Visible Thinking

Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based framework stemming from Project Zero, an educational research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Principal Investigators are Veronica Boix-Mansilla, Howard Gardner, Tina Grotzer, Carrie James, David Perkins, Ron Ritchhart, Steve Seidel, Shari Tisman, Daniel Wilson and Ellen Winner. Its original aim is to study and improve education in the arts. Visible Thinking has a double goal: a) to cultivate students' thinking skills and dispositions and b) to deepen content learning. 

The basic idea is to make thinking visible within the context of learning thus fostering cultures of thinking. Post-it notes, construction papers on the walls, any sort of visible documentation within the classroom can be used for this aim where students’ individual and collective thinking is valued, revealed and promoted. By making thinking visible, students regulate, monitor, guide and reflect on their