New Research.
New Insights.
New Routines.
Advancing Our Understanding of Visible Thinking Practices
With the support of funding from The Melville Hankins Family Foundation and through our collaboration at Mandela International Magnet School we have been able to continue our research and development work around visible thinking practices. Specifically, we have developed new routines, deepened our understanding of how teachers use thinking routines to maximum effect, and identified the power of visible thinking practices to benefit students and transform schools and classrooms. Specifically, we identified 6 powers of visible thinking practices. These include fostering deep learning, cultivating engaged learners, changing the role of students and teachers, enhancing formative assessment practice, improving learning (even when measured by standardized tests), and developing thinking dispositions. Click on the images below to read the text on a plan background.
FOSTERING DEEP LEARNING
The Visible Thinking project, which began in 2000, built on the Teaching for Understanding project. These two ideas, understanding and thinking, are core to conceptions of deep learning. While no single definition exists of deep learning, The Hewlett Foundation defines deeper learning as the significant understanding of core academic content, coupled with the ability to think critically and solve problems with that content. These core academic competencies are joined by the interpersonal and intra-personal 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.
Erik Lindemann from Osborne Elementary School in Quaker Valley, Pennsylvania, sees these elements coming into play as he makes thinking visible in his 3rd 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.
CULTIVATING ENGAGED STUDENTS
We identify 3 types of engagement that thinking routines foster: 1) engagement with others, 2) engagement with ideas, and 3) engagement in action. In engaging with others, we recognize that learning unfolds in the company of others and is a social endeavor. 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, building understanding is an active process that involves digging in and making sense. Exploring meaningful and important concepts 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.
Secondary math teacher Jeff Watson at the International Academy in Oakland County, Michigan, reflects on the difference in engagement in his students through visible thinking. “Math classrooms tend to be lecture-oriented, teacher-centered environments,’” 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.”
CHANGING THE ROLE OF STUDENT & TEACHER
When teachers embrace the goal of making their students’ thinking visible and begin to make use of the associated practices, they begin to see shifts in the roles played by teachers and students. These shifts are small at first but over time have the potential to become seismic. To be sure, when many teachers start using thinking routines they may be merely tacked on to the traditional transmission model of teaching as ways to enliven learning. Even when this happens, teachers still may see glimmers of what’s possible. Teachers must then embrace this potential and cultivate it through the regular, thoughtful application of MTV processes. They must adopt not only the practices but also the goal of visible thinking. This necessitates taking a new stance toward teaching, of changing the story of learning one is telling, and re-conceptualizing the goals of education.
While teachers whose classrooms are most transformed do not abandon curriculum or preparing students for high-stakes tests, they see their role as teaching beyond the test toward preparing students for a lifetime of learning. The test is only one small marker along the way. Listen to Cameron Paterson: “While I want my students to do well on the tests, I also want them to develop the dispositions they need to thrive in a globalized world full of robots - to be able to think for themselves, create and question.”
ENHANCING OUR FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT PRACTICE
If we want to know not just what our students know, but how they know it, then we must make their thinking visible. Thus, making students’ thinking visible is a formative assessment practice. As Stevens Cooperative School principal Shehla Ghouse explains, “Insights into student thinking provide teachers with invaluable information that can be used to plan next steps for individual students. It also helps us better understand the individual learner and ways in which to reach them more effectively to further their learning.”
Speaking about the specific benefits of thinking routines as formative assessment tools, Katrin Robertson identifies their open-ended nature as being particularly useful with her university students. “By asking students to make their thinking visible through a thinking routine, I not only can collect data about specific areas of their learning that I want to understand, but also am able to reveal students’ learning in ways that I had not considered or anticipated.” She adds that by providing both sought after and unanticipated information, thinking routines “help me design better learning opportunities that support and extend students’ learning in rich and nuanced ways as we move forward in our learning.”
IMPROVING LEARNING (EVEN WHEN MEASURED BY STANDARDIZED TESTS)
When we began sharing thinking routines and visible thinking practices, we often received questions about how their use related to students’ test performance. To be honest, we couldn’t answer those questions. We knew that the routines engaged students in their learning, got them to think, and helped them build understanding. We felt this would help them on standardized tests, but we had no evidence. However, in the intervening years we have been able to collect this data. In determining the effects on students’ performance, we rely on the data from individual teachers and schools who have embraced MTV as both a goal and a practice and nurtured it at their schools or classrooms through sustained professional learning. The results have been impressive. We’ve seen gains on a diverse range of tests used across a variety of countries, subjects, and grade levels including on PARCC, Smarter Balanced, IB Diploma, VCE, HSC, and MEAP. In an experimental study, conducted by our colleague Yerko Sepulvada at the university level, students who received instruction using thinking routines scored a full 1.3 points higher (on a 7-point scale) than their peers receiving traditional instruction.
As Cameron Paterson states, “When I make students’ thinking visible, it becomes shared, so it is ‘our’ thinking, bounced off each other, rather than locked inside their heads. This process of publicly sharing thinking builds our collective understanding. We all learn more AND they do well on the tests.”
DEVELOPING THINKING DISPOSITIONS
The main goal of the Visible Thinking project was to develop students as thinkers and learners by cultivating their dispositions toward thinking. When we make thinking visible as a regular part of the classroom through our useof thinking routines, documentation, questioning, and listening, we send a message to students that thinking is valued. It is infused in everything we do and becomes part of the fabric of the classroom. Students come to see the value in their thinking and become more inclined toward thinking as an important part of their learning rather than as an occasional add-on. This changes who they are as learners.
Denise Coffin, a kindergarten teacher at Sidwell Friends School in DC, has seen how regular effort to make thinking visible changes her kindergarten students. “Over the years, I have noticed that my learners take all of this with them when they leave kindergarten. The thinking continues to deepen and the routine becomes an innate habit or disposition. I see my learners take this newly formed learning identity, routines and all, to other disciplines and even to interactions with their families.”