Technological University of El Salvador

Language school

Subject: Management of Technological Resources for the Teaching and Administration of the
English Language

Topic: Project 4. summary of visible thinking

Professor: Lic. Martin Ulises Aparicio Morataya

Students’ names:

Jackson Vladimir Alas

Oscar Orlando Sánchez Iraheta

Due date: February 10th, 2011

Introduction

This project has the purpose of presenting a summary of what visible thinking is, and the
different section in which visible thinking is divided. The different routines or mantras that
teachers use in order to develop the students’ visible thinking; The integration of students’
thinking with a complete content learning across different subject matters which improve the
students’ mental skills and dispositions such as curiosity, concerns for true and understanding,
a creative mindset.
Visible Thinking

Visible thinking is a systematic research approach which is based on the integration of the
students’ thinking with a complete content learning across different subject matters. This
project contains a series of routines or mantras for thinking. An extensive and adaptable
collection of different practices in which students develops their thinking through the
interaction of cultivating the students’ mental skills and dispositions such as curiosity, concern
for true and understanding, a creative mindset. Students not just learning to be skilled but also
alert to thinking in getting new opportunities to be taken in life.

Visible thinking is for teachers, school learners, and administrators in K-12 schools who want to
encourage the development of the culture of thinking in their classrooms and lives. Also, in this
site we can find a convenient way to learn about visible thinking as well as through descriptions
of ideals, routines and activities. The site is divided in four sections such as visible thinking in
action, getting started, thinking routines, and thinking ideals.

Visible Thinking in Action is, in which every committed educator wants to better learning and
more thoughtful students. Visible thinking also is a way to helping students to improve their
thinking without using thinking skills courses. Moreover, visible thinking is a broad and flexible
framework for enriching classroom learning in the content areas and improving the students’
intellectual development at the same time. This section achieves some goals such as: a deeper
understanding of content, greater motivation for learning, development of thinking and
learning abilities, development of learners’ attitudes towards thinking and learning, a shift in
classroom culture toward community of enthusiastically thinker and learner.

Getting started is the section in which the routines are the central element of the practical,
functional and accessible nature of visible thinking. Thinking routines are easy to use mini-
strategies that are repeatedly used in the classroom. They are a small set of questions or short
sequence of steps that can be used across various class levels and content. Each routine targets
a different type of thinking and by bringing its own content into the classroom. 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.

Thinking routines refers to those loosely guide learners’ though process and encourage active
processing. They are short, easy to learn mini-strategies that extend and deepen students’
thinking and become part of the everyday classroom life. Classrooms also have routines that
structure the way students go about the process of learning. These learning routines can be
simple structures, such as a reading from a text and answering the questions at the end of the
chapter, asking students what they know, what they want to know, and what they have learn as
part of a unit of study.
Thinking ideals are areas of thinking like understanding, truth, creativity, fairness. They are
important part of thinking that we cherish and strive to cultivate. When you start with an ideal,
you focus on foreground thinking routines that emphasize the ideal, and draw out the students’
ideas and reflections about the ideal to foster their conceptual development. For instance, if
you picked the ideal of understanding, you might use thinking routines that foreground
understanding several times a week in connection with subject matter instruction. You might
ask your students to develop concept maps about understanding, so that you and they can
reflect on what understanding means.