Making Thinking Visible E-Book

Ron Ritchhart

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 537

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A proven program for enhancing students' thinking and comprehension abilities Visible Thinking is a research-based approach to teaching thinking, begun at Harvard's Project Zero, that develops students' thinking dispositions, while at the same time deepening their understanding of the topics they study. Rather than a set of fixed lessons, Visible Thinking is a varied collection of practices, including thinking routines?small sets of questions or a short sequence of steps?as well as the documentation of student thinking. Using this process thinking becomes visible as the students' different viewpoints are expressed, documented, discussed and reflected upon. * Helps direct student thinking and structure classroom discussion * Can be applied with students at all grade levels and in all content areas * Includes easy-to-implement classroom strategies The book also comes with a DVD of video clips featuring Visible Thinking in practice in different classrooms.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Jossey-Bass Teacher

Title Page

Copyright

List of Figures and Tables

DVD Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Dedication

About the Authors

Part One: Some Thinking about Thinking

Chapter 1: Unpacking Thinking

Beyond Bloom

Beyond Memorization, Work, and Activity

A Map of Thinking Involved in Understanding

Other Kinds of Thinking

Uncovering Students' Thinking about Thinking

Chapter 2: Putting Thinking at the Center of the Educational Enterprise

How Does Visibility Serve Both Learning and Teaching?

How Can We Make the Invisible Visible?

Part Two: Using Thinking Routines to Make Thinking Visible

Chapter 3: Introduction to Thinking Routines

Three Ways of Looking at Thinking Routines

How Are the Thinking Routines Organized?

Chapter 4: Routines for Introducing and Exploring Ideas

Chapter 5: Routines for Synthesizing and Organizing Ideas

Chapter 6: Routines for Digging Deeper into Ideas

Part Three: Bringing the Power of Visible Thinking to Life

Chapter 7: Creating a Place Where Thinking Is Valued, Visible, and Actively Promoted

The Forces That Shape Culture

Chapter 8: Notes from the Field

What These Cases Reveal about the Use of Routines

Stages of Development in the Use of Thinking Routines

Common Pitfalls and Struggles

In Conclusion

References

Index

How to Use the DVD

System Requirements

Using the DVD with Windows

In Case of Trouble

Jossey-Bass Teacher

Jossey-Bass Teacher provides educators with practical knowledge and tools to create a positive and lifelong impact on student learning. We offer classroom-tested and research-based teaching resources for a variety of grade levels and subject areas. Whether you are an aspiring, new, or veteran teacher, we want to help you make every teaching day your best.

From ready-to-use classroom activities to the latest teaching framework, our value-packed books provide insightful, practical, and comprehensive materials on the topics that matter most to K–12 teachers. We hope to become your trusted source for the best ideas from the most experienced and respected experts in the field.

Copyright © 2011 by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison. All rights reserved.

Published by Jossey-Bass

A Wiley Imprint

989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741—www.josseybass.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax [phone], or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Permission is given for individual classroom teachers to reproduce the pages and illustrations for classroom use. Reproduction of these materials for an entire school system is strictly forbidden.

The materials on the accompanying DVD are designed for use in a group setting and may be customized and reproduced for educational/training purposes.

This free permission is restricted to limited customization of the DVD materials for your organization and the paper reproduction of the materials for educational/training events. It does not allow for systematic or large-scale reproduction, distribution (more than 100 copies per page, per year), transmission, electronic reproduction or inclusion in any publications offered for sale or used for commercial purposes—none of which may be done without prior written permission of the Publisher.

Please note: The video content can be accessed online at www.wiley.com/go/makingthinkingvisible. When prompted, enter your email address and use access code 15516.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ritchhart, Ron, 1958- author.

Making Thinking Visible : How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners / Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, Karin Morrison.

p. cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-91551-6 (pbk.), ISBN 978-1-118-01501-8 (ebk.), ISBN 978-1-118-01502-5 (ebk.), ISBN 978-1-118-01503-2 (ebk.)

1. Thought and thinking--Study and teaching. 2. Critical thinking--Study and teaching. 3. Cognition in children. I. Church, Mark, 1970- II. Morrison, Karin, 1951- author. III. Title.

LB1590.3.R63 2011

370.15′2—dc22

2010049619

List of Figures and Tables

FiguresFigure 1.1A Fourth Grade Student's Concept Map on ThinkingFigure 1.2A Sixth Grade Student's Concept Map on ThinkingFigure 1.3A Tenth Grade Student's Concept Map on ThinkingFigure 4.1Temptation of St. AnthonyFigure 4.2M. C. Escher's Day and NightFigure 4.3Fourth Grade Chalk Talk: The Race into SpaceFigure 4.4Fourth Grade Chalk Talk: Sending Animals Before Astronauts into SpaceFigure 4.5A Student's “Excitement” from Compass PointsFigure 4.6A Student's “Worries” from Compass PointsFigure 4.7A Student's “Need to Know” from Compass PointsFigure 4.8A Student's “Suggestions” from Compass PointsFigure 4.9Sixth Grade Explanation Game Journal EntriesFigure 5.1Eighth Grade Students' Headlines Within an Exponential Growth UnitFigure 5.2Fifth and Sixth Grade Students' Headlines About FractionsFigure 5.3Alexandra's CSI Routine for The Diary of a Young GirlFigure 5.4Tyrone's Concept Map for the Character John Wade from In the Lake of the WoodsFigure 6.1Eighth Grade Students' Evaluations of Equivalency ClaimsFigure 6.2Eighth Grade Tug-of-War About the Makings of an Ideal SocietyFigure 7.1Student's Painted Reflection on MigrationFigure 7.2Leor's “Brick Wall” PaintingTablesTable 3.1Thinking Routines MatrixTable 4.1Second Graders' Thoughts and Puzzles About TimeTable 5.1A High School Student's Connect-Extend-Challenge Reading NotesTable 5.2High School Students' Criteria for Good Connection MakingTable 5.3Fifth Grade Students' 4C's for the Book, HolesTable 5.4Grade 8 Students' Wiki Conversation on AtlantisTable 5.5Erica Doyle's Categorization of Students' Reflections on Their Growth as Readers, Writers, and LearnersTable 6.1Eighth Grade Students' Initial Claims About Equivalent ExpressionsTable 8.1Looking At Students' Thinking (LAST) Protocol

