Making Thinking Visible

MTV Main Points

Foster Deep Learning

• When learning includes many of our senses (i.e., sight, hearing, and touching), we not only provide a means of multiple learning styles and needs being met but we manifest what we learn in real time. When we experience the knowledge, we gain in our daily lives or can provide some physical or emotional aspect of ourselves in relation to the content, deeper understandings are being created due to text-to-world and text-to-self connections happening.
• The opportunity to show the mastery of content is diversified when thinking is visible. Students aren’t confined to utilizing just pen and paper for taking notes or answering extended response questions on tests, but rather have the option to convey their creativity and draw their learning processes, act out narratives from novels and stories, build inventions and projects, cultivate PowerPoints, create word walls, and more. Making thinking visible doesn’t limit learning to the imagination but gives students a chance to watch how what they learn can come to life or how they can initiate their learning themselves.
• Revealing identity is important, especially for young adults, because much of the work they do should provide a means for them to see themselves and relate to what they’re learning. We want students to foster deep understanding less from experiences that are foreign to them and more from ideas that are lived through as well as a part of who they are. Our students are still in the crucial developmental stages of their lives where some do and don’t know who they are but are seeking to figure it out, so implementing texts and activities that are coupled with the understanding of identity can create academic as well as personal success for our students.

Cultivate Engaged Students

• Engagement isn’t limited to student to teacher interaction, but it shows in how students engage with their work as well. We should aim to make our students excited about learning and give them reason to believe that the work they do matters, will help them grow, and mature their level of worldly understanding. Making thinking visible can increase their attention, focus, and promote critical thinking which connects the what of learning to the why behind its importance.
• Engagement is successful when students are kept at the center. Oftentimes, teachers educate their students on what they believe is vital to know, neglecting student interest and creating a disconnect in the classroom. Putting your students first by asking what it is they are curious to know will elevate their engagement because of their interaction with work they are passionate about understanding. Prioritizing student choice activates agency, gives students access and ownership, and empowers them to learn new things and put their learning on display.
• Engagement is also important from student to student. Being that the room is full of students as thinkers, times of group work and whole class interaction where students have the chance to be teachers keeps their wheels turning, increases their social skills and problem-solving techniques, builds community, and makes for a cooperative learning environment.

Changing the Role of the Student and Teacher

• Classrooms that operate as a collective don’t feel or visibly see the distinction between the teacher and the students to where learning is only focused in one direction. As an educator, it is certainly an obligation to mature and transform the minds of your students but understanding that teachers have just as much to learn from the children in the room invites diversity of ideas and perspectives, makes students feel comfortable asking questions, and gives teachers an opportunity to learn about who is in the room.
• Making thinking visible while basking in different roles in the classroom is apparent when education is transformative. If the knowledge we obtain remains stale in our brains, is learning ever happening? Students are not subject to taking information at face value but rather to seeing how through the processes of critical reflection and review, they can understand how their thinking is renovated in lieu of the way that the world around them transforms. Transformative education gives teaching and learning meaning, purpose, and empowers learners to view the world from a lens that will uproot the status quo and promote students as instruments of change.
• Having students as teachers also shows the teacher how what the students are learning is registering in their minds. Teachers can see how students are drawing connections to other materials, relating the content to their own lives, using critical examples, and making sense of their ideas. Teachers can then take this information as feedback to know in what ways they can alter their instruction to be more engaging and beneficial for the students.

MTV Strategy

“Ladder of Feedback”

This MTV strategy is a way for students to improve their communication through forms of feedback that balance responses of praise and constructive criticism. “Ladder of Feedback” is embedded with the intention of students creating clear, mind-provoking, and transparent pieces of work that captivate multiple audiences through aspects of deep understanding and reflection. This strategy helps to eliminate “vague and non-action oriented” feedback that doesn’t provide the writer, designer, or creator with any means to elevate their pieces. By balancing the positive and more constructive forms of advice, the creator then feels like all the suggestions aren’t catered to just the good parts or just the parts that need more improvement which helps to keep the healthy spirit of the activity’s purpose alive.

“Ladder of Feedback ” is designed to function within pairs or small groups where the students present a work of their choosing to have read and analyzed. The audience of the writer will then have to provide feedback that includes the following:

1. clarifying questions with a goal of understanding author’s choice
2. “i value …” statements to show praise and express what’s good
3. “it seems like …” statements where concerns and questions are raised that pose confusion
4. suggestions for improvement in the form of “what if questions”
5. sharing of take-aways that the presenter/writer gained from the feedback given

For my lesson, the students were to choose a vignette we have already read and discussed from, “House on Mango Street ” that they want to use as inspiration. The students would practice this style of writing by creating a vignette of their own that still keeps the intent, emotion, or experience of the vignette they chose the same. This challenges the students to new forms of storytelling while also showing the connections the students are drawing from their own lives to the text.

