Written by: Mr. G Senthilkumar (HSSW)
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.
Toward achieving these goals, Visible Thinking involves several practices and resources. Teachers are invited to use with their students a number of “thinking routines” – simple protocols for exploring ideas – around whatever topics are important, say fractions arithmetic, the Industrial Revolution, World War II, the meaning of a poem, the nature of democracy. Visible Thinking includes attention to four big categories of thinking – Understanding, Truth, Fairness, and Creativity. Sometimes we call them “thinking ideals” because they are all ideal aspirations for good thinking and learning. And of course there are other thinking ideals as well. Visible Thinking emphasizes several ways of making students’ thinking visible to themselves and one another, so that they can improve it.
The idea of visible thinking helps to make concrete what a thoughtful class-room might look like. At any moment, we can ask, “Is thinking visible here? Are students explaining things to one another? Are students offering creative ideas? Are they, and I as their teacher, using the language of thinking? Is there a brainstorm about alternative interpretations on the wall? Are students debating a plan?”
When the answers to questions like these are consistently yes, students are more likely to show interest and commitment as learning unfolds in the class-room. They find more meaning in the subject matters and more meaningful connections between school and every-day life. They begin to display the sorts of attitudes toward thinking and learning we would most like to see in young learners – not closed-minded but open-minded, not bored but curious, neither gullible nor sweepingly negative but appropriately skeptical, not satisfied with “just the facts” but wanting to understand.
The central idea of Visible Thinking is very simple: making thinking visible. When thinking is visible in class- rooms, students are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their thinking. When thinking is visible, it be- comes clear that school is not about memorising 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.
Reference:http://admin.kasa.org/Professional_Development/documents/
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