thinking routines

Tag: thinking routines

Virtual School Pedagogy – Oldies but Goodies

Note: My international school is just starting virtual school for the current school year, so we are now just experiencing what many schools have been doing for most of the year. I posted the following to our Wellness blog.

I hung up my instructional technology hat a ways back, so I can’t offer the latest tools, tips, or techniques that many of our staff use in their virtual learning delivery. I can offer pedagogical strategies that have worked in the past and can definitely be supported through technology to enhance learning in virtual schools.

Concept/Mind Maps

Concept/Mind maps help students make their thinking visible, primarily when representing connections between ideas, events, topics, etc. Concept maps also can be used as collaboration tools.

An excellent way to use concept maps for virtual learning is to use an online provider like Mindmeister. Students can share their Mindmeister concept maps with you to access their thinking, especially for formative assessment of their understanding as the unit of study progresses. Virtual collaboration is supported if you partner with students or place them in groups to work together to use mind maps for multiple purposes. Here is a mind map template for essential questions one teacher provided his students. Look at a blog post describing how students used concept maps to answer the essential questions for their units of study at a couple schools.

Learning Activity Types via TPACK

Several American professors came together in 2010-11 to organize learning activity types (LAT) into nine subject areas supported by technology. They published articles about their efforts. Here is one. They provide research-supported pedagogies in their Learning Activity Types website hosted at the College of William & Mary School of Education. They apply the TPACK construct for planning purposes. Look to their website by going to the left side menu to select from the nine learning activity-type disciplines. The supporting technologies are from 2011, so adapt ones that still exist today and/or find the latest iteration or replacement tool that best supports each pedagogy. Image Source

Multimedia Essays (Media Mashups)

Writing essays is one of the most precious skills that we teach our students. But sometimes, our students can benefit from an alternative learning experience and assessment that engages the full range of their ICL skills. We can differentiate and add complexity to the standard writing process by having students create multimedia essays where they “mash up” various sources of media to communicate their thinking. At the time, a William and Mary doctoral student describes her work with multimedia essays in this podcast. Image Source

Personalized Learning System (PLS)

Students (and teachers) use technology to access information, to make meaning, to create and communicate their learning via a personalized set of resources for learning… a “go-to” 24/7 technology and information access toolkit – a Personal Learning System (PLS).

We guide our students to work as architects designing and maximizing their “learning flow” (think of the term workflow) while also engaging in time management techniques to increase efficiency and purposeful productivity. Self-directed and growth-minded students use devices, apps, Web tools, and information sources, putting themselves in charge of their learning. Here is a web resource describing what a Personal Learning System can look like and a planning document for students to work with. Image Source

Sketchnoting (Visual Note-Taking)

Our students live in a media-rich world. They think in images, video, and sound while constantly making neural connections. The creation apps on phones, tablets, and computers offer students pathways to draw, audio record, insert images/video, and embed hyperlinks to information sources, all personalized. This is where visual note-taking comes in. We can expand note-taking choices beyond text recording into multiple modalities by guiding students to use mind maps, colors, shapes, images, and digital grouping by dragging and dropping objects and connecting lines to record their thinking. Image Source

The Six Thinking Hats

Edward de Bono created this approach to decision-making and problem-solving that guides users to think in terms of types of thinking and perspective. We can apply them for individuals and groups of students to use as they process information. Here is a helpful overview and a teacher’s application in her classroom. Image Source

In the book Making Thinking Visible, Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morisson help readers understand the power of thinking routines to help students process big ideas and make their thinking visible. Teachers routinely use the thinking routines in their regular face-to-face classes. One can also choose from a variety of technologies to also use in virtual school. Here is a dated web resource on the supportive tools one can use. However, the application of the routines is sound. If you are new to the routines, you can review an article by Ron Ritchhart and David Perkins entitled Making Thinking Visible. Also, look to go through the Harvard Project Zero Thinking Routine Toolbox. Image Source

WebQuests

WebQuests are a natural pedagogy for virtual schools because they’re already web-based. They connect inquiry and research skills to students working in teams using their communication skills to present their findings. WebQuests are online research expeditions built by teachers that put the students into roles to find information from selected sites and other resources as they attempt to solve a real problem and/or answer a question. The students in teams analyze, curate, and then use the information to create a learning product to demonstrate their understanding. WebQuests are NOT internet scavenger hunts with students just going through a list of links. True WebQuests have the students performing in the authentic roles of historians, economists, mathematicians, etc. The culminating project is usually a performance task in which the students present their findings while playing their roles or applying the learning to produce a product. Image Source

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A significant wellness connection for these pedagogies is that they engage students in PERMAH while exercising their Character Strengths. Collaboration amplifies Relationships with students using their strengths of kindness, leadership, and teamwork, to name just a few character strength applications. The process of creating definitely has students applying their strength of creativity within the pillars of Engagement and Accomplishment.

