POSSIBILITIES & ANALOGIES

Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage? 

This routine helps students understand their own process of learning by considering their conceptions of a topic before and after a learning experience and how their conceptions changed. 

Application: When and where can I use it? 

This routine works well when the topic of the learning experience is one in which students have some prior knowledge. If the topic is something that students would not recognize, it would not be a good choice to use with this routine. Use the “Before Learning” part when you want students to remember their prior ideas, questions, and understandings about the topic. Then, near or at the end of the learning experience, invite students to complete the “After Learning” and “Bridge” parts of the routine.

Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage? 

The routine encourages metaphorical thinking – central to the work of any artist and to creative thinking in any discipline. Metaphors provoke our imaginations to create comparisons between dissimilar things, often leading to deeper and richer understanding of each. 

Application: When and where can I use it?

 Creating metaphors help students understand unfamiliar subjects by linking it to what they already know. Use the routine when you want to help students make connections between disparate elements or ideas, or to stimulate new insights and solutions.

Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage? 

This routine provides practice developing questions that provoke thinking and inquiry. Brainstorming such questions helps students explore the complexity, depth, and multi-dimensionality of a topic. 

Application: When and where can I use it? 

Use this routine to expand and deepen students’ thinking, to encourage their curiosity, and to increase their motivation to inquire. This routine works well throughout the study of a topic in a variety of ways: when introducing a new topic to help students get a sense of the topic’s breadth; in the middle of studying a topic as a way of enlivening students’ curiosity; and, finally, near the end of studying a topic as a way of showing students how the knowledge they have gained about the topic helps them to ask more complex questions. 

Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage? 

Formulating and exploring an interesting question is often as important than finding a solution. This routine encourages students to create interesting questions and then imaginatively mess around with them for a while in order to explore their creative possibilities. It provides students with the opportunity to practice developing good questions that provoke thinking and inquiry into a topic. 

Application: When and where can I use it? 

Use Creative Questions to expand and deepen students’ thinking, to encourage students’ curiosity and to increase students motivation to inquire. This routine can be used when you are introducing a new topic to help students get a sense of its breadth. It can be used when you’re in the middle of studying a topic as a way of enlivening students’ curiosity. And it can be used when you are near the end of studying a topic to show students how the knowledge they have gained about the topic helps them to ask ever more interesting questions. This routine can also be used continuously throughout a topic to help the class keep a visible, evolving list of questions about the topic that can be added to at anytime.

Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage? 

Based on principles from habit science, the Digital Habits Checkup helps students be alert to and take stock of their digital habits so they can make positive changes that support well-being. This routine directs ongoing consideration to: the self and personal well-being. Using it repeatedly helps cultivate dispositions that support mindful digital engagement. 

Application: When and where can I use it?

This activity can be used anywhere educators see a connection with their learning goals. For example, in:

 • advisory period, where students are learning SEL or character education skills; 

• library or media class, where students are learning about digital citizenship and technology; 

• health class, where students are learning about healthy and unhealthy lifestyle choices. 

This activity is flexible! Students can complete the Habits Check-up in a short period of time (e.g., 15 minutes). Or, you can extend the steps with more discussion and expand the activity so it’s a special unit with follow-ups as students track and revamp their habits over a week or month. 

Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?

 Feelings and Options scaffolds perspective taking, empathic problem-solving, ethics spotting, and communication skills for social dilemmas of digital life. 

Application: When and where can I use it?

 Feelings and Options is a thinking routine for engaging with social and emotional dilemmas. It’s designed to support students to explore different perspectives and practice language for constructive and kind communication. By using this routine repeatedly, students can develop the sensitivity to recognize dilemmas and the dispositions to 

1) explore and care about others’ perspectives, and 

2) envision options and possible impacts before acting. 

Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?

This routine fosters creative thinking. It helps to explore decision making situations where a trade-off makes it hard to find a really good option. It focuses on resolving opposites. Sometimes, but not always, there are options that partly bring the opposites somewhat together. All this is also relevant to understanding. It helps in understanding situations even when you are not the real decision maker. 

Application: When and where can I use it? 

The options diamond helps with personal or classroom decision making when different factors pull strongly in opposite directions. It’s also a useful way of exploring and understanding such situations in the news, history, or literature or science or medical policy, etc. For example, US President Harry Truman in deciding to drop the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima struggled with this trade-off: Kill many thousands of Japanese but shorten the war versus Let the war and its casualties continue. He chose to use the bomb. But what compromise options were there? And were there any options that might combine the opposites and end the war quickly without killing thousands of Japanese?

Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage? 

This routine fosters creative thinking. It helps explore “hidden” options in a decision making situation. Often people don’t make good decisions because they miss the hidden options. It is also relevant to understanding. It helps in building an understanding of decision-making situations even when you are not the real decision maker. 

Application: When and where can I use it?

Students can use it for personal decision making or you and students can use it for classroom decision making. Also, you can use it with students as a way of exploring and understanding important decisions in the news or history or literature or science policy or medical policy, etc. You can ask students to make the decision personal by role playing, imagining that they were in the situation.

Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage? 

The True for Who? routine helps students cast a wide net for facts and arguments by imagining how an issue looks from different points of view. The routine also helps students see how different viewpoints and situations might influence the stances people are likely to take. 

Application: When and where can I use it? 

What we think is true often depends on what we see and care about from our own perspective. Like the Circle of Viewpoints routine, this routine helps students consider the roles of context and perspective in shaping what people believe. It can be used at any point in the process of puzzling about truth, once the truth-claim has been clarified.