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 information 2) 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.

A great educator book. It was a good reminder of what we can do better as educators. A great price as well!

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.

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!

How many times have you wished you could open up a child's head to see what he's thinking and how well he understands content you're working with in class? Visible thinking strategies can help you with that, providing a window into a students' thinking so that other students and you can better follow their reasoning and explanations. Visible thinking can be used with virtually any age of student or any subject matter, making these strategies extremely useful and worthy of use in your classroom. The book is well written and easy to read, with clear explanations and examples of how strategies have been used in a wide variety of classrooms. These strategies can be immediately employed in your classroom, no matter when in the school year you begin, so you won't need to wait for a new term in order to get started. If you want to have a better understanding of what goes on in students' heads, I recommend this book. It would be a great book for your professional learning community's focus, too.

I have found that the suggested approach, promoting a constructivist view of learning, is very suitable for students of art history, who normally start with visual material. It helps them develop their own thinking aloud and gradually become more sensitive to various theories of art and to speculating/theorising in general.The authors provide lots of examples from teaching practice so you can compare how effectively you as a teacher can use and modify the principles and routines. (Personally, I have made all the funny mistakes.) The authors' witty tone makes an experience of using the book even more rewarding.

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Simply Wow

It a very interesting book, useful to understand thinking routines and how to bring them to your classroom.

This book is full of excellent advice for teachers teaching on all different levels. I bought this book years ago and keep reading it again and again. I always find a new idea to stimulate my students to think deeper and deeper. "See - think - wonder" has become a standard routine in my lessons. Thank you.

Visible thinking is a buzzword in education circles. Having trialled and refined what works well for my students and for me, I strongly believe this is a must read to help your students develop the art of thinking.