that learning is a product of thinking, then we need to be clear about what it is we are trying to support
if we are going to make thinking visible in our classrooms, then the first step will be for us as teachers to make the various forms, dimensions, and processes of thinking visible to ourselves.
Bloom identified a sequence of six learning objectives that he felt moved from lower-order to higher-order thinking: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. However, these ideas were just a theory and were not based on research on learning. Nonetheless, they have become codified into the way many teachers are taught to think about thinking. Teachers are often admonished to make sure some of their questions or lessons require the “higher levels” of thinking, though generally this is taken to mean anything above comprehension.
the idea that thinking is sequential or hierarchical is problematic
In the 1990s, two of Bloom’s former students revised his taxonomy, and a new list was published using verbs rather than nouns. However, the idea of a sequence was kept
What these examples illustrate is that it makes little sense to talk about thinking divorced from context and purpose
Research into understanding, much of it conducted with our colleagues at Project Zero, indicates that understanding is not a precursor to application, analysis, evaluating, and creating but a result of it
Thus, we might consider understanding not to be a type of thinking at all but an outcome of thinking
As these brief critiques point out, the idea of levels is problematic when it comes to parsing thinking and ultimately less useful than one might hope
How does one learn to teach? More to the point, how does one learn to teach well? We
We believe this view of teaching, as little more than the delivery of content, is not only an overly simplistic view of teaching but also a dangerous one in that it puts the focus on the teacher and not the learner
content we get through, we must learn to identify the key ideas and concepts with which we want our students to engage, struggle, question, explore, and ultimately build understanding. Our goal must be to make the big ideas of the curriculum accessible and engaging while honoring their complexity, beauty, and power in the process. When there is something important and worthwhile to think about and a reason to think deeply, our students experience the kind of learning that has a lasting impact and powerful influence not only in the short term but also in the long haul. They not only learn; they learn how to learn
With the learner at the center of the educational enterprise, rather than at the end, our role as teachers shifts from the delivery of information to fostering students’ engagement with ideas. Instead of covering the curriculum and judging our success by how much