So how do we take these oldies but goody strategies and other current innovative and effective practices to spread them throughout our virtual school? One approach would be to form a virtual school design team in each division who become busy bees finding out what’s happening in virtual classrooms elaborating on ideas, and making connections to new approaches. They then cross-pollinate throughout the division and potentially between divisions. 😁

Album Cover Image Source

Virtual School – August Version

May 9, 2020 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

Which phase of virtual school are you in now? 2.0 3.0 4.0

How will your school prepare for the likelihood that either at the start or a month or two into the new school year you will need to go virtual again? What will your priorities be now that you have some experience with virtual school?

My school just completed three months of virtual school. Our students returned to school this week. Looking forward, we will need a lot of design time to be ready to up our game to potentially roll out virtual school during the coming school year. Our teachers and administrators did an incredible job delivering our curriculum virtually. Yet, I think we can sharpen the saw of our pedagogy to do an even better job in helping our students reach the learning goals of our curriculum. We need to stick with the mission of our school and the learning outcomes of our normal curriculum. In the case of our elementary division, this means teachers designing learning experiences around concepts and HOTS often delivered through project creation. Thus we will need to put on our designer caps to replicate virtually what we normally do face to face. I hit on this topic a little in the VS – Coming Out the Other Side post.

As for a mechanism to do the planning, I would either work with my current VS Design Team idea to allocate time for August planning or possibly create another team of interested innovators to start the design process. As mentioned in previous posts, I would continually update the wellness section of the parent portal to provide families with strategies to help with their wellness.

My main drivers continue to be the wellness of all stakeholders as we try to humanize virtual schools as much as possible. This would include a mindset of finding even more ways to build community whether through collaborative Project-based Learning, ongoing class community meetings, or whatever activities that bring students together.

A second focus would be on finding ways to be as efficient and productive in delivering the learning experiences. Teachers cannot spend 8 hours a day responding to students through tech platforms that call on teachers to respond to every student’s post. The fatigue factor is just too much. Sustainability over many months of virtual school needs to drive our thinking. I would also look to find ways to bring innovation into the process to support these two focus areas. And I would continue to find ways to support the most creative teacher designers to pilot some new approaches.

A third ongoing focus is to continue to provide resources to support community members with their PERMAH. We often focus on the H with physical and mental activities that can be shared via the Parent Portal. But wellness as PERMAH demonstrates is much more than meditation, exercise, good sleep, and a healthy diet.

One of my favorite ways to help students with their thinking and connection-making is to use the visible thinking routines from Harvard’s Project Zero. The educators at Project Zero recently consolidated the thinking routines and other tools for learning into two new sections of their site. One section is for the thinking routines and the other is for strategies to use at home in support of the virtual school. I add in my Web Resources for Learning Thinking Routines section with technology supports as another toolbox where teachers can find practices that can be used for virtual school.

Photo by June Admiraal on Unsplash

Zoom In Thinking Routine in Kindergarten

October 25, 2014 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

Cecilia Rios, a Kindergarten teacher at Washington International School, shares her interpretation of the “Zoom In” thinking routine in the following video. As I recorded the teaching session, I marveled at how Cecilia pushed her students to analyze information and make connections while speaking in Spanish.

The Zoom In Thinking Routine

Project Zero Conference- Lessons Learned

March 4, 2014 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

I was fortunate to attend the Project Zero (PZ) conference hosted by Presbyterian Day School (PDS) and the Martin Institute. There are many resources on the Web and books if you are new to PZ’s many research areas and pedagogical approaches. Here are some of my notes taken from the presentations by Harvard researchers and from my day spent in the classrooms of PDS teachers.

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Creating Cultures of Thinking: what to look for when observing learning in a classroom. Ron Ritchhart.

-Making thinking valued- where to look in a classroom? 1) Focus of the lesson- how is it directed to engage students to think 2) Teacher Interactions with students. Where and when are you interested in and curious about students’ thinking? 3) What opportunities are available for student thinking? How did the lesson yield new understanding? What kinds of thinking lead to true understanding? It is essential to promote wondering, considering different viewpoints, and uncovering complexities… to provide opportunities for students to make their thinking visible.

-Routines and Questions: Look for the routines the teacher uses to bring about thinking, to make it visible and apparent. It doesn’t have to be written out but is evident through student words and activity. How do these routines/tools support thinking and learning? The ongoing thinking, not just products.

