Visible Thinking

I was quite excited to come across a website developed by Project Zero from the Harvard Graduate School of Education this week.It is called Visible Thinking and it offers a framework to help you integrate teaching and the development of thinking with your own content and curriculum.There is a plethora of learning routines on offer  that you can choose from that structure the way students go about the process of learning.It is an easy to navigate website and all of these routines can be downloaded.Some of the routines  you will be very familiar with such as the Think,Pair,Share and KWL routines but there are many other  fanatastic practices that I have not come across before that you might like to try in your classrooms.

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. (Visible Thinking Website  2011)