There’s many ways that as a teacher, you can incorporate visible thinking in your classroom. But another question you might be asking yourself is why should you be making thinking visible. Here’s a few reasons for why we should make our students’ thinking visible:
- Start to get students to understand the content more deeply
- Increased motivation to learn
- Develops their thinking and learning abilities
Now that you know the why, here’s the how…
See, Think, Wonder
This is a great strategy, that can be easily implemented into any classroom… including science! One example of how to use this strategy is to display an image for your students to see, it could be a mountain, volcano, island, plant, anything that you would like that is relevant to your class. After your students get the chance to look at the image, ask them what they see. Then, proceed to ask them what they think about what they see. Finally, ask what it makes them wonder. this strategy makes students observe before attempting to interpret it. The wonder aspect makes sure that the students use what they observe to get new information, think about it, and combine it.
KWHL Chart
The KWHL Chart stands for…
- K– what you already know
- W– what you want to learn
- H– how you can learn
- L– what you learned
This chart is an excellent way to help students organize their before, during, and after thoughts. Also, a great way for students to structure their research by growing through and addressing each part of the process. A KWHL Chat can be used for any subject or any unit; it can most always be used!
Jigsaw Strategy
The Jigsaw Strategy requires groups of about 5-6 students. Students will start in their “expert” group, where each group will be given one piece, that’s a part of an overall topic. to become experts in. In the expert groups, the piece of the given topic will be researched. Once each expert group becomes and expert and knows their part of the topic well, they will be broken up into their “jigsaw” groups. This means that one person from each expert group will form a jigsaw group. They will share what they learned about their topic they became and expert in, and essentially teach their jigsaw group. This strategy ensures that all students are contributing equally and it’s inclusive for everyone. This also gives students the opportunity and responsibility to become “experts” and learn from other “experts” as well!
Hey Josie! I really like your post, it was especially helpful for me when you would describe the different strategies that you listed in great detail for us to use in our future classrooms! For each strategy that you outlined, do you have a specific instance when you could use it in your science classroom?
Josie,
Nice post! I like how you bring up why it’s important to get students’ thinking to be visible. Is there any particular concept or idea that you think the jigsaw strategy would work well in?
Hey Josie!
I really liked the idea behind the KWHL chart. I’ve heard of KWL charts before, but having that “how will I learn it” aspect will be helpful! I think it makes the chart much more active, it makes the students think about the actions they will take to actually learn the content. Additionally, it may help the students take a little autonomy in their learning. Based on the KWHL chart, if most students want to learn a topic in a certain way perhaps you can rearrange your lesson plan to accommodate. Or, perhaps the class falls into a few neat categories of how they want to learn and you can use that to split them into groups!