Making Thinking Visible

 

             Recently, there has been an uptick in the number of professional articles that refer to thinking skills and how to encourage them in the classroom.  It is well known that thinking and pondering about topics and subjects leads to the individual student reaching for connections which in turn contributes to deep learning.  Deep learning is what happens when new connections are made to concepts already existent in the functioning brain.  For example, let’s say we ask a group of students to create bridges using popsicle sticks. This is a challenge that often presents itself in classrooms.  So, you provide the class with the popsicle sticks and the glue guns and the spaces to work and then you set them to work.  Sometimes, you can precede this activity with some pictures of bridges in various places and class discussions about how they are constructed and what they think makes the bridges strong.  This would create an activity for students to THINK about what they are seeing. We have to draw attention to what we want them to think about, but then, in classroom discussions, students will build on each other’s thoughts and contribute ideas. 

             Just talking about why bridges are strong or weak is not sufficient to enable students to remember the reasons or to create new learning pathways to support their ideas.  You have to write things down for them because some students will not remember and others won’t grasp the concepts at all. But this is all normal and natural. So then you can encourage a student to make lists for the students and allow them to specify how to write the concepts down.  By enlisting student scribes, you are enabling more students to engage with the thought process. Right there is an example of how we are making thinking visible.  You cannot rush this activity nor should you because you want the thinking to become abstract.  When students begin to create images in their heads of what you are talking about, you are contributing to deep learning. 

          The next step is to enable the students to experiment with their ideas.  They have begun to think about what makes for bridge strength and what factors might be necessary to consider when functioning as an engineer and planning a building.  Lest you are reading this and thinking that this is above and beyond any class, consider that there are all kinds of bridges and all kinds of designs and just enumerating all the factors that limit how and what to build is cultivating engagement with the students and thinking about the challenge.  All kids like to build things and they are not afraid to take risks and that is precisely what you want. You want them to experiment.  So from here, I would suggest that you turn to the actual building of the bridges with popsicle sticks.  You work with the students to enumerate how to consider a structure successful either using a rubric or a checklist, but they are evolving a mental determination of just what the challenge entails.  Then you let them go to work.  You encourage group work because, you tell them, no one works on their own anymore.  They will understand that these things are done in groups but you talk about why that is so.  You want them to understand that when we work in teams, we put ideas together and we become better because we all have individual ideas. 

           So after giving them lots of time to play around and experiment, you lt them talk about why some of them were successful, somewhat, and some were not. Not every group will be successful, but that is what you want, because you want them to be able to debrief, to talk about what they did right and what they did wrong and why some of them are more successful than others.  Hopefully, you will allow just as much time afterwards to talk about the results as you did to talk about the planning. Obviously, everything has gone from abstract to real but while they are now dealing with real bridge building and the problems that arose, they are deepening their knowledge.  They will be thinking about what they accomplished and why and analyzing what went right and what went wrong. This is also deep thinking.  

           This is what it means to use problem-based learning to help students acquire knowledge, skills and affect but it is also a very real and fun way for students to actually visualize their thinking.  You can use this same strategy over and over again and the kids will remember the challenges that you present to them while they are acquiring knew knowledge, skills and affect.  The only way this works is if you do it over and over again.  It becomes part of their learning repertoire that way.