Response

• The students responded well to the activity! I could tell they were engaged and enjoyed being able to listen and give feedback to others as it made them feel a sense of power and agency in the classroom. I could also tell that they valued and received the feedback more positively as it came from their peers due to the interactions feeling less intense than they would hearing the feedback from a teacher. I observed many raised eyebrows yet heard many laughs as well which let me know that they were ultimately having fun with the tasks.

Successes

• Students had their Google documents filled with suggestions, ideas, and positive remarks which showed everyone remained focused.
• The simplicity of seeing the smiles! Feedback doesn’t just come in the form of words but also body language. The students were smiling and laughing in addition to asking to follow up questions and even asking for examples of what their peers meant by the feedback they gave. I could tell everyone had an open mind with this activity which let me see how students really enjoy utilizing one another for help.
• Everyone stated that they felt they received at least one piece of feedback they agreed with and decided to use in the future drafts of their pieces.

Challenges

• Time management! As much as I loved the organic conversation, some of the groups spent a lot of their time focused on just one piece which made them devote less time to the others.
• Vulnerability was a factor that only challenged a few. Many of them have never had to read things about themselves out loud before so some students were hesitant but after observing everyone else as well as myself do it, the reading their own came with more ease.

Next Time

• I would most likely change not having a measure of accountability for time. To help my students keep their focus on the activity itself, I will use a timer that will serve as a reminder for when the group should transition on to the next piece so that everyone has a far time to read their work and receive proper feedback that isn’t slighted or minimized due to lack of time.

TCE Threshold Concepts

Social justice requires awareness, action, activism, and practice.

• Bouncing off another threshold concept, honoring one’s full humanity is essential to your practices as an educator. Diversity is great when speaking to the welcoming of multiple viewpoints and ideas from those in the room, but diversity is also present within the students themselves. Our classrooms are full of multicultural, religious and non-spiritual, disabled and able-bodied, as well as poverty stricken and wealthy individuals who know of the world in different ways.
• In making thinking visible, we also want to make thinking and learning equitable and in line with socially just practices. We want our students to remain aware of who they are but also learn of identities outside of their own so they can take agency in advocating, educating, and supporting those in communities that are underprivileged and undervalued. When using my MTV strategy, “Ladder of Feedback”, in the process of the students writing, reading, and giving feedback on the vignettes, they were learning a lot about each other including one another’s backgrounds, struggles, and intimate attributes of what makes the student who they are. They were able to get a deeper, more profound look into each other’s lives which also revealed some of the inequities and hardships they face due to their race, sexual orientation, or gender. The MTV strategy helped to make the students more aware of the livelihoods of their peers and even encouraged them to practice the aspects of visible thinking by taking social action and being an activist for reform within education but also in our world as well.

Teachers and students engage in critical consciousness.

• Using the “Ladder of Feedback” guaranteed the students engaging in a form of critical consciousness by having to ask questions that revealed a lot about the students as people. Granted, this unit is structured around the topic of “Identity” but who knew that you could learn so much from a person based on how they write? The students got to dissect their peer’s beliefs and values while also understanding the intentions behind the word and grammar usage that helped to convey those ideas.
• In doing this MTV strategy, the students were able to engage in critical consciousness through the development of them becoming critical thinkers and their ability to connect the written texts of their peers to the way they view the world. Seeing how education manifests itself in everyday life is crucial to educational success. “Ladder of Feedback” really helped the students to appreciate the process of learning more than just the end result which sheds light on the fact that how you learn can, at times, be far greater than what you learn.
• As the teacher, I was invested in the conversations being had and seeing how certain answers to questions would spark more conversation. I joined in on conversations that allowed me to emphasize with the students and found myself sharing some of my life story as well as a means of relatability. I enjoyed taking a step back and putting myself and the students on an equal playing field so we could all feel we were comfortably learning about each other while also giving and listening to advice and suggestions that would improve the narratives of our peers and our own.

Links to My Social Media

Twitter: https://x.com/jsimonee023/status/1713289372995395876?s=20

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Links to Supplementary Blog Posts

MTV Blog: https://blog.tcea.org/thinking-routines/

MTV Blog: https://blogs.cisco.com/education/how-making-thinking-visible-helps-teachers-and-students