Visible thinking summary

Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. In other words Visible Thinking is a way of helping to achieve that without a separate thinking skills' course or fixed lessons. Visible Thinking is a broad and flexible framework for enriching classroom learning in the content areas and fostering students' intellectual development at the same time. The idea of visible thinking helps to make concrete what a thoughtful classroom might look like, an extensive and adaptable collection of practices, Visible Thinking has a double goal: on the one hand, to cultivate students' thinking skills and dispositions, and, on the other, to deepen content learning. By thinking dispositions, we mean curiosity, concern for truth and understanding, a creative mindset, not just being skilled but also alert to thinking and learning opportunities and eager to take them. Visible Thinking is for teachers, school leaders and administrators in schools who want to encourage the development of a culture of thinking in their classrooms and schools.
A key feature of the Visible Thinking approach is the Teacher Study Group as described in the School-Wide Culture of Thinking section. In these groups teachers reflect on student work, or documentation, generated by students when using routines or investigating an ideal. Documentation such as lists, maps, charts, diagrams, and worksheets reveal learners' unfolding ideas as they think through an issue. In study groups teachers use the structured conversation of a protocol to look at and reflect on thinking present in student work.

There are many ways to make thinking visible. One of the simplest is for teachers to use the language of thinking. English and all other natural languages have a rich vocabulary of thinking consider terms like hypothesis, reason, evidence, possibility, imagination, perspective and routine use of such words in a natural intuitive way helps students catch on to the nuances of thinking and thoughtfulness that such terms represent.

Another way to make thinking visible is to surface the many opportunities for thinking during subject matter learning. Thinking routines are helpful tools in this process. Thinking routines are simple patterns of thinking that can be used over and over again and folded easily into learning in the subject areas. They have a public nature, so that they make thinking visible, and students quickly get used to them. Research shows that especially teachers establish cultures of thinking from the very first class days of the year. For instance, they may discuss with students directly the value of attitudes of curiosity, inquiry, and playing with ideas important thinking dispositions. They may put an open-ended problem on the table and engage students in wrestling with it, without coming to any final solution that day. They may lead Socratic dialogues that unpack a complicated issue. Then, as the school year unfolds, they continue and extend these practices. Visible Thinking makes extensive use of learning routines that are thinking rich. These routines are simple structures, for example a set of questions or a short sequence of steps, that can be used across various grade levels and content. What makes them routines, versus merely strategies, is that they get used over and over again in the classroom so that they become part of the fabric of classroom' culture. The routines become the ways in which students go about the process of learning. Thinking routines form the core of the Visible Thinking program. What makes these routines work to promote the development of a students thinking and the classroom culture are that each routine: Is goal oriented in that it targets specific types of thinking Gets used over and over again in the classroom Consists of only a few steps Is easy to learn and teach Is easy to support when students are engaged in the routine

-Grecia Karina Sanchez Flores -Brenda Lisseth Mejia Moreno