DVD Contents

Please note: The video content can be accessed online at www.wiley.com/go/makingthinkingvisible. When prompted, enter your email address and use access code 15516.

The Explanation Game: Debbie O'Hara, Kindergarten Art

International School of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Chalk Talk: Leeland Jennings, Grade 2 Science

St. Charles Elementary, Michigan

See-Think-Wonder and Sentence-Phrase-Word: Lisa Verkerk, Grade 5 Humanities

International School of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Connect-Extend-Challenge: Mark Church, Grade 6 Social Studies

International School of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

CSI: Color-Symbol-Image: Melyssa Lenon, Secondary Chemistry

Chesaning Union High School, Michigan

Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate: Ravi Grewal, Grade 12 English Literature

Bialik College, Melbourne, Australia

Looking at Students' Thinking Protocol: A Professional Learning Group Looks at Students' Thinking in Grade 7 Science

Bialik College, Melbourne, Australia

Foreword

Have you ever listened to one side of a conversation and wondered, “Where did that come from?” A number of years ago, I had a signal experience of this sort. I was walking slowly across the Cambridge Common toward my office at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A man was sitting on a park bench talking loudly on his cell phone: “I have to! He lied to me and he lied to you! What did he tell you on the phone? Everything's A-okay, he said. Well everything's not A-okay!”

I felt a powerful temptation to ask, “Where did that come from?” but an even more powerful inhibition against intruding on a stranger's life. So I swallowed my curiosity and strolled along, memorizing what the stranger said and writing it down as soon as I got to my office. Several times in the ensuing years I've reread my note and wondered about the story behind the man on the park bench. This small experience has come to symbolize for me how much remains to be revealed when we hear just half a conversation…and hearing half a conversation happens a lot in our lives, especially when we interpret “conversation” broadly.

Thinking is a good example. We do not generally hear other people's thinking, just the results of their thinking—an idea, an opinion, a plan. The messiness of “what if,” “on the other hand,” “but I worry that,” or even just “my gut says” all happens on the other end of the line. What the person says to us may sometimes sound like the whole story, but it is only half or much less than half of the internal conversation. That's why we sometimes have to ask ourselves, “Where did that come from?”

Often we could ask that same question about our own thinking. Research suggests that most people are not sharply aware of how they go about figuring out a problem or coming to a position on an issue. If this seems strange, let's compare with why coaches are so important in athletic learning. A coach, besides having expertise the athlete does not, can pay attention in ways the athlete cannot—from the outside and without having to perform physically at the same time.

All this signals why the ideas about Making Thinking Visible are so important to education. In broadest terms, these ideas call for externalizing processes of thought so that learners can get a better handle on them. To this end, the authors foreground a range of ideas about questioning, listening, documenting, naming, and more, including many specific strategies and a general approach to establishing a positive, engaged, and thoughtful culture of learning in classrooms. Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison have been deeply involved for many years, along with me and a few other colleagues in various combinations, in developing these ideas and fostering their practice. Here they bring us the wisdom of their experience.

However, more is at stake here than learning to think better. The mission addressed by this book is not only learning to think but thinking to learn. To elaborate, there is an uncomfortable question I like to ask people from time to time: “What ideas did you learn during your pre-university education that are important in your life today?” Some people have a hard time identifying much beyond a list of facts, but others report knowledge they have found to be tremendously important to who they are, how they understand the world, and how they behave. For instance, I recall one person mentioning the French Revolution, not for its details but for how it had served as a lens to look at conflicts of all sorts. I remember another person discussing ecological understandings that influenced substantially not only what policies the person supported but the conduct of everyday life. In general, when people bring forward themes that have mattered to them, they mention themes to think with, not just themes to think about—think with the French Revolution to understand other conflicts or think with your ecological knowledge to revise some of your everyday behaviors.

Thinking with is two important steps beyond just knowing information, the focus of far too much education. One step beyond is thinking about a topic, often interesting and valuable but in itself leading toward rather specialized understandings. When learners get comfortable thinking with the ideas in play, those ideas become far more meaningful. Horizons of application open up…everything from managing everyday relationships or making a smart purchase to making sense of global warming on a personal level.

The place of thinking about and thinking with what is learned gives us a second reason why making thinking visible and related themes are so important to learners. Back to that park bench one more time: in the complex, conflicted, and sometimes precarious world of today and tomorrow, the better people think about and with what they know, the more likely they will be able to make sense of the half conversations we all encounter. And the more prepared they will be to enter meaningfully into the whole conversation.

David Perkins

Preface

In 2005, my colleagues at Harvard Project Zero and I had just finished a five-year project exploring how to cultivate thinking dispositions in school settings. The project, Innovating with Intelligence, unfolded at Lemshaga Akademi in Sweden with the financial backing of the Carpe Vitam Foundation. 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. These routines formed the foundation of our intervention and became the core practice of an approach we eventually called “Visible Thinking.” We documented our efforts and presented a set of initial routines to the world via a website: www.pz.harvard.edu/vt.

