Using Thinking Routines: 10 Ways You Can Die
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the various missteps, impediments, and mindsets that might stand in the way of both individual and school wide progress in making thinking visible. I this process, my thoughts returned to an article my colleague Jal Mehta wrote back in 2016 entitled: Deeper Learning: 10 Ways You Can Die. His article was inspired by another Harvard colleague, Bob Kegan who had written an internal memo with a similar title but focused on educational leadership. The idea in both those pieces was that while you can never ensure success in any new undertaking, there are often certain factors that will almost certainly derail your efforts. Being aware of and paying attention to those factors is helpful in moving forward.
Recently, Mark Church and I wrote The Power of Making Thinking Visible to distill what we had learned about using thinking routines to maximum effect over the last decade. We gleaned our insights from working closely with teachers around the world. In addition, we created a YouTube channel to provide rich pictures of practice so that others can see how real teachers put thinking routines to effective and purposeful use. However, we haven’t really written much about some of the common ways in which teachers might run aground in their efforts to make thinking visible. What entrenched values and mindsets might stand in the way of their being successful? Why aren’t thinking routines working for some teachers?
It’s worth noting that our advocacy for making students’ thinking visible, and using thinking routines as a tool for doing that, is situated in a context. Like everyone in the field of education, we work from a set of beliefs about what constitutes a quality education and how learning happens. You can find these clearly articulated in my early writings in Teaching for Understanding and Intellectual Character, but these values certainly run through all my books and articles. Of course, not everyone is introduced to thinking routines through books. Many come across them in other ways: through colleagues, workshops, online resources, and so on. In which case, they may not be aware of the origin, research, development, design, and context behind thinking routines or the broader enterprise of making thinking visible. For those, this video provides a brief introduction.
Although thinking routines are relatively accessible (admittedly, some more than others), they aren’t silver bullets, magic potions, games, activities, or tricks. Some teachers may be expecting routines to do all the heavy lifting in the classroom, and thus not experience much success. So, with much appreciation to my two colleagues, I offer my own list of ways you can die—or struggle, or flounder—focused on using thinking routines.
You will die:
1. If you haven’t used thinking routines yourself in your own learning. Using thinking routines, authentically, as a part of one’s own learning helps teachers to learn routines from the inside out. Using thinking routines in context and seeing how they support your own conversation, exploration, and understanding of ideas is the best empirical evidence we can take with us into the classroom. To be sure, we have other evidence on the effectiveness of routines that we reported in The Power of Making Thinking Visible, but this kind of firsthand know-how is hard to beat. Using thinking routines ourselves lets us know where students might encounter difficulties and what prompts and assists might be useful in helping them push forward. Being able to say to your students, “You know when I first tried this routine in my own learning, it really helped me to ….” Is street cred you just can’t get any other way.
2. If you don’t believe learning is a consequence of thinking. This may seem obvious. After all, if you don’t see thinking as the linchpin to learning, then why would you try to use thinking routines in the first place? However, many teachers are often focused more on the delivery of content and direct instruction rather than on engaging their students with ideas. Direct instruction has its place, but it won’t build understanding or help students learn how to grapple independently with new ideas. For that we need our students to think. If we do value thinking and see it as key to students’ learning, then we must be able to identify what kinds of thinking students will need to grapple with a particular piece of content (The Understanding Map can be useful here). Only then can we select the right tool or thinking routine for the job. Thinking routines are tools for thinking and must be introduced as such, not as an activity. We want to make thinking a routine endeavor in our classrooms so that students become good at it.
3. If you don’t see your students as capable, powerful thinkers, with rich backgrounds and experience they bring to their learning. The way we perceive our students will determine how we go about teaching them. If we look at our students and only see deficits and a lack of knowledge, we will approach them accordingly. From this viewpoint, it is not uncommon for teachers to underestimate their students’ abilities to think, question, and explore. Consequently, teachers step in to do the thinking for students or assume that their lack of knowledge (which is always going to be less than ours) will prohibit them from thinking. These teachers delay the thinking in favor of delivering knowledge. The problem is that next year’s teachers is likely to perpetuate this same cycle of deficit teaching. On the other hand, if we take Piaget’s view that children are not “empty vessels to be filled with knowledge,” but rather active meaning makers, builders of knowledge, and scientists, then we will approach them as highly capable people able to grapple with complexity.
4. If you don’t connect your use of thinking routines to the larger agenda of creating a culture of thinking in your classroom. The routines of any group or organization explain to newcomers: “This is how we do things here.” When you join any new group, you pay attention to how they do things. Thus, we need to be asking ourselves how will I and my students go about the task of learning together in this classroom this year? What routines and structures do I need to put in place to make this happen? What behaviors, ways of being, and interacting (with others and with ideas) do I want to make routine? Of course, routines are just one of eight cultural forces. All eight forces send messages to our students about what we value and seek to promote. The story of learning we are living and trying to make a reality. In isolation, a thinking routine might feel out of place if all the other messages being sent are that this classroom is not about learning and thinking but is instead focused on short-term skill and knowledge acquisition for tests. We need to align all eight cultural forces with the support of good thinking.
