Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners

**SHORT VERSION**This book provides two things every busy teacher needs:1. A deeper understanding of how to make the invisible parts of thinking more visible -to both students and teachers.2. Actionable student activities, grouped for different phases of learning: introduction, processing, and digging deeper into content.I wouldn't recommend this book for the teacher who is simply looking for quick tools for lesson planning… the activities are not complicated, but a deeper explanation is needed to learn them and to make optimal use of them.However, if you are an educator that wants to better understand how to build better THINKERS, this book is a must!**CONTEXT OF MY USE**I've spent the last four years volunteering as a curriculum coordinator for a hybrid (online/in person) learning program (well before Covid). The director and teachers could see a lot of gaps in their pre-existing curriculum, so they asked for my assistance in finding better options.To my surprise, the task was much harder than expected because nearly every curriculum program (regardless of subject) has a major flaw… one that this book addresses in great depth and with great utility!Most programs (regardless of whether they are software or text-based) follow the same pattern:1) Deliver new information2) Give writing assignments (or, for math, assign problems)Yet, over and over (and over…) again, students smash into the same brick wall… they freeze at the writing assignments because they are still trying to *process* the new information.We started coaching students to understand, "Writing happens in two phases, first you must determine WHAT you want to say, then you must determine HOW you want to say it."The problem is… they don't really understand the difference between these two phases… until we give them a graphic organizer. Then, one-by-one, their faces light up as they see how the graphic organizer helps them sort through new information… with zero burdens of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and minimal burden on language. Instead, they are free to focus mostly on ideas before transferring those ideas into language.So, we've been supplementing our curriculum with graphic organizers. But, we've long known that there is room here for deeper instruction. (SIDENOTE: For math, we've seen significant improvement from using graphic organizers to help students learn the terminology/vocabulary for each unit!)"Make Thinking Visible" caught my attention because I had been using this phrase with my students, "We have to make the invisible, visible." And, as noted above, it has delivered with comprehensive insights into how to provide more explicit guidance on how to think about thinking.

Excellent book for teachers. Although the examples are all from primary education, I feel that this book is equally useful for higher ed too. As a longtime teacher in higher ed, I have seen how hard it is to get student engagement. This book provides many ways in which we can achieve this. I find that many teachers complain bitterly about how students have become dumber over the years and how uninterested they are in learning -- I have been guilty of this too. We do this without thinking about how we are presenting the material. From what I have seen, the bulk of students come to class with a reasonable amount of keenness to learn; taking care to engage them using creative means can be very helpful. What we teachers often tend to forget is that most of us had a knack for learning and did not face the barriers that many students do. Often, especially in higher ed, the thinking among teachers is that they are experts in their subject matter and that their job is to present the material and it is the students' job to pay attention and understand. In truth, we need to be experts in our subject areas and also have special expertise in teaching the material. I think this book can help us to fill in this second aspect that we in higher ed often neglect.

It is quite easy to recommend any product with Ron Ritchhart's involvement, and David Perkins endorsements. It you like to think about thinking, and like to think of way how to reach out to students and make learning a deeper activity - I think you will enjoy this book.Not only is it a book, but it comes with a wonderful DVD of some methods and tactics for generating thoughtful discussion with students. I know it is aimed at K-12 education, but I have used the videos for Professional Development sessions within Higher Education, and the ideas stuck.A lot of the ideas we got from Project Zero Summer Conferences and WIDE World courses which are connected to these books. I recommend these and the following books that fall in the same genre of thought: Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It (Jossey-Bass Education), Smart Schools, The Teaching for Understanding Guide (Jossey Bass Education Series).I would add a few to the cart at once, and sit back and enjoy.

This work is the continuation of the Harvard Project Zero which is all about teacher children to think and make them aware of their own thinking. More importantly, classroom instruction changes in a significant way. The thinking routines force the teacher out of the telling mode and places the highest value on understanding students. Absorption of information is not king any longer. Whether intentional or not, this work goes hand in glove with the work of adaptive schools. Completely changes the classroom!Now the Kindle edition has a major problem. The authors constantly refer to the companion DVD and there isn't one. There should be a link to videos on-line so all versions of this book have the same content. It's like the publishers need to read the book and think some more!