Almost immediately the website became a hit with the teachers with whom we had been working as well as a valuable resource for our colleagues and ourselves in our ongoing work. Teachers who had been involved with Teaching for Understanding saw the thinking routines as short understanding performances that enhanced their efforts with students. Colleagues Shari Tishman and Patricia Palmer found them useful in supporting an initiative, Artful Thinking, focusing on arts integration. Faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education found them to be useful tools for actively engaging students with complex ideas. Some colleagues even used the routines as structures for reflecting on and writing about the ideas they were developing. Facilitators at our annual summer institutes gravitated toward the routines for supporting adult learning in much the same way they might use a protocol to structure a professional discussion.

At the same time, David Perkins, Mark Church, Karin Morrison, and I were beginning the Cultures of Thinking project at Bialik College, a pre-K through grade 12 independent school in Melbourne, Australia, with the financial support of Abe and Vera Dorevitch. We felt that thinking routines would be a good starting place for teachers to begin their own thinking about the forces shaping classroom culture. 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 (for more on these, see Chapter Seven).

Not long after the VT website's debut, educators we didn't even know began to write us about how they were using the thinking routines and to express an eagerness for more: more routines, more stories from classrooms, more video illustrations, and more examples of teachers' efforts at different grade levels and subject areas. In short, more support for learning designed to enhance the effectiveness of routines in their educational settings. Although educators shared how valuable the website was as a resource, they kept expressing a desire for a book that would take their learning deeper: a collection that they could set on their desks as a ready resource and thumb through at their leisure, something that they could bring to planning meetings, share with colleagues, and mark up with their own notes and tips. Some teachers admitted to having gone so far as to print off the entire website and bind it together in order to fulfill this need.

This outpouring of interest and enthusiasm led Mark, Karin, and me to begin thinking about creating a book that would both extend and complement the Visible Thinking website. In our early conversations we identified several goals that we thought such a book would need to fulfill. First, we thought it was important to capture the development that had occurred in our own thinking as researchers, developers, and facilitators since we originally debuted the idea of visible thinking back in 2005. Our ongoing research and conversations with colleagues had expanded our thinking about visibility beyond just the use of routines, and we wanted to share these additional strategies. We present these ideas in Chapter Two.

Second, we felt an obligation to share the many stories of teachers who were making use of thinking routines in novel ways. Over the years, we have worked with thousands of educators, and we never cease to be amazed at their inventiveness. However, we wanted to find a way to tell these stories that would help readers see the power of the routines to support thinking and learning and not just as clever activities. As the popularity and use of thinking routines has spread, we have seen a few too many examples of their ineffective use and wanted to help people better understand the conditions under which the power of thinking routines is realized. Consequently, in designing our template for writing up the routines, we decided to emphasize the importance of selecting appropriate content along with some ideas for the formative assessment of students' thinking, something we had not dealt with explicitly in our earlier work. You'll find more about this new template in Chapter Three. Drawing on the wealth of examples gleaned from teachers, both through the Cultures of Thinking project at Bialik College and elsewhere, we crafted rich “pictures of practice” that highlighted each teacher's thinking as he or she planned, implemented, and reflected on his or her use of that thinking routine. These stories are found throughout Chapters Four, Five and Six.

As an accompaniment to the original Visible Thinking website, we had also produced a DVD that became available in 2005. This video collection highlighted teachers from the International School of Amsterdam and has become a popular resource for educators who want to share what Visible Thinking is all about with their colleagues. We had seen the power of these videos to present an embedded teaching practice that highlights the interactive quality of routines and the importance of using them with powerful content. Consequently, Mark, Karin, and I wanted to include as part of this book a DVD containing video stories from a more diverse range of classrooms that would highlight teaching done by teachers in the United States, Australia, and Europe. We reference the seven videos captured on the included DVD throughout this book and hope that this resource will enhance your reading and understanding of the ideas presented.

Another goal we identified for our writing was to situate the use of thinking routines and other tools within the larger enterprise of teaching, addressing such goals as fostering engagement, uncovering understanding, and promoting independence within a classroom culture of thinking. In Chapter One, we unpack thinking and discuss the critical role it plays in learning, making the case that promoting thinking isn't a nice extra but is central to learning. We then situate the thinking routines and visibility strategies presented throughout the book within three case studies: one from a classroom, one from a museum, and one from a professional group, which we present in Chapter Seven. These cases demonstrate how strategies for making thinking visible exist within the larger mosaic of a culture of thinking. Finally, we conclude this volume by pulling together our “Notes from the Field” in Chapter Eight. Here we present some of our research on how teachers learn to use routines and work with them over time, as well as a collection of tips, triumphs, and hints for moving forward with your own use of visible thinking practices.

Throughout this book, we have sought to weave together narrative threads from a diverse set of classrooms. This array of perspectives adds to the richness of the larger story we have been able to tell here. But the story isn't over. There are always more voices to add, more tales to tell. We continue to learn with and from teachers throughout the world; educators like yourself who are continually looking for ways to engage learners, develop understanding, support thinking, and promote independence. Since you are reading this book, we assume you are one of these inspired educators. And so, we hope that you will add your own voice to the chorus of teachers working to make thinking visible. Take these ideas and make them your own, embedding them within the culture of your classroom. Use this book as a resource, but stretch beyond it. Take risks in your teaching. Most of all, have confidence in every learner's ability to think and your capacity to nurture that thinking. The results will amaze and energize you.

