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Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners
by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison
What kinds of thinking are students doing?
Challenge to Bloom: Thinking is not neatly sequential or hierarchical.
"Rather than concerning ourselves with levels among different types of thinking, we would do better to focus our attention on the levels or quality of thinking within a single type of thinking." (7)
"[U]nderstanding is not a precursor to application, analysis, evaluating, and creating but a result of it." (7)
Challenge to experiential learning: While retention and rote practice is not understanding, neither is activity.
"In the often misunderstood notion of experiential or inquiry-based learning, students are sometimes provided with lots of activities. Again, if designed well some of these activities can lead to understanding, but too often the thinking that is required to turn activity into learning is left to chance." (9)
Google doc with lists of thinking involved in understanding and problem solving
"As students become more aware of their own thinking and the strategies and processes they use to think, they become more metacognitive." (12)
"Over the course of a unit of study, students should be engaged in all of these types of thinking on more than one occasion to help them develop their understanding." (12)
Understanding is not the goal for *all* thinking; sometimes we think to solve problems or make decisions. Many of the 8 thinking moves above apply here as well, but 6 additional kinds of thinking can be identified for this purpose.
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