Making Thinking Visible (MTV)

What is the power of MTV?

Making thinking visible (MTV) is when teachers give their students the opportunity and power to express their thinking process in engaging ways. These strategies can be grouped into three categories: engaging with others, engaging with ideas, and engaging in action. When we as educators implement these strategies, we become better listeners, learn to encourage student curiosities, and gain insights to our students’ learning that informs our instruction in order to foster independent thinkers. The goal of MTV is to create an learning environment that empowers students’ thinking by creating a culture of thinking. If more schools implement MTV strategies, there are 6 powers that have the potential to transform how instruction looks in the classroom:

1. Fostering Deeper Learning
2. Cultivating Engaged Students
3. Changing the Role of Both Students and Teachers
4. Enhancing our Formative Assessments
5. Improving Learning Even When Measured by Standardized Tests
6. Developing Thinking Positions

MTV as a Goal for Teaching

As our students think, we need to make sure that they understand their thinking process by supporting it, prompting it, and growing it. In order to develop their thinking process, students must have the opportunity to make their thinking visible. Making thinking visible provides educators the information needed to plan opportunities that push students’ learning to the next level and develop deeper understanding and continuous engagement of the content being explored.

There are four practices that provide the support to make thinking visible for our students:

1. Questioning
   • Questions start and drive both students’ thinking and learning. As students engage more in content, new questions arise that allow more opportunities for engagement and exploration.
   • Facilitative questions provide teachers the opportunity to understand their students’ thinking by getting inside their heads and making their thinking visible. These questions allows us to examine students’ responses, demonstrates our sincere interest in their thinking, and provide an opportunity to dive deeper into content.
2. Listening
   • Through listening we provide students the chance to make their thinking visible because showing our interest in what they are thinking, gives them a reason to share it with us.
3. Documentation
   • Documentation includes not only data, but the analysis, interpretations, and reflection of a student’s thinking and learning that took place throughout the instructional activity.
   • By documenting thinking, it provides us with a tool for the analysis and reflection of their thinking and will guide future instruction.
   • Important guiding question: “What do I want to capture so that we as a class can return to it later for a more careful examination and analysis?”
4. Thinking Routines
   • These are tools to prompt and promote thinking, structures that reveal and scaffold thinking, through their continuous use as routines they become patterns of behavior.
   • Once the ‘thinking’ is identified, we choose the thinking routine, or the tool, that will successfully help our students reach the desired thinking.
   • Thinking routines have been designed to support and structure students’ thinking by including steps that naturally scaffolds students’ thinking and leads to more sophisticated thinking levels. 
   •  Regularly using thinking routines in the classroom, reveals to students what learning is and how it happens at school and throughout life. 

Check out the video below to hear more about MTV in the classroom.

MTV Influences in my Kindergarten Classroom

Changing the Role of the Student and Teacher

• Schools often make teachers collect and submit data that will ultimately evaluate whether a teacher and their students are successful. However, when we consider the power of MTV, we realize that our role as an educator shouldn’t be to teach to a test for the best data, but to prepare our students for a lifetime of learning.
• Students should be active creators and take initiative in their own learning. To do this, teachers must change their role as driver to passenger. Students must be the driver of their own learning in order to foster a deeper understanding of their learning. Teachers need to be willing to be the passenger, where they guide, listen, and advice students in their thinking and learning.
• In my Kindergarten class, I often have students do activities that allow me to step away from the driver’s seat and become a passenger, or observer, of their learning. For example, we complete 2-3 Socratic Seminars throughout a Module. In the Socratic Seminars, students are put into groups of 3-5 students, given 1-2 questions, and 3 talking chips. To participate in Socratic Seminars, students will answer the questions, comment on their group members responses, and ask questions about responses or the content being discussed. During this time, I am an observer that walks around the room, takes notes, scaffolds thinking as needed, and provide positive support.
• The video below gives more information on Socratic Seminars and how the teacher holds a facilitator role.

