Understanding and Supporting Thinking
The Learning to Think, Thinking to Learn initially focused on developing students abilities and dispositions around three specific types of thinking: Reasoning with evidence, Connection making, and Perspective Taking. The project carefully reviewed the literature on each topic to identify what was involved in each type of thinking, what the natural trajectory of development looked like, how each type of thinking appeared in different subject areas, key markers of progress and development, and what types of strategies, practices, and thinking routines would be useful in promoting development. For each type of thinking we put together a matrix that captured these key ideas. Below you can download the matrix for each type of thinking by clicking on the image. Our hope is that these will not be used to “grade” or “score” thinking, but will provide teachers guidance about what to look for and how to grow students’ thinking as seek to foster powerful thinkers and learners.
Understanding and Supporting Thinking
Reasoning with Evidence
We found four different actions related to reasoning with evidence that generally occurred in a logical sequence or order. These include the making of claims or assertions about what is going on, the ability to provide evidence and support for those claims as well as evaluate the veracity of the claim, constructing arguments that connect the evidence to the claims in meaning ways that can convince others, and the raising of additional questions that might service a healthy skepticism and critique of the claim.
Connection Making
We identified four sub-components or thinking moves that represent distinct phases of increasing sophistication in the process of making connections. At a foundational level, we begin to make connections by activating our prior knowledge and schema around a topic. This primes the pump as it were for the mapping phase in which we connect prior experience or different ideas together through the identification of similarities. In order for our connections to go deeper and support our understanding we assess our connections in terms of their strengths and shortcomings. Finally, we seek to apply or transfer our new skills and understanding into new areas.
Perspective Taking
Perspective taking is generally considered to be a developmental skill that progresses with age. However, it is also a skill that can be enhanced and deepened through active engagement, modeling by others, and experience. To fully realize the power and benefits of perspective taking we need to recognize perspectives and that others have their own perspectives, and we need to practice taking on those perspectives to see things as others might. As we begin to utilize perspectives to help us build understanding we engage in the process of weighing perspectives to identity what they can contribute. Finally, we get in the habit of using perspectives as a tool for deepening our understanding of issues, problems, and ideas.