Ron Ritchhart

Acknowledgments

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. Although this is an idea easy to embrace, it takes something more to bring it to fruition. It takes hard work, dedication, continual reflection, and most of all a willingness to take risks and reach outside the comfort zone of established practices. This is both an individual endeavor and a collective process, recognizing that one learns as much from others' practice as from one's own. We thank all of those who joined us in this journey of nurturing thinking and who were willing to dig in to the work of making thinking visible.

We are greatly indebted to Abe and Vera Dorevitch and the Bialik College School Council for the financial support provided. They have been the political visionaries who recognized the potential of these ideas to transform schools and classrooms. They were willing to support seven years of ongoing professional learning for the teachers at Bialik College to take ideas first developed as part of the Visible Thinking Project, funded through Carpe Vitam Foundation, and the research on Intellectual Character, supported by the Spencer Foundation, and advance them through on-the-ground, in-the-classroom exploration as part of the Cultures of Thinking Project. Their dedication to advancing the education happening not only at Bialik College but also around the world has produced far-reaching benefits and ripple effects around the globe. In addition, Dow Chemical has financially supported the teachers of mid-Michigan in their application of these ideas; ATLAS Learning Communities provided support for teachers in New York City; Lemshaga Akademi in Sweden and the International School of Amsterdam have facilitated the coming together of teachers from around the world to share their experiences. And so, from the vision of just a few individuals willing to think big, we have seen a dramatic impact that continues to grow, nourishing our collective and ongoing development as educators.

The journey with these ideas plays out in real schools. All busy places with too much happening and too many agendas to serve. And yet, we have been blessed to find school leaders who valued this work and who have been willing to do the hard work to make sure the mission of making thinking visible could take hold at their schools. In particular, at Bialik College, Genia Janover carved out a central place for the Cultures of Thinking Project and ensured that teachers had time to meet regularly to share, discuss, and explore these ideas in depth. Her commitment and dedication to teacher learning have been instrumental in moving these ideas forward. Also at Bialik College, Daphne Gaddie and Tosca Mooseek brought these ideas into the ongoing discussion of teachers. In mid-Michigan, Rod Rock and Geralyn Myczkowiak provided the inspiration and leadership to bring together a diverse collection of teachers to pursue these ideas in a wide scale initiative across many public school districts. In Traverse City, Michigan, Jayne Mohr, Pam Alfieri, and Julie Faulkner made it possible for many teachers from Traverse City Area Public Schools to be a part of this work. In New York City at Vanguard High School, Principal Louis Delgado embraced these ideas and supported his teachers' work with them. In Clover Park School District in Washington state, Patty Maxfield facilitated the ongoing exploration of these ideas within the district. In Marblehead Public Schools in Massachusetts, Beth Delforge and Paul Dulac advanced a whole-district focus on thinking. Linda Gerstle embraced these ideas early on and integrated them into ATLAS Learning Communities' work around the United States. Julie Landvogt first saw the power of these ideas in 2000 and established a network of schools in Melbourne, Australia, to explore them. At Melbourne Grammar School, Chris Bradtke, Alan Bliss, and Roy Kelley took up the charge. And the list goes on and continues to grow.

As we have tried to move these ideas forward in our research and development work, we have been inspired by their broad applicability. The idea of making thinking visible and the assorted thinking routines that support that mission have found a place across a range of subject areas, in assorted organizations, in diverse settings, and with varied types of learners. The heart of this book is contained in these Pictures of Practice. We only have been able to tell a relatively few number of stories here; however, we acknowledge all the other dedicated professionals who have been a part of this journey. Their stories serve as daily examples and inspiration for students and colleagues. In particular we thank the teachers of Bialik College, Saginaw Intermediate School District in Michigan, Traverse City Area Public Schools, Vanguard High School, Marblehead Public Schools, International School of Amsterdam, Lemshaga Akademi in Sweden, Brighton Primary in Tasmania, and Melbourne Grammar School, Methodists Ladies College, and Wesley College, all in Melbourne. These represent just a small number of the many schools and teachers at them who have journeyed with us.

In the writing of this book we have to thank the conceptual visionaries who pushed our thinking and contributed greatly to the formation of the ideas presented here through their ongoing dialogue with us. At Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, we thank our colleagues David Perkins, Terri Turner, Becca Solomon, and Linor Hadar, who have been key in developing these ideas as part of the Cultures of Thinking Project. Shari Tishman and Patricia Palmer, who were part of the original Visible Thinking project in which an initial set of thinking routines were developed. Steve Seidel, Mara Kerschevsky, and Ben Mardell have all made us think about issues of visibility and documentation further and deeper through their work in the Making Learning Visible project. In addition, Tina Blythe and Julie Landvogt pushed our thinking forward on more than one occasion.

For Michael, Jean, and Kevon.

Thank you for pushing us to love, laugh, live, and think more deeply.

You've made us better teachers and better people for being in our lives.

About the Authors

Ron Ritchhart has been a principal investigator at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education since 2000. Before coming to Project Zero, he was a classroom teacher working in a variety of subject areas ranging from art to mathematics, at grades ranging from elementary to secondary school, and in settings as diverse as New Zealand, Indiana, and Colorado. The thread running through all of Ron's work as an educator and researcher has been and continues to be the importance of fostering thinking, understanding, and creativity in all settings of learning. He is the author and producer/director of many articles, books, and videos that address these topics.

In 2002, Ron published the book Intellectual Character, which put forth the idea that a quality education is about much more than scores on tests; it is about who students become as thinkers and learners as a result of their time in schools. Ron's classroom-based research, for which he was recognized by the Spencer Foundation, unpacked the important role school and classroom culture plays in nurturing the development of students' thinking dispositions. His identification of the forces shaping the culture of groups and organizations resulted in a framework now being used widely to help educators both in and out of the classroom think differently about teaching and learning.