Building a Classroom Community of Thinkers

• To build a community of thinkers, an educator must emphasize the importance of thinking and the entire thinking process. Educators must encourage, inspire, and provide opportunities for students to think about content and their learning. Once students realize that a teacher genuinely cares and is interested in their thinking, this will encourage them to share their thinking, take risks, and be more initiative in their learning.
• Teachers need to inform students that they are not looking for correct answers, but how they are thinking and coming up with the answers. Instructional routines must give the sense that thinking has a purpose and is valued above providing us with the correct answers.
• As visible thinking practices embeds itself in our learning routines, documentation, questions, and listening, we send students the message that thinking is valued and not just a grade.

• Kindergarteners want to hear that they are doing a great job and are correct because they want to leave an impression on you. They often fixate on the correct answer because in their mind that is being good in class. As a teacher, I need to make sure that they feel that they are valued as thinkers and not valued based off of their “correct” answers. In order to do this, I create anchor charts that post all of my students thinking, questions, or answers given during a discussion. Instead of focusing on correcting, we review each thought and discuss it as a class and even go back to see if anyone wants to change their posts.

Thinking classrooms is not about finding the tasks but about building thinking classrooms. Love this quote @pgliljedahl ! So many teachers fixating on finding tasks rather than building the thinking. Learned so much from you today !#MMMSummit #thinkingclassrooms

— Marie Fanshaw (@fanshaw57) November 18, 2019

Implementing MTV in Kindergarten ELA

MTV Strategy: The Story Routine Main-Side-Hidden (Engaging with Ideas)

• Purpose: Learners analyze events and explore documents in depth by moving beyond the surface level and digging into the side and hidden parts.
• Below is the worksheet that I created that was based off of the Main-Side-Hidden Routine worksheet found on page 119. I used clipart from the following: Creating 4 the Classroom, Whimsy Clips, Clever Cat Creations, Just for Kids.

Lesson: What is the essential meaning of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom?

• Prior to beginning the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom read-aloud, I read the story The Little Engine That Could. The purpose behind reading this book was to model how to complete the Main-Side-Hidden worksheet. Through discussions about the story we completed the Main-Side-Hidden activity by drawing in each section of what we believed was the main story, the side story, and the hidden story (the essential meaning). I kept the Main-Side-Hidden Anchor Chart posted in the classroom in case students need to refer back as they completed their own.
• I read the story Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to the class and only stopped when students had a questions about the text.
  • One student asked, “Why do the letters keep going up the tree? The tree is bending can’t they see.” I loved this question and comment because it was something they could draw on their paper.
• After I read the story, we conducted a few Think-Pair-Share (TPS). Once each pair had shared, I wrote down the answers on the board to help keep track of our thinking.
  • What words or phrases do you hear repeated over and over in the story?
  • How does this phrase make you feel? What clue might this phrase give us about the essential meanings in the story?
  • I went to the last page of the story and asked, Why did a ‘dare double dare’ the other letters? Why do you think a goes back up the coconut tree even though many letters got hurt?
• I displayed the Main-Side-Hidden worksheet again and reviewed the parts of each house. I told students that they would work with a partner to complete the activity and that we would complete one part at a time.
• Partners went back to their seats and started to work together to complete the worksheet together. Students were to discuss their answer with each other and then draw on their own worksheet what they had discussed.
  • Main Story: Draw a picture that represents the main story of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.
  • Side Story: Draw a picture(s) that represents a side story/stories from Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. This can include other letters and details from the story.
    • What else is going on in the story around the edges? Who are the letters that are helping to the story but not the major players?
  • Hidden Story: After listening to the story, what is the hidden part of the story. Draw a picture that represents going beyond the words and tells us a lesson or meaning.
    • What can we not see right away from hearing the words of the book but is still important in understanding what is actually happening?, What might be left out?
• As students completed the worksheet, the Intervention Specialist and I walked around the room to scaffold as needed and write down small descriptions of what students drew. We wrote down what the students told us to.
• After students finished their drawings, each pair got an opportunity to share their Main-Side-Hidden worksheet with the class. There peers were given a chance to give positive feedback and ask questions about their drawings.
  • Follow up questions I asked were: What makes you say that?, What is it that made you identify this as the hidden story? Why do you think the story was hidden?
• Once students were done, we added all of the worksheets to our “Show What You Know Wall” in the classroom.

