Visible+Thinking

Purpose and Goals
"Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. An extensive and adaptable collection of practices, Visible Thinking has a double goal: on the one hand, to cultivate students' thinking skills and dispositions, and, on the other, to deepen content learning. By thinking dispositions, we mean curiosity, concern for truth and understanding, a creative mindset, not just being skilled but also alert to thinking and learning opportunities and eager to take them."

[|Visible Thinking Website]

Visible Thinking in Action
"Every committed educator wants better learning and more thoughtful students. Visible Thinking is a way of helping to achieve that without a separate ‘thinking skills' course or fixed lessons. Visible Thinking is a broad and flexible framework for enriching classroom learning in the content areas and fostering students' intellectual development at the same time. Here are some of its key goals:
 * 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 website] Project Zero: Harvard Graduate School of Education

Core Routines
A thinking routine is a simple structure like a set of questions or a sequence of steps that can be used across grades and content areas.They are used over and over so that they become routine when talking about thinking - they become the way that students go about their learning.

Core Routines target different types of thinking, and can be used in many different ways across all Key Learning Areas. We will be starting with these four core routines: [|What Makes You Say That.pdf] [|SeeThinkWonder.pdf] [|ThinkPuzzleExplore.pdf] [|CompassPoints.pdf]



Pictures of Practice
Below are links to a few examples of Visible Thinking in practice in schools. Think about how you have used the Visible Thinking Routines in your classroom, and the different ways the teachers in the examples have used them.

[|Generating documentation Maths lesson Making Thinking Visible: poetry]

[|What makes You Say That] in practice [|Think Puzzle Explore] in practice [|See Think Wonder] in practice [|Compass points] in practice

What do you **THINK** you know about Visible Thinking? What aspects/areas/applications **PUZZLE** you? What areas/aspects/applications of Visible Thinking would you like to **EXPLORE** further?