Ron's ideas and their application have now found a strong following in many schools and organizations. Since 2005, Ron has been applying these ideas at sites all over the world but most notably in Melbourne, Australia, through the Cultures of Thinking Project funded by Bialik College and Abe and Vera Dorevitch.

Mark Church has been an educator for nearly twenty years and has a particular interest in helping teachers and school leaders think deeply about their efforts to cultivate thinking and learning opportunities for students. A skilled facilitator, he works with schools and districts throughout the world, encouraging efforts to create rich communities of practice for educators committed to being mindful students of those they teach and lead. In his work, Mark draws on his extensive and diverse teaching background, having taught elementary and middle school students in the United States, Japan, Germany, and The Netherlands.

After several years overseas, Mark returned to the United States to consult with ATLAS Learning Communities and Harvard Project Zero's Visible Thinking projects. Mark has also been an online course coach, developer, and instructor for WIDE World online learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as well as a faculty member for the annual Harvard Project Zero Summer Institute. Mark has presented on issues of thinking, learning, and understanding at conferences throughout the world, especially emphasizing classroom work with middle-years learners. Currently Mark is a district administrator supporting professional growth and development in the Traverse City Area Public Schools in northwestern Michigan. Additionally, he serves as a consultant for various Harvard University Project Zero Cultures of Thinking initiatives in the United States and abroad.

Karin Morrison is an enthusiastic and passionate educator interested in the thinking and learning of both teachers and children. Her work has focused on providing the environment and structures needed to support deeper thinking and greater understanding and engage students in learning in a relevant and meaningful way. She is currently director of the Development Centre at Independent Schools Victoria (ISV), Australia. Karin also serves as the instructor for the WIDE World online learning course, Making Thinking Visible, developed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Karin was instrumental in developing the collaboration between Project Zero and Bialik College that led to the creation of the Cultures of Thinking project at Bialik. Karin was the in-school leader of this project for its first five years. While at Bialik, she was director of the Rosenkranz Centre for Excellence and Achievement in Education and director of Teaching and Learning. Karin has long been an avid supporter of thinking on the world scene. She was co-convenor for the Twelfth International Conference on Thinking in Melbourne in 2005, the Australian delegate to the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children, past president of the Victorian Association for Gifted and Talented Children, and a committee member of the Reggio Emilia Australia Information Exchange. Karin has also been a faculty member at the annual Project Zero Summer Institutes and the ATLAS Learning Communities Summer Institute in Vermont.

Part One

SOME THINKING ABOUT THINKING

Chapter 1

Unpacking Thinking

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million distinct words in the English language—if one uses a somewhat strict definition of distinct words, that is (“Facts About Language,” 2009). Of course, of this vast number of linguistic options, we use only a small percentage on a regular basis. It is estimated that a mere 7,000 words account for 90 percent of our day-to-day usage. With these numbers in mind, where do you imagine the word think resides in terms of frequency of use? That is, with what relative incidence do you believe you use, hear, or read the word think each day? What rank does it hold in our average use? Does it make the top 1,000 or is it much further down the list?

Drawing on information from several lists, think as a word ranks somewhere around the top 125 to 136 in terms of frequency in print (Fry, Kress, & Fountoukidis, 2000). If one considers just verbs, Oxford English Dictionary rates the word think as the twelfth most used verb in the English language! Clearly the word think plays an astonishingly prominent role in our speech and writing, but for all this usage, how well do we understand what it actually means to think? When we use the word think, what meaning do those listening to us infer? When we tell someone we are thinking, what is it we are actually doing? Although no data is available, one might expect the word think to occur even more frequently in classrooms. When teachers use it, what do they intend? When students hear it, how do they interpret it? Does it lead to any actions on their part?

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. What kinds of mental activity are we trying to encourage in our students, colleagues, and friends? When we ask teachers in workshops, “What kinds of thinking do you value and want to promote in your classroom?” or, “What kinds of thinking does that lesson force students to do?” a large percentage of teachers are stumped. They simply haven't been asked to look at their teaching through the lens of thinking before. They ask their students to think all the time, but they have never stepped back to consider just what it is they specifically want their students to do mentally. However, 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.

Beyond Bloom

When we ask teachers to identify the thinking required in their lessons, we frequently get the response, “Do you mean Bloom's taxonomy? Is that what you're after?” Most teachers have learned about Benjamin Bloom in their teaching training courses. Although his taxonomy focused on three domains—affective, psychomotor, and cognitive—it is the cognitive domain that most teachers remember. 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.

Although Bloom's categories capture types of mental activity and thus are useful as a starting point for thinking about thinking, the idea that thinking is sequential or hierarchical is problematic. Bloom suggests that knowledge precedes comprehension, which precedes application, and so on. However, we can all find examples from our own lives where this is not the case. A young child painting is working largely in application mode. Suddenly a surprise color appears on the paper and she analyzes what just happened. What if she does it again but in a different place? She tries and evaluates the results as unpleasing. Continuing this back and forth of experimentation and reflection, she finishes her work of art. When her dad picks her up from school, she tells him about the new knowledge of painting she gained that day. In this way, there is a constant back and forth between ways of thinking that interact in a very dynamic way to produce learning.