5. If you use thinking routines as the only vehicle for making thinking visible. It is easy to view thinking routines as the bright and flashy object. The new thing to try. Maybe your colleagues are talking them up or you’ve been to a workshop where you were introduced to them. However, thinking routines are just one way of making thinking visible alongside questioning, listening, and documentation. All are useful tools in our arsenal. What adds life to a routine, what supports it, and lifts it off the page is when teachers surround the routines with effective questioning, robust listening, and supportive documentation. Take at look the videos on our YouTube channel and pay attention to the teacher’s use of questioning, the way they listen actively to their students’ thinking, and the role documentation plays in capturing the thinking. From this vantage point, you’ll see that successfully using a thinking routine depends on much more than just handing students a worksheet or giving clear directions. The best use of routines will always feel interactive and discussion based.
6. If you don’t care about who your students are becoming as thinkers and learners as a result of their time with you. The way we think about and construe the mission of schools and our purpose as teachers will determine many of our actions in the classroom. This is sometimes referred to as our “stance” as educators. The position from which we see things. For many, the job of schools is preparing students for a hierarchical testing system in which winners and losers can be ascertained based on their scores. From this stance, short-term learning and coverage are king. But we can take a different stance. We can focus on students’ long-term development as learners and thinkers. What do we want the students we teach to be like as adults? The interesting thing though is that these two goals need not be mutually exclusive endeavors. When we focus on students’ development as thinkers, we set them up for both short and long-term success (again see The Power of Making Thinking Visible for more of this evidence). However, if we focus only on narrow, short-term goals, we are unlikely to develop our students as powerful thinkers and independent learners.
7. If for you and your students learning and being a "good student" are all about having the quick, right answer. When students worry about being “correct” when responding to a prompt from a thinking routine, it is often because their experience in school has taught them that teachers are looking for answers and appearing smart means responding with the correct answer as quickly as possible. Students will only give us their thinking when they feel that we are generally interested in them and their ideas. This is hard to fake and the routine itself won’t be able to overcome a teacher’s lack of interest in their students’ thinking. If students are trying to please you with an answer, then you likely aren’t getting their thinking. This means that we as teachers need to be comfortable with complexity and ambiguity and the possibility that students will surprise us.
8. If you don’t combine the use of thinking routines with rich, meaningful, complex content worthy of both your and your students’ time. More times than I would like, I have gone into classrooms and seen students doing a See-Think-Wonder (STW) with a banal image (kittens in a basket is one egregious example) or asked to create a headline after a trivial lesson. Thinking routines are always a marriage with content. Students’ thinking will only be as rich as the content with which you are working. It is also important to place thinking routines in a purposeful context. The idea is not to “do STW” but to use STW as a tool that helps us carefully analyze an image, poem, design, etc. Completing the routine is never the goal. We use the routine to help us achieve a learning goal connected to the content. What’s our purpose? Why this content? How will this routine help us think about this content? How will I build on the students’ thinking and extend it to push for deeper understanding?
9. If you don’t tie your use of thinking routines to an agenda of deeper learning and building understanding in your classroom. Once again, the way one views teaching and the goals of schooling will influence the stance one takes in the classroom. Although there are thinking routines that can support building knowledge (“+1” for example), most thinking routines fit best within the context of building understanding. When a teacher is struggling to use thinking routines, the first thing I generally ask is: “What are you wanting students to understand in this unit and how does this particular content fit in with that goal?” If a teacher can’t answer that or says, “I just need them to listen to me and do what I show/tell them,” then it is no wonder they struggle figure out how to use thinking routines effectively. At the same time, I recognize that focusing on deeper learning and building understanding is hardly the norm in schools. Something that Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine discovered in their book, In Search of Deeper Learning.
10. If you don’t reflect regularly on your use of thinking routines with colleagues and with your students. At their core, thinking routines are formative assessment tools. This means that we should not judge their success by how smoothly the lesson went or how many students gave us what we wanted. Rather we need to judge our success by what we learned about our students’ thinking and developing understanding. Learning to use routines in this way is best accomplished with the support of our colleagues who can bring a fresh perspective and look at our documentation of students’ thinking more objectively. Sometimes we get so hung up on correctness, we can’t see the sense making students are doing. Instead, we focus on their deficits and what they don’t yet know. The LAST protocol, Looking At Student Thinking, can be helpful in this regard. Of course, surfacing misconceptions is also a part of making thinking visible, and we need to be as thrilled when that happens as when we get sharp insights. Without being aware of students’ misconceptions, we can’t help them to confront them, not by direct teaching but by providing new experiences that allow misconceptions to be confronted.