QEP - Thinking and Beyond

The Visible Thinking website, associated with the book Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison, offers “thinking routines,” also known as “structures,” designed specifically for K-12 educators to promote students’ critical thinking (“Home Page”).

The authors differentiate between the word routine and the word strategy because routines become habitual through classroom repetition, but a strategy may be used just once or sporadically (Ritchhart et al. 45). They advocate that teachers use the routines to stimulate and structure thinking and learning and indicate teachers must determine the “content” they will teach with a particular routine, since the routines are not content-specific. After a thinking routine becomes habitual for students, they can also use it independently to “support their own thinking” (Ritchhart et al. 45).

Although the Visible Thinking model’s stated purpose is for K-12, this model’s thinking routines allow for explicit scaffolding and metacognition in which students recognize what they already know about a topic before receiving new instruction about it (Ritchhart et al. 47; 86-7).

For instance, the 3-2-1 Bridge routine calls for students to write down “three words, two questions, and one metaphor/simile” about a topic before it is taught to access their prior knowledge. After classroom instruction, students write down the same three items and then compare and contrast their pre- and post-instruction responses to create a “bridge” and identify what they have learned and how their thinking has changed (Ritchhart et al. 87). This activity translates well into a college-level curriculum. The routines represent active-learning pedagogy crucial for teaching students to think critically; they also entail having students communicate their thought processes verbally and in writing, reflect on those processes, and rise to higher order thinking (Ritchhart et al. 47).

Other benefits of the thinking routines are their applicability to the Arts and Humanities as well as their versatility, since the routines encompass a variety of academic disciplines and classroom purposes. Two of the four collaborators on the Visible Thinking project website, David Perkins and Shari Tishman, wrote books about arts education, and several thinking routines in the Making Thinking Visible book reflect that art background. For example, it is clear the routines “See-Think-Wonder,” “Zoom In,” and “The Explanation Game” apply readily to thinking about visual art, although Ritchhart et al. point out other possibilities for them (55-69; 101-108). However, with 21 routines total, the routines offer activities for many disciplines such as effective concept mapping and discussion routines for nonfiction texts such as “The 4Cs: Connections, Challenge, Concepts, Changes” (Ritchhart et al. 140-146). In addition, the authors categorize the routines as suitable for “Introducing and Exploring,” “Synthesizing and Organizing,” and “Digging Deeper,” which relate to the thinking trajectory students should ideally employ as they progress through a unit of study (Ritchhart et al. 49-50).

Works Cited

Ritchhart, Ron, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison. Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners. Jossey-Bass, 2011.