Bersabe del Carmen Rivas Interiano

Sandra Patricia González Hernández

VISIBLE THINKING

INTRODUCTION

Visible Thinking is the product of a number of years of research concerning children's

thinking and learning, along with a sustained research and development process in
classrooms.

One important finding was that skills and abilities are not enough. They are important
of course, but alertness to situations that call for thinking and positive attitudes toward
thinking and learning are tremendously important as well. Often, we found, children
(and adults) think in shallow ways not for lack of ability to think more deeply but
because they simply do not notice the opportunity or do not care. To put it all
together, we say that really good thinking involves abilities, attitudes, and alertness,
all three at once. Technically this is called a dispositional view of thinking. Visible
Thinking is designed to foster all three.

Another important result of this research concerns the practical functionality of the
Visible Thinking approach -- the thinking routines, the thinking ideals and other
elements. All these were developed in classroom contexts and have been revised
and revised again to ensure workability, accessibility, rich thinking results from the
activities, and teacher and student engagement.

CONTENT

Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating

the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters.

Visible Thinking has a double goal:

a) To cultivate students' thinking skills and dispositions.

b) To deepen content learning.

Visible Thinking is trying to develop:

 Deeper understanding of content

 Greater motivation for learning
 Development of learners' thinking and learning abilities.
  Development of learners' attitudes toward thinking and learning and their
alertness to opportunities for thinking and learning (the "dispositional"
side of thinking).
 A shift in classroom culture toward a community of enthusiastically
engaged thinkers and learners.

Visible Thinking includes attention to four "thinking ideals" -- understanding, truth,

fairness, and creativity. Visible Thinking emphasizes several ways of making
students' thinking visible to themselves and one another, so that they can improve it.

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.

When thinking is visible in classrooms, students are in a position to be more

metacognitive, to think about their thinking. When thinking is visible, it becomes clear
that school is not about memorizing content but exploring ideas. Teachers benefit
when they can see students' thinking because misconceptions, prior knowledge,
reasoning ability, and degrees of understanding are more likely to be uncovered.
Teachers can then address these challenges and extend students' thinking by starting
from where they are.

There are three ways to get started using Visible Thinking....

Start with Routines

The routines are a central element of the practical, functional and accessible nature of
Visible Thinking. Thinking routines are easy to use mini-strategies that are repeatedly
used in the classroom. They are a small set of questions or a short sequence of steps
that can be used across various grade levels and content. Each routine targets a
different type of thinking and by bringing their own content. They have a public nature,
so that they make thinking visible, and students quickly get used to them

Start by exploring Ideals

"Thinking ideal" is a commonsense concept, not a technical one. Thinking ideals are
areas of thinking like understanding, truth, creativity, fairness, and more. They are
important kinds of thinking that we cherish and strive to cultivate.

You focus on that ideal, foreground thinking routines that emphasize the ideal, and
draw out students' ideas and reflections about that ideal, to foster their conceptual
development. For instance, if you picked the ideal of understanding, you might use
thinking routines that foreground understanding several times a week in connection
with subject matter instruction. You might ask your students to develop concept maps
about understanding, so that you and they can reflect on what understanding means.

Thinking ideals offers more focus than starting with general routines or
documentation, although you may prefer to greater flexibility of those entry ways. It
allows you to draw students' attention to one or another very important aspect of
thinking in a sustained way -- understanding, truth, creativity, or fairness. And of
course you can go on to the others later.

Another reason to start with a particular ideal is that provides an organizing structure
that some teachers find useful.

Start by focusing on Documentation

The idea of documentation is closely linked with the idea of making thinking visible.
Through documentation of students' thinking and learning, we develop our own
understanding of how thinking processes develop and how we can best support them.
In this sense, documentation is not just a reflective examination but also a
prospective one as it shapes the design of future learning situations.

What does it mean to get started with Visible Thinking by focusing on documentation?
You focus your attention on how to capture, record, and reflect on the thinking
students are doing in your classroom. While you might be using the routines from any
of the ideals, the focus will be on learning to document and discuss students’ thinking.

Documentation can take many forms. It might be a visual representation, chart, or

table that captures a particular conversation. It can be a set of students' responses to
an assignment. It might take the form of an audio or videotape of a class session. It
can be digital photos that capture a process. In short, anything that will help to
illuminate the thinking students are doing.

The documentation process doesn't stop with the collection or generation of artifacts,
however. What makes documentation powerful is the analysis, interpretation, and
evaluation of these materials. This work is often best done by groups of teachers
working together so that multiple perspectives on the meaning of the documents can
be expressed and explored.

As educators, our first task is perhaps to see the absence, to hear the silence, to
notice what is not there. The Chinese proverb tells us that a journey of one thousand
miles begins with but a single step. Seeing the absence is an excellent first step.
Without it, the journey is not likely to happen. With it, and the direction and energy the
realization brings, we are on our way to making thinking visible.