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. Moving from lower- to higher-order skills, Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) identified remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Once again a potentially useful list, but it remains problematic if one takes it as a set sequence to guide instruction for learning. Looking at the thinking actions that Anderson and Krathwohl associated with these six, one might question whether the “testing” they say is involved in evaluating is really more difficult or higher order than the “describing” they list under remembering. For instance, looking carefully to notice and fully describe what one sees can be an extremely complex and engaging task. Such close observation is at the heart of both science and art. Analysis and speculation depend on careful noticing. Our colleague Steve Seidel (1998) has written about both the importance and challenge of description when looking at student work. Because the mind is designed to detect patterns and make interpretations, slowing it down to fully notice and just describe can be extremely challenging. In contrast, one can test the ability of a paper airplane to fly, the accuracy of a proposed mathematical algorithm, or the strength of a toothpick bridge pretty quickly and easily.

What these examples illustrate is that it makes little sense to talk about thinking divorced from context and purpose. Furthermore, the idea of levels might best be considered with regard to the thinking itself. Rather than concerning ourselves with levels among different types of thinking, we would do better to focus our attention on the levels or quality within a single type of thinking. For instance, one can describe at a very high and detailed level or at a superficial level. Likewise, one can simply test something out to determine if it will fail, or one can fully test the limits and conditions of that failure. Analysis can be deep and penetrating or deal with only a few readily apparent features. Watch any major television news show and contrast it to the more in-depth stories one might hear on radio and see in print, and you will see different levels of analysis at play.

One can argue that there is a bit of category confusion in both of the Bloom's lists as well, since not all items seem to operate at the same level. This can most readily be seen in the way “understanding” is framed. Since the 1970s, many researchers and educational theorists have focused on the complexities of teaching and learning for understanding, as opposed to just knowledge retention (Bruner, 1973; Gardner, 1983, 1991; Skemp, 1976; Wiske, 1997). Some researchers have made the distinction between deep and surface learning (J. B. Biggs, 1987; Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Marton & Saljo, 1976). Surface learning focuses on memorization of knowledge and facts, often through rote practices, whereas deep learning has a focus on developing understanding through more active and constructive processes. Today, most educators would argue that understanding is indeed a very deep, or at least complex, endeavor and not in any way a lower-order skill as the revised taxonomy suggests (Blythe & Associates, 1998; E. O. Keene, 2008; Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). Indeed, understanding is often put forward as a primary goal of teaching.

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 (Wiske, 1997). Recall the brief illustration of the young girl painting mentioned earlier. The understanding or insight she develops into painting are the direct result of much and varied activities and the associated thinking that went along with those activities. Thus, we might consider understanding not to be a type of thinking at all but an outcome of thinking. After all, one cannot simply tell oneself to understand something or direct one's attention to understanding versus some other activity. Ellin Keene (2008) writes about the complexity of the process of understanding in the process of reading and the need to develop explicit thinking strategies to support those efforts. Likewise, James Hiebert et al. (1997) write about how learning mathematics for understanding is fundamentally a different task than memorizing procedures.

The same argument put forth about understanding—that it is a goal of thinking rather than a type of thinking—applies equally well to the process of creating. How does one go about the process of creating anything? It is not necessarily a single direct act but a compilation of activities and associated thinking. Decisions are made and problems are solved as part of this process. Ideas are tested, results analyzed, prior learning brought to bear, and ideas synthesized into something that is novel, at least for the creator. This creation can be simplistic in nature, as with the child creating a new color; useful, as in the invention of a new iPhone app; or profound, such as new methods of producing energy from never before used materials.

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. Thinking doesn't happen in a lockstep, sequential manner, systematically progressing from one level to the next. It is much messier, complex, dynamic, and interconnected than that. Thinking is intricately connected to content; and for every type or act of thinking, we can discern levels or performance. Perhaps a better place to start is with the purposes of thinking. Why is it that we want students to think? When is thinking useful? What purposes does it serve? We pick up on these issues in the following section of the chapter.

Beyond Memorization, Work, and Activity

In the preceding discussion of Bloom's taxonomy, we made the argument that understanding isn't a type of thinking one does but is in fact a chief goal of thinking. As most teachers are aware, understanding is one of the major thrusts of current educational practices. The Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework (Blythe & Associates, 1998) and Understanding by Design (UBD) (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998) are two current curricular planning tools that help teachers focus on understanding. It would be nice if we could merely take for granted that all teachers adopt this goal and strive to teach for understanding, but we all know that the reality of most schools and classrooms is quite different. Within the high-stakes testing environments in which educators today operate, there is often pressure to cover the curriculum and to prepare for the test (Ravitch, 2010). Although lip service may be paid to the idea of teaching for understanding, there are pressures that work against it. These pressures aren't necessarily anything new. Schools, having been built on an industrial model, have long focused on imparting skills and knowledge as their chief goal.

In most school settings, educators have focused more on the completion of work and assignments than on a true development of understanding. Although this work can, if designed well, help to foster understanding, more often than not its focus is on the replication of skills and knowledge, some new and some old. Classrooms are too often places of “tell and practice.” The teacher tells the students what is important to know or do and then has them practice that skill or knowledge. In such classrooms, little thinking is happening. Teachers in such classrooms are rightly stumped when asked to identify the kinds of thinking they want students to do because there isn't any to be found in much of the work they give students. Retention of information through rote practice isn't learning; it is training.

The opposite side of this same coin is a classroom that is all about activity. In the often misunderstood notion of experiential or inquiry-based learning, students are sometimes provided with lots of activities. Again, if designed well some of these activities can lead to understanding, but too often the thinking that is required to turn activity into learning is left to chance. Other times, the activity itself is little more than a more palatable form of practice. Playing a version of Jeopardy to review for a test may be more fun than doing a worksheet, but it is still unlikely to develop understanding.

