Making Thinking Visible

When we place the learner at the heart of everything we do, our focus as teachers shifts in a most fundamental way.
* from the delivery of information to fostering students’ engagement with ideas
Instead of covering the curriculum and judging our success by how much 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.

We have two chief goals:
* creating opportunities for thinking
* making students’ thinking visible

David Perkins “learning is a consequence of thinking. Retention, understanding, and the active use of knowledge can be brought about only by learning experiences in which learners think about and think with what they are learning…Far from thinking coming after knowledge, knowledge comes on the coat tails of thinking. As we think about and with the content that we are learning, we truly learn it.”
When we reduce the amount of thinking eg ask of our students, we reduce the amount of learning as well. We need to remember that thinking may still be invisible to us. To make sure thinking isn’t left to chance and to provide us with the information we needin order to respond to students’ learning needs, we must also make their thinking invisible.

Enabling students to show thinking gives the teacher insight into understanding and misconceptions.

Good “essential questions”:
What’s the story?
What’s the other story?
How do you know the story?
Why know/ tell the story?
Where’s the power in the story?

Students’ questions all the more important: “I judge my students not by the answers they give, but by the questions they ask” Paul Cripps Wyoming

“What makes you say that?” – a non-threatening way of eliciting thinking process.

We make students’ thinking visible through our questioning, listening and documenting so that we can build on and extend that thinking on the way to deeper and richer understanding.

The section ‘As patterns of behaviour’ gets to the crux of an idea that has been milling around in my head recently. The notion that it is the routine, daily things that teachers set up in their classroom that create habits and effect learning powerfully. That is why I have been developing a Daily Planning tool, which tries to highlight and synthesise the key aspects that we are focusing on as a school, and place them front and centre in all of our teachers’ minds. I realise though that the aspects I have highlighted so far are the ‘what’ of the curriculum, and the routines set out in this book address the ‘how’. I will need to come back to explore this section in more detail.

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