I read Visible Thinking a few years back and found it intriguing.
The introductory chapters essentially lay out the case for thinking. I also found the concept-may study intriguing. I was teaching 6th grade science at the time, so had my classes try the activity. Here are some of their thought maps:
As in the original study, it was clear that some kids have (and can articulate) far more sophisticated metacognitive strategies.
The bulk of the book describes Ritchart’s “routines for thinking,” which are instructional routines designed to support the development of metacognitive strategies. These are divided into three broad categories: Routines for introducing and exploring ideas, routines for organizing and synthesizing, and routines for digging deeper. I’ve tried many of these in the years since then…and as Ollie suggested in his “thought Shrapnel,” I think some of them are teaching practices that both progressive and traditional teachers might find useful.
For example, there are some key themes in the routines for introducing and exploring ideas that I’ve seen show up in other places. For example: See-Think-Wonder is essentially the same “Notice and Wonder” many progressive math teachers love. (WODB is a special form of this.)
There are lots of examples in Making Thinking Visible, but many are from elementary and I think history and literature are over-represented. So here’s one I did sort-of recently for 5th-grade math:
To implement this routine, you just project the image, open the floor for discussion, and try to focus intently on understanding what the kids are saying/noticing. To make this work, you really have to try hard to refrain from correcting or explaining.
From 8th-grade science, here’s one I got from Brilliant.org:
source:
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I can see why initially, traditional teachers might have a harder time seeing the value in unstructured “wondering.” It is true that kids are rarely actually learning much during this time–they tend to focus more on their own thinking than what classmates are saying, and they often have misconceptions even about things they think they know. But I can say that most of the time, when I do this, I’m glad I did…obviously, they are a low-threshold introduction–an easy way to invite all kids to engage with the ideas you are going to be teaching. They can help establish your “no-opt-out” norm–it’s impossible to be “wrong” about what you notice, so kids have absolutely no excuse for not sharing. (And they usually really want to–especially the ones who struggle and are often too worried about being “wrong” to raise their hand.) But I think there are also two more evidence-based explanations for why these can be effective.
First, these kinds of discussions are often an efficient formative assessment–they can be a great way to identify misconceptions and/or prior knowledge. In the fifth-grade discussion, for example, one kid said, I know that “h” is height, but what do all the other letters stand for? That’s the kind of knowledge that I can easily take for granted, but can trip a kid up and make it hard for them to understand anything else we’re doing if missing.
The second cognitive science argument is that these are a kind of goal-free problem. Initially, reducing the cognitive demand involved in trying to figure out “the answer” allows kids to think about what’s going on. Here’s a quick abstract (I don’t have access to the article):
Again, there are limits to using these in math and science. I usually keep these discussions brief–maybe 5 minutes–and they are usually followed by “the lesson” and assessment. In my earlier post I think I shared the TWR-sentence template I used as a formative assessment, but here it is again:
When I first started using these, I tended to look more at outside sources. For science, I adapted several problems from Brilliant.org; I’ve also used a few images from Edward Tufte’s books, and I love that there are sites like this (although I haven’t reviewed many of these yet). But increasingly, I’ve found that for science and geometry, it’s often just as effective (and a lot faster) to take an image or diagram from their textbook, strip away all the text, labels, questions, etc., and just try to figure out what it’s showing us.
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I can’t honestly say I use as many of the routines for synthesizing and organizing information. I’ve had some success with “I used to think…now I think,” but I’ve found this much more effective when I’ve written content-specific anticipation guide and made them commit to a position before the lesson/unit, then given those back at the end so the kids can see how their thinking has changed. (Otherwise, the kids often can’t remember what they used to think or claim they “knew that all along.”)
Here’s a science example I wrote for a book we read together:
We used the same scale afterward and compared. My main observation is that these routines require a lot of time and are very content-specific.
I haven’t been able to make connect-extend-challenge or “4 cs” work well (although to be fair I haven’t spent a ton of time trying).
The IM curriculum I’m currently using for most of my math classes is very discussion based, and relies heavily on what they call the “lesson synthesis.” These lesson closes are a part of my teaching I don’t feel I do as well, so I would definitely be interested in hearing from anyone who has a great routine for synthesizing, particularly if you’ve used it for math.
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Last…the routines for digging deeper:
Other than the Explanation Game, which Ollie wrote about, the routine I use most often is “Step Inside,” although we just call it “point-of-view writing.” I use this about once a month in English…but rarely in math or science. (I tried once to have 6th graders write a first-person account of the water cycle from the point of view of a drop of water…they enjoyed doing it, but honestly the water cycle isn’t super complicated for 11-12 years olds, and they all wanted to illustrate and color their little books, so a lesson that should have taken 20 minutes ended up taking two full class periods. That dampened my enthusiasm for quite a while.)
When I use this for English, I usually put some constraints on the exercise: student consider the assigned character’s POV during one specific scene or episode. For example, earlier this year the kids read Witch of Blackbird Pond independently. I assigned POV writings after a meal scene in Chapter 10 or 11 and after the trial scene near the end of the book. Here are some whole-class feedback sheets:
It’s helpful to collect these and save them, particularly if you assign the same character more than once…comparing the POV for Kit (the main character) at two points in time made it easier have a focused, productive discussion about how she grew or changed over the course of the novel.
I really don’t have a great digging deeper routine for math or science. If I have a take away from Visible Thinking, it’s that an effective routine likely needs to incorporate some kind of questioning.
With my advanced 8th grade math group, I’ve experimented some with my reading notes template, trying to “force” question-asking:
(The blank template we used for a while is here, some kids still print it but most don’t.)
I think its been marginally effective as a synthesis activity, but not as effective as a digging deeper routine. Kids usually write questions they know how to answer, and all of the “question I still have” have been about things they don’t understand about what’s been presented. I could probably do better with this if I developed some explicit lessons on asking questions (i.e, “does this pattern generalize?”), but I’m asking a lot of these kids already…
again, would love to hear how any math teachers make something like this work. 🙂
Arithmetic Plus 
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