At the heart of this view of teaching is the notion that curriculum is something that teachers deliver to students and good teachers are those most effective at that delivery. Reflecting on his own evolution as a teacher, Mark Church recounts how prevalent this view was in his own teaching:

In my early years of teaching I was “the fun teacher” bursting with confidence and more than a bit of hubris. I kept my students entertained. They liked me. They liked my class. Whatever was to be covered became an object of knowledge that I, as the expert, would deliver by way of gimmicks and glamour to my students. Consequently, I judged my teaching by the ease with which I was able to transmit information along a linear, one-way path of knowing. My idea of good teaching was to focus on the creation and delivery of palatable, hands-on, though not necessarily minds-on, activities. Becoming a good teacher meant mastering a set of delivery techniques and knowing all the answers to my students' questions. In those years it had not yet occurred to me that good teaching hinged upon what I knew and understood about the learners themselves and about how learning happens. However, it was not until I really examined the issue of what is understanding and how does it develop that I actually began the process of becoming a teacher. Only then did I recognize that work and activity are not synonymous with learning.

Let's return to the key question with which we began this chapter: “What kinds of thinking do you value and want to promote in your classroom?” And the associated question, “What kinds of thinking does this lesson force students to do?” When classrooms are about activity or work, teachers tend to focus on what they want their students to do in order to complete the assignments. These physical steps and actions can be identified, but the thinking component is missing. When this happens, the learning is likely to be missing as well.

Here's a quick exercise to help you identify the possible discrepancy between students' classroom activity and teaching that is likely to lead to understanding. Begin by making a list of all the actions and activities with which your students are engaged in the subject you teach (if you are an elementary school teacher, pick a single subject to focus on, such as math, reading, or writing). You might want to brainstorm this list with a couple of colleagues or teammates. Now, working from this list, create three new lists:

1. The actions students in your class spend most of their time doing. What actions account for 75 percent of what students do in your class on a regular basis?

2. The actions most authentic to the discipline, that is, those things that real scientists, writers, artists, and so on actually do as they go about their work.

3. The actions you remember doing yourself from a time when you were actively engaged in developing some new understanding of something within the discipline or subject area.

To the extent your first list—what students spend the bulk of their time doing—matches the other two lists, your class activity is aligned with understanding. If the three lists seem to be disconnected from one another, students may be more focused on work and activity than understanding. They may be doing more learning about the subject than learning to do the subject. To develop understanding of a subject area, one has to engage in authentic intellectual activity. That means solving problems, making decisions, and developing new understanding using the methods and tools of the discipline. We need to be aware of the kinds of thinking that are important for scientists (making and testing hypotheses, observing closely, building explanations…), mathematicians (looking for patterns, making conjectures, forming generalizations, constructing arguments…), readers (making interpretations, connections, predictions…), historians (considering different perspectives, reasoning with evidence, building explanations…), and so on, and make these kinds of thinking the center of the opportunities we create for students. Furthermore, these kinds of thinking need to be among the primary expectations we hold for students: that they can and that they will engage in the kinds of thinking necessary to build disciplinary understanding.

A Map of Thinking Involved in Understanding

In the preceding section we listed a few types of thinking that were central to different subject areas, such as making and testing hypotheses in science or considering different perspectives in history, but are there particular kinds of thinking that serve understanding across all the disciplines? Types of thinking that are particularly useful when we are trying to understand new concepts, ideas, or events? When you thought about the kinds of thinking you did to develop your own disciplinary understanding, you probably identified some of these. Ron Ritchhart and colleagues David Perkins, Shari Tishman, and Patricia Palmer set themselves the task of trying to identify a short list of high-leverage thinking moves that serve understanding well. Their goal was not to come up with all the different kinds of thinking that were involved in understanding but to identify those kinds of thinking that are essential in aiding our understanding. They wanted to identify those thinking moves that are integral to understanding and without which it would be difficult to say we had developed understanding. They came up with the following six:

1. Observing closely and describing what's there

2. Building explanations and interpretations

3. Reasoning with evidence

4. Making connections

5. Considering different viewpoints and perspectives

6. Capturing the heart and forming conclusions

We feel that these six all play important roles in fostering understanding of new ideas. If we are trying to understand something, we have to notice its parts and features, being able to describe it fully and in detail. Identifying and breaking something down into its parts and features is also a key aspect of analysis. The process of understanding is integrally linked to our building explanations and interpretations. In science, we label these as theories and hypotheses. In mathematics, we sometimes call them conjectures or generalizations. In building these explanations, we draw on and reason with evidence to support our positions and try to arrive at fair and accurate positions that can be supported. When we encounter anything new, we make connections between the new and known, drawing on our past experience. These connections help us to link ideas and find where the new ideas fit within the subject area and out. Our connections might also be about application and where the new ideas or skills are used. All of these connections aid our retrieval of information and help ensure that new information is not static or inert (Whitehead, 1929). If one were only to look at new ideas or situations from a single perspective, we would say that one's understanding was limited and sometimes even biased. Awareness of the different perspectives or takes on an idea gives us a more robust understanding. Capturing the heart or core of a concept, procedure, event, or work ensures that we understand its essence, what it is really all about. We want to make sure we haven't lost the forest for the trees and that we notice the big ideas in play.

These types of thinking are by no means exhaustive of all the kinds of thinking we want to make visible in classrooms. However, they do provide a good and useful list with which to begin. Many teachers working to make thinking valued and visible in their classrooms have found that posting these thinking moves in their classrooms can be extremely useful. The list helps draw students' attention to what they will be doing to learn. To help ensure that work and activity don't swamp students' learning, teachers often pause class either before or after an assignment to discuss the types of thinking that will be or were involved in the assignment. As students become more aware of their own thinking and the strategies and processes they use to think, they become more metacognitive (Ritchhart, Turner, & Hadar, 2009a).

