We learn best what we can see and hear. Visible Thinking includes a number of ways of making students' thinking visible to themselves, to their peers, and to the teacher. When thinking is visible in classrooms, students are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their thinking. Teachers benefit when they can see students' thinking because misconceptions, prior knowledge, reasoning ability, and degrees of understanding are more likely to be uncovered. Teachers can then address these challenges and extend students' thinking by starting from where they are.