Visible Thinking.

  I've been cleaning the house and stumbled across a book on making thinking visible.  Of course I stopped working to check it out as if it were a new toy.

While reading it, I wondered if visible thinking is the same as thinking aloud or are they different enough to warrant a more in depth look.

Lets start by looking at what "Visible Thinking" is.  There are 6 ideas this topic is built upon.
1.  Learning is a consequence of thinking.  It has been found their understanding and memory of material increases with thinking.

2. Good thinking is important because its how a person invests their thinking that makes learning possible.

3. Thinking develops from social endeavors.  Individuals learn from their social interactions with those around them.

4. When you foster thinking, it becomes visible. For the most part, thinking is invisible so we don't always know how we arrived at an answer.  Effective thinkers make their thinking visible by speaking, writing, drawing, or other method.

5.  Classroom culture makes it more inviting to develop visible thinking.  The classroom needs to have  routines and structures which encourage learning.  It should also have language, expectations, time, modeled thinking,  interactions, and opportunities to think.

6. There should be professional development opportunities for teachers to develop their own thinking.

Below are 4 suggested routines to help students learn to make their thinking visible.
1. Headlines - Have students create a headline for a newspaper which summarizes the most important information covered in the lesson.

2. Connect - extend - challenge. This requires the teacher to ask students three questions.  The first is how are the ideas or materials presented connected to what you've already studied or already know?  The second asks what new ideas pushed or extended your thinking in new directions. The final question is which new ideas or material are you still confused by?  What are your questions?

3. See - think - wonder has the student comment on what they see (making observations), what they think about it, and what do they still wonder in regard to the topic.

4. Compass points - Each compass point stands for a different level of understanding.  East means Excited or what excites you about this idea or proposition.  West stands for worrisome or what do you find worrisome about this idea.  North is need to know or what more do you need to know.  Last is south or stance, steps, or suggestions for moving forward.

So it appears visible thinking is in the same area but a bit different. So next is to look at its application to math.  Hope you enjoyed it.  Have a good day.

Visible Thinking

  I've been reading up on the topic of visible thinking.  Its something I'm not always as good at using as I should be.

For those of you who are not familiar with visible thinking, it is framework designed to help shape intellectual development.

The goals of visible thinking include developing deeper understanding of the material, increase motivation for learning, improve attitudes towards learning and move the culture towards one of wanting to learn.

One thing is to establish simple rules for exploring ideas student thinking becomes visible through their discussions.Most of my students have trouble expressing their thinking.  Sometimes its because they do not understand the concept, sometimes its due to a lack of  vocabulary.

Visible thinking should involve teachers thinking aloud, students verbally expressing their thinking, students listening to others who are expressing their thoughts, students use discussion to help form understanding, and recording understanding via journals, solving problems, and completing projects.

Some of the recommended ideas for helping students develop visible thinking are:
1. Justifying your thinking through questions such as "What's going on?" or what do you see that makes you think that?"  Questions such as these help students learn to describe things and then support this with evidence.  This type of questioning can be used with everyone from whole class to individuals.

2.  Asking what they think, what still puzzles them, or what are some ways to explore the topic further.  These questions can help connect the current topic with prior knowledge.  This is good to use at the beginning of a topic because it helps students recognize what they already know.  It can also be used to figure out what they still need to learn.

3. Another one is the "I used to think.......but now I think.........." which can be used to show how student understanding has changed.  It might be as simple as I used to think I should add numbers and variables together but now, I think you add numbers to numbers and variables to variables.

4. Use the See, Think, Wonder when introducing new material.  Assign them to preview the section while they consider what they are seeing, what do they think its about, and is there anything they wonder about as they look through the material.

5.  Think about Chalk Talk which is where you list each essential vocabulary word on a piece of chart paper. Each student has a marker and they add their definition, thought, or comment on the word.  They rotate completing this for every word.  This activity can also be used for a mathematical reflection where you place a series of questions, one on each piece of chart paper, and students write down their thoughts, questions, or examples.

6. One way to increase discussion is to present problems to students that have no one right answer.  This could be done via questions such as "Which one does not belong?" or "I have 5 coins in my pocket, what might their total be?"  Have students justify or explain their answer.

These are some simple, easy to implement steps which help increase visible thinking in your classroom.  Let me know what you think.