Since all of these thinking moves directly support the development of understanding, this list can be useful to teachers in planning units. Over the course of a unit of study, students should be engaged in all of these types of thinking on more than one occasion to help them develop their understanding. If students haven't been actively engaged in building explanations, reasoning with evidence, making connections, or having the opportunity to look at things from more than one perspective, then there would likely be significant holes or gaps in their developing understanding. Just as the six thinking moves can help to develop understanding, they can also be useful in assessing understanding. Fredrik Pettersson, a secondary history teacher at Lemshaga Akademi in Sweden, found that the six thinking moves were exactly the qualities he was looking for in a historical essay and decided to use them as an assessment rubric that he gave to his students. The sixth grade team at the International School of Amsterdam decided that if they were really trying to make thinking visible in their classrooms, then students should focus on their thinking and not only their performance on tests and quizzes. All sixth graders were charged with creating a visible thinking portfolio in which they collected samples that demonstrated where and when they had engaged in each of the six thinking moves. These portfolios were then presented to parents as part of a student-led conference at the end of the year.

Since identification of the six thinking moves that support understanding, what we sometimes call the “understanding map,” we have added two additional thinking moves:

7. Wondering and asking questions

8. Uncovering complexity and going below the surface of things

The importance of curiosity and questioning in propelling learning is easily seen in our experience as learners. We know that when our curiosity is sparked and we have a desire to know and learn something, our engagement is heightened. Many teachers are familiar with the use of essential questions as vehicles to propel students' learning. However, questions are also an ongoing part of developing understanding. The questions we ask at the outset of a learning journey change, morph, and develop as that journey moves forward. Even after extensive efforts to develop understanding, we find that we may be left with more questions than when we started. These new questions reflect our depth of understanding. This depth and our ability to go below the surface of things is a vital part of our ongoing development of understanding. Rather than look for or accept the easy answers, we push to identify the complexity in the events, stories, and ideas before us. In this complexity lay the richness, intrigue, and mystery that engage us as learners.

While these eight represent high-leverage moves, it is important to once again stress that they are by no means exhaustive. We offer up this list as a useful starting place, and no more. You can probably think of other kinds of thinking that are useful, such as visualization, taking stock of what you understand, looking for cause-and-effect relationships, and others. Furthermore, you can probably identify many thinking moves that further flesh out the key eight in ways that are useful. For instance, comparing and contrasting ideas is a specific type of connection making, as is thinking metaphorically. Classifying extends our description and noticing. We've chosen the broad terms of explanation and interpretation, but these are certainly related to inferring, explaining, and predicting. You might well ask, Where is reflection? Structured reflection has been shown to be a way to enhance understanding and problem solving (Eyleer & Giles, 1999). The answer is that a structured reflection—that is, reflection that goes beyond voicing one's opinion or feelings—involves describing the object of reflection and noticing its key features, connecting what is new to what one already knows, and examination of the event or object of reflection through various lenses or frames, which is perspective taking (Colby, Beaumont, Ehrlich, & Corngold, 2009).

Other Kinds of Thinking

Of course, understanding is not the sole goal of thinking. We also think to solve problems, make decisions, and form judgments. Many of the eight key thinking moves come in handy when we are doing those activities as well. Looking at things from new perspectives, identifying the parts, and reasoning with evidence certainly play a role. Making connections to our prior knowledge so that we can draw on it and use it effectively is useful as well. Forming conclusions and identifying the essence are also important. Some additional types of thinking we haven't mentioned that seem useful in the areas of problem solving, decision making, and forming judgments include:

1. Identifying patterns and making generalizations

2. Generating possibilities and alternatives

3. Evaluating evidence, arguments, and actions

4. Formulating plans and monitoring actions

5. Identifying claims, assumptions, and bias

6. Clarifying priorities, conditions, and what is known

Again, these six are not meant to be exhaustive, merely useful moves in terms of directing our mental activity and planning our instruction. Each of the six could be further elaborated with associated kinds of thinking. For instance, brainstorming is a useful strategy to help one generate possibilities and alternatives, and taking stock would be a part of clarifying priorities, conditions, and what is known. Formulating plans and actions connects with the idea of being strategic just as evaluating evidence is a part of being skeptical. Reviewing this list, one might get the impression of a very thoughtful mathematics or science classroom in which problem solving plays a central role. In learning mathematics and science actively, it is important that one gets used to looking closely, noticing patterns, and generalizing from those patterns to create procedures, algorithms, and theories. Of course, these theories and conjectures must be carefully evaluated and tested.

The preceding list might also give one the impression of a civics class in which students are exploring current political, social, or ethical issues. In these situations, getting clear about priorities, conditions, and what is known and unknown is an important starting place. Being sensitive to assumptions and bias that might be clouding our perception is also crucial. Of course, in such situations one must also look at things from a variety of perspectives, drawing on one of the kinds of thinking discussed in the understanding map. Depending on the situation, one might also find oneself generating possibilities and alternative takes on the situation and/or making plans to carry out and monitor.

The combination of the preceding list with the eight thinking moves in the map of understanding goes a long way to helping us unpack what we mean by thinking. By being clearer in our own minds as teachers about the kinds of thinking we want our students to do, we can be more effective in our instructional planning. We can create opportunities for the kinds of thinking we value and want to make an expectation in our classrooms. Being clear about the thinking students need to do to develop understanding or to solve problems effectively allows us to target and promote those kinds of thinking in our questioning and interaction with students. Now that we are clearer about what we mean by thinking, we turn our attention toward how we can make students' thinking about thinking visible.

Uncovering Students' Thinking about Thinking