VISIBLE THINKING

What is visible thinking? It is a way of helping to achieve a better learning and more thoughtful students without a separate thinking skills course or fixed lessons. It is a broad and flexible framework for enriching classroom learning in the content areas and fostering student`s intellectual development at the same time. Some of its key goals are: - Deeper understanding of content - Greater motivation for learning. - Development of learners thinking and learning abilities. - Development of learners`attitudes toward thinking and learning. The central idea of Visible Thinking is very simple: making thinking visible. This means that our visible thinking is through the senses, and not just what we can see. All we have to do is imagine. Imagine how to learn a sport when the players can`t be seen. Visible Thinking includes a number of ways of making students`thinking visible to themselves, to their peers, and to the teacher, so they get more engaged by it and come to manage it better for learning and other purposes. THINKING ROUTINES A routine can be thought of as any procedure, process, or pattern of action that is used repeatedly to manage and facilitate the accomplishment of specific goals or tasks. In the classrooms there are some routines that serve to manage and facilitate the accomplishment of specific goals. Also have routines that structure the way students go about process of learning. Some of the advantages of these routines are:

There are goal oriented in that it targets specific types of thinking. Gets used over and over again. Consists of only a few steps. It is easy to learn and teach.

Focus on integration with existing content These routines do not need to be taught but can simply be used as a means of investigating and working with existing subject matter. But, when teachers first introduce a routine they may choose to do so with one of the suggested topics or a topic that may not be a regular part of student`s study.