Successes of the Lesson:

• Students loved incorporating drawing into their activity, which kept them engaged throughout the majority of the lesson. This also encouraged all students to participate in the lesson because they did not have to worry about the writing part.
• About 80% of students were able to identify a essential meaning or hidden part of the story through drawings and/or words.
  • Some answers were: 1) Letters keep getting hurt, but they kept going and did their best to get back up. 2) Keep trying and your plan will work soon just like A going back up again. 3) The letters had a fun time, but sometimes fun can get you hurt. 4) Getting hurt isn’t fun, but people will be there to help like the moms and dads of the letters.

Challenges of the Lesson:

• The terminology of side and hidden were difficult for my kids. This was the first time we had talked about these terms and students found it challenging to figure out what picture they could draw.
• I felt like the story was a little too simple and that is why there wasn’t a lot of variations in answers. Which can be a good thing but it was hard to see students dive deeper into the book.

Next time I use the Story Routine, I will…

• Include our Notice and Wonder chart for the story. I think having students revisit their wonders from the original read aloud. I think this may help with the side and hidden stories because their wonders are questions they have asked that were not apparent in the words alone. Many times wonders are related to things that are not seen in the words and/or pictures alone. Also, I might have students create their own Wonder Journals to keep throughout each read-aloud where they can ask for a teacher to record their wonders.

TCE Thresholds Concepts Connected to MTV

Threshold Concept #1: Curriculum is more than standards, textbooks, or courses of study.

• Curriculum provided by schools provides the learning target, the activity, and the desired results. But is that really benefiting our students to prepare them for a lifetime of learning? The answer is no because curriculum tells students what to learn and what the answer is. However, implementing MTV strategies allows students to take control of their learning by engaging in content in various ways, going beyond the surface level of texts, and creating a classroom culture of valuing thinking over correct answers.
• MTV encourages engagement with content, others, and in action. As students engage they are able to go beyond curriculum and create deeper meanings and connections with the content being taught. Therefore, preparing them for future learnings.
• As students develop way to make real-life connections and value their own thinking, they are becoming lifetime learners.
• Check out this blog that talks about implementing MTV practices with science and how it leads to deeper understandings by going beyond the facts. KnowAtom’s Blog

Threshold Concept #2: Both teachers and students have empowerment/agency.

• Content taught in school should prepare students to be citizens that can solve difficult life situation and lifelong learners that can adapt to situations. In order to do this, students need to feel empowered over their own learning and thinking. Through MTV strategies, students are able to have a sense of empowerment over their thinking, which leads to initiating their own learning experiences.
• As MTV strategies are implemented, the classroom transforms from teacher led to teacher-student led. Both teacher and students should be the driving force of what is being learned in the classroom. A teacher should provide the foundations and guidance as needed and students should initiate their own learning. This new dynamic will lead to more meaningful learning outcomes to prepare our students for their future.
• Check out this blog about student empowerment! Making The Shift from Student Engagement to Student Empowerment

Threshold Concept #3: Teaching and learning honors people’s full humanity.

• Another practice of MTV is listening and curriculum has educators as the speakers and students as the listeners, but it should be more balanced than what it currently is. Meaning that teachers should be listening for both questions and answers that come from their students.
• Listening shows others that we are interested in what they have to say or think, which allows a classroom to build a community within the classroom that develops interactions centered around exploring ideas.
• Empathetic listening is when educators listen to and for students’ understandings, feelings, and perspectives, while putting aside our own judgements or biases. By doing this we are honoring our learners’ as individuals on a human level, instead of a student number. 
• Check out this blog Why making thinking visible depends on who you are as a learner?. This blog talks about how when we allow students thinking to show, we honor their thinking as an individual.

Check out my blog about Making Thinking Visible (MTV)! https://t.co/WCZtjqk8Tl #exemplaryteaching #TCE623 @edutopia @RonRitchhart

— Ms. B (@bballfan5330) October 13, 2023

Check out my blog about CBCI! https://t.co/toyrZoamaO #exemplaryteaching #TCE623@edutopia @NSTA

— Ms. B (@bballfan5330) September 30, 2023