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The Power of Making Thinking Visible with Ron Ritchhart & Mark Church

Nigel Coutts August 2, 2020

On Saturday PZ Sydney Network hosted Ron Ritchhart and Mark Church for a conversation about their new book, “The Power of Making Thinking Visible”. What follows is a summary of some of the key messages from this conversation. You can watch the whole conversation above. For more learning opportunities like this visit the PZ Sydney Network or follow @pzsydnetwork on Twitter.

Making Thinking Visible is a stance, not just a set of routines. The books evolved from noticing the actions teachers take as a consequence of their stance on thinking. Teachers who value thinking, who push for thinking from their students were noticed to make particular teaching moves on a routine basis. These moves were a reflection of their stance, the tangible evidence that thinking was valued and nurtured. As we think about the culture of our classroom we should consider the nature of our stance. Do we routinely send a message that we value thinking? Are the messages consistent with our stated stance and would others recognise our purported stance in the teaching moves we make?

Key Question 1 - What kind of thinking is necessary in this situation? How do we backwards engineer the scaffolds which will support the thinking that students are noted to require for success in their learning. 

Key Question 2 - What are the thinking moves that we want to grow our students into to empower them as thinkers. 

Making thinking Visible requires a decision making process. It is a process that takes us beyond randomly selecting a thinking routine and hoping it might have the desired impact. It takes us beyond conversations about what content we are going to teach or what activities our students will do. It brings to our planning process a deliberate attention to the thinking moves we want to make routine for our students. It looks something like this:

  • What thinking do I hope to make routine here? 

  • Why that thinking in this context? 

  • How might I support my students to make this thinking move? 

  • How do I make this thinking move routine?

  • How do I empower my students to make this move routinely?

Thinking routines are the tools and the structures which make the thinking we desire possible. Thinking routines make visible and concrete the things that good students are doing automatically. For example, good readers are already making connections as they read; connections within the text and connections beyond the text. When we use thinking routines we make the use of such skills explicit, we are naming and noticing effective practices and encouraging others to do the same. The thinking moves evolved from a process of noticing and naming the types of thinking that effective learners were already doing. Once we identify these moves we can consider how we bring these into the realm of our teaching. If I know good readers make connections, how might I make this thinking move accessible to all my students and how might I refine and strengthen this move even for those who are already making it.

We are more likely to focus on thinking when we consider the BIG Ideas that we want our student to grapple with rather than focusing on the content. It is easy to make plans for how we will deliver content, but when we ponder BIG Ideas we are encouraged to consider what thinking moves are required to make sense of these.

If I don’t consider the type of thinking that I want my students to engage in, it is easier to develop activities that do not require thinking. If we believe all learning is a consequence of thinking, we need to also identify the type of thinking that we want our students to understand. 

Key Question 3 - What do I want my students to understand? What type of thinking does this understanding require?


The Power of Documentation

Documentation is a teaching strategy that emerges from the Reggio Emilia approach. In this the teacher makes time and space to notice and document the learning that is occurring in their classrooms. This documentation acts as a catalyst for elective practice with the teacher constantly asking questions about their learners progress and the impact of their choices on this learning. The documentation is as much a part of the future learning of the students as it is about recording what has occurred. We use documentation to give agency or ownership of the learning to the learner, not to record evidence of learning or the absence there of in a spreadsheet. With this in mind, Visible Thinking builds on this as it connects to the teachers’s stance towards thinking. The following questions might be asked to guide this process:

  • What do we need to note in this moment so it doesn’t get lost, so we can have a ’to be continued moment’? 

  • How might we use documentation to capture where we have been and where we are going.?

And on a personal and collective level documentation and the process of capturing evidence of our thinking support distributed intelligence. The notion of distributed intelligence is that our thinking process can be extended beyond our brains through our use of tools such as drawing, writing and other modes of capturing our thoughts. Our processes of documenting our thinking by other means such as these reduces our cognitive load and allows us to make better use of our cognitive resources.

A Vital Understanding - Thinking routines are not going to elevate the quality of weak or low order content. Deep thinking requires rich content. Content that requires the learner to grapple with complexity and ambiguity when married with the right thinking routine takes the learning deeper.

And linked to this - The routine is only as powerful as one’s purpose. If our purpose is to get the routine done or to do a routine, we lose any power that it might have. 

SO. . . Don’t abandon your use of a routine because it didn’t work. Explore why. Was it that you were not clear on its purpose? Was it paired with content that demanded thinking? Did you give it the time it required? Did students understand your intent? Might the routine need to be used multiple times so that it becomes routine?

A Routine that encourage deep thinking when paired with the right content  . . .

The Three Whys and the Four Ifs?

  • Why does this issue matter to me? 

  • Why does this issue matter to my community? 

  • Why does this issue matter to the world?

    • If I took this issue seriously . . . what might the consequence be?

    • If my community took this issue seriously . . . what might the consequence be?

    • If the world took this issue seriously . . . what might the consequence be?

    • If I do noting what might the consequence be?

Key Question 4 - How do we open minds to the thinking routines? - If we think about the routine and its match to our learning environment, we may be drawn away from a particular routine because we don’t imagine it fits our learners or our context. We may think it doesn’t suit our discipline or learners of the age we teach. But, when we begin by considering the thinking moves, we can see their relevance. As an example; Colour, Symbol, Image may not seem to fit inside a chemistry lab, but one of the thinking moves it supports, ‘synthesising’, probably does. If we want our students to synthesise their ideas, we might scaffold this with Colour, Symbol, Image. 

The danger of turning Watering Holes into Campfires - Our use of thinking routines should create spectacular opportunities for collaborative learning conversations with and between our students. Their use creates a metaphorical “Watering Hole” where many minds come together to share ideas. At the watering hole, no voice is dominant. Contrast this with the metaphor of the “Campfire”. Again we have a gathering of minds, but here there is a dominant speaker or presenter. These metaphorical spaces have evolved from a range of thinkers who examined a mix of spaces which occur across learning environments. Watering Holes, where all members of a community share ideas, Campfires, where one or two people share information with a group, and Cave Spaces, where we work and learn independently all have value. The message here is to not transform what we had planned as a watering hole into a campfire by allowing our teacher voice to dominate or shape the thinking. 

A final note of caution - Consider "The unwitting undermining I do in my own classroom”. Try to identify the actions you take which undermine your intent to encourage, empower and foster thinking. Look for the actions you inadvertently send which are counter to the messaging you hope to be sending your learners.  

With greatest thanks to Ron Ritchhart and Mark Church. for the inspiration.

By Nigel Coutts

Tagsthinking, making thinking visible, MTV
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