-Thinking is actively promoted. Press for Thinking- how is the teacher pressing the students for further thinking? How does the teacher push students a bit? Discourse: How do we encourage discourse, conversation about ideas? How does the teacher help the greater group to challenge ideas and share comments? Opportunities and Time: How are the children given the time and opportunities that advance thinking? How does the teacher provide space for students to extend, elaborate and develop both their ideas and the idea of others? This means not just waiting and jumping on the first response but having “wait time” that lets students know they have time to respond to their first idea to expand it and for others to respond.

-Task with a low threshold to get started but high ceilings for expansive thinking. This approach supports differentiation for all students.

-Video of Gr 1 teacher and teaching how one’s conscience guides us: Thinking books with words and images– visual notetaking, complex concept. The teacher had systems in place for learning. The students were comfortable turning to their listening partners.

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Making Learning Whole: David Perkins

What does it look like to learn well?

-What school learning experiences do we have that are like learning a game like a baseball that gives you a feel for the whole where one sees the connections? School is different from learning to play baseball. So many separate aspects that need to be connected.

-Seven Sides of Learning

-We often teach with “elements of things,” breaking them down into skills and parts, but we wait to put them together later. Not such a good thing. David calls this “elementitus”. The learners don’t understand the whole “game,” thus not learning with proper understanding.
-We teach about things… think about how we teach about history. Think of children going to baseball camp. Think if they learned about baseball words, rules, and strategies instead of playing… this is “learning about” rather than how to think, apply, solve, etc. David calls this “aboutitis.” The students are not “in” the game. It isn’t getting them into complexities.
-Junior Versions: Baseball story, learning in the backyard, a couple of bases playing with friends, fewer players… it is more straightforward, a more junior version but still the exact shape of the whole. We can help students enter complexity by going the “junior version” route, where they are in the game and not on the outside from the “about’ perspective looking in.
-There are junior versions for all learning areas at all ages. Again, the first step is to enter the learning of complexity. It is not going the elements or about its route.
-Good learning calls for the learning experiences to be a good model of the target performances. If you don’t go this way, the learning is thin in meaningfulness. It is inert and ritual knowledge that we often have on tests. That type of learning knowledge is inert in that it is not transferred by the students to make connections to other topics, ideas, etc.
-So it comes back to playing the whole game… not looking in from the fringe… getting totally in.
-Looking for rich, holistic learning activities. An example is the math bungee jumping video.
-Teach in a whole game way: Fairness and Justice in stories as a concept to pursue. You want students to be thinking about fairness and justice constantly and looking to have them combine the elements as they read the book. We need to have an appropriate junior version… don’t give them Crime and Punishment; go with Jack and the Beanstalk. 🙂 Use methods and purpose, and forms of the discipline you are working with. As with lit study, we look at the text, analyze it, predict, and connect to other stories and look for problem-finding and solving. Not just giving them the exact task but opening it up enough to see where they might go.

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The Edge Lab Learning Space at PDS

Explore-Develop Empathy-Grow Your Ideas-Evaluate

I spent a class period in the new EDGE Lab Learning Space that had just opened up at Presbyterian Day School. The room is where the students solve problems and design and prototype their ideas in a maker space. The class teacher, Alice Walker, worked with the students to connect to their reading from the Chester Cricket series of books. Their task was to design and build a cricket house for Chester.

Alice started the class by reminding them how the EDGE learning approach works. She then did an exercise to get the students thinking laterally by giving each team of students an everyday object. They brainstormed to come up with alternative ways to use the objects. Alice also went over the brainstorming process. The teams then moved to the “Idea Wall” to go through the brainstorming process. It was impressive to see the engagement and teamwork as the students wrote their ideas on the wall.

Idea Wall

Hallway Venn Diagram for Chester Cricket Reading

Thinking Routine Used with Venn Diagram

One huge takeaway from my time at the conference and at the school was the validation of my belief in just how important leadership and being actionable are to shifting practices in a school. The head of PDS, Lee Burns, decided many years ago to connect with Project Zero to help transform teaching and learning at his school. He led his teachers to PZ conferences and then communicated expectations that they would be accountable for implementing PZ pedagogies into their teaching and classrooms.

Evidence of the shift to developing a school where the culture of learning indeed emphasizes thinking, problem-solving, connection-making, etc., could be seen everywhere. Bulletin boards, posters, the school website, and the language of thinking that the students used all communicated the mission to develop students as thinkers. Here are photos of just a few examples of what was on display throughout the school.

Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness