Articles, Chapters, and Papers
From Zero to Fifty: Celebrating Five Decades of Project Zero (2019)
This special issue of Creative Teaching & Learning features articles by a number of Project Zero researchers including an interview with Ron Ritchhart on leveraging culture. There is also an article by secondary math teachers Jeff Watson and secondary chemistry teacher Roger Winn on “Transferring Ownership of Learning”
Harnessing Meaningful Interactions
Cultures of Thinking in Maths and Chemistry (2018)
Finding opportunities for interactions within the classroom is crucial for empowering students to take ownership of their learning and gain deeper conceptual understanding. In this special focus issue of Creative Teaching & Learning dedicated to Cultures of thinking, In this article, Teachers Jeff Watson and Roger Winn show how they are employing the ideas of Project Zero’s ‘Cultures of Thinking’ to offer transformative learning opportunities in their Maths and Science classrooms.
Making Thinking Visible (2008)
When learner’s speak, write or draw their ideas, they deepen their cognition. In doing so, they make their thinking visible to themselves, their peers, and to their teachers. by demystifying thinking and providing students with structures that prompt and promote their thinking, we develop their thinking dispositions. This article from ASCD’s Educational Leadership explains the Visible Thinking approach, outlines six key principles, and presents a number of thinking routines.
Learning to Think: The Challenges of Teaching Thinking (2005)
The idea that thinking can be taught, or at least productively nurtured along its way, is ancient. Despite this long history of concern with thinking, one reasonably might ask: Why do we need to “teach” thinking anyway? Addressing this issue entails looking more closely at a fuller range of thinking, particularly what might be called high-end thinking, as well as examining the role education plays in promoting thinking. In this chapter from The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, David Perkins and I explore this question and why teaching thinking can be such a challenge.
Cultivating a Culture of Thinking (2018)
In this special focus issue of Creative Teaching & Learning dedicated to Cultures of thinking, Jeff Watson and Roger Winn, teachers at International Academy in Troy, Michigan, write about how to harness the cultural force of “Opportunities” to develop students’ thinking skills in secondary Maths and Chemistry classrooms.
The Real Power of Questions (2012)
What makes a good question? Asking good questions has long been a focus in education, particularly as it relates to students’ thinking and the creation of opportunities for learning. Open-ended are generally advocated as a means of pushing beyond knowledge and skill and opening up discussion. Often Bloom’s taxonomy is suggested to help teachers ask better questions. The advice being to make sure questions push for application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. But, how useful is this advice in the practical lives of teachers and students? These questions are explored in this article from Creative Teaching & Learning.
Cultivating a Culture of Thinking in Museums (2007)
During the brief time students come together for a group tour, museum educators have the opportunity to create a culture of thinking. This peer-reviewed article from the Journal of Museum Education describes 8 cultural forces, found to shape the culture of group learning in classroom settings, and applies this framework to tour observations conducted at three different museums, and explores ways that museum educators might best leverage these forces to cultivate a culture of thinking when conducting school group tours.
When Is Good Thinking? (2004)
In this chapter from the book, Motivation, emotion, and cognition: Integrative perspectives on intellectual functioning and development, David Perkins and I make the argument that persistent good thinking in realistic situations forces us not only to examine, “What is good thinking"?” but also, “When is good thinking?” This question draws attention to another important dimension of thinking: good timing—attempting the right kind of thinking at the right moment. It asks how thinking gets activated or mobilized when needed.
Shaping Reality with the Language of Thinking (2018)
In this special focus issue of Creative Teaching & Learning dedicated to Cultures of thinking, Erika Lusky, teacher at Rochester High School in Rochester, Michigan, writes about the cultural force of “Language” and how the Cultures of Thinking framework is transforming learning and offering students the ability to truly think for themselves.
Uncovering students’ thinking about thinking using concept maps (2009)
In this peer reviewed article in the journal Metacognition and Learning, a method for uncovering students’ thinking about thinking, specifically their meta-strategic knowledge, is explored within the context of an ongoing, multi-year intervention designed to promote the development of students’ thinking dispositions. The development of a concept-map instrument that classroom teachers can use and an analytic framework for interpreting students’ responses is presented.
The Seven Rʼs of a Quality Curriculum (2006)
For decades, I’ve worked with teachers exploring the enacted curriculum of understanding. Reflecting on the qualities that make an activity, a unit, a curriculum something that effectively engages students in developing a deeper understanding. Seven common criteria emerge: rigorous, rewarding, real, requires independence, rich in thinking, revealing, and reflective. I present these here in this article from Education Quarterly Australia as guidelines for the planning, enacting, and evaluating of a curriculum focused on understanding.
Life in the Mindful Classroom:Nurturing the Disposition of Mindfulness (2000)
In this peer-reviewed article from Journal of Social Issues, we review the appropriateness of “mindfulness” as an educational goal and explore what it means to cultivate mindfulness as a disposition rather than a temporary state. We identify three high-leverage instructional practices for enculturating mindfulness: looking closely, exploring possibilities and perspectives, and introducing ambiguity. We conclude by exploring what it might look like to cultivate the trait of mindfulness within individual classrooms. This report includes a review of an experimental study of“conditional instruction.”