What is Visible Thinking?

Is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development

of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters.

Visible Thinking is for teachers, school leaders and administrators in K - 12 schools who

want to encourage the development of a culture of thinking in their classrooms and

schools.
 Introduction to Visible Thinking

Visible Thinking makes extensive use of learning routines that are thinking rich. These

routines are simple structures, for example a set of questions or a short sequence of

steps, that can be used across various grade levels and content. What makes them

routines, versus merely strategies, is that they get used over and over again in the

classroom so that they become part of the fabric of classroom' culture. The routines

become the ways in which students go about the process of learning.

Thinking routines form the core of the Visible Thinking program. What

makes these routines work to promote the development of a students

thinking and the classroom culture are that each routine:

 Is goal oriented in that it targets specific types of thinking

 Gets used over and over again in the classroom

 Consists of only a few steps

 Is easy to learn and teach

 Is easy to support when students are engaged in the routine

 Can be used across a variety of context

 Can be used by the group or by the individual

 Thinking Routines

Routines exist in all classrooms; they are the patterns by

which we operate and go about the job of learning and

working together in a classroom environment. A routine can

be thought of as any procedure, process, or pattern of action

that is used repeatedly to manage and facilitate the

accomplishment of specific goals or tasks. Classrooms have

routines that serve to manage student behavior and

interactions, to organizing the work of learning, and to

establish rules for communication and discourse. Classrooms

also have routines that structure the way students go about the process of learning.

These learning routines can be simple structures, such as reading from a text and

answering the questions at the end of the chapter, or they may be designed to promote

students' thinking, such as asking students what they know, what they want to know,

and what they have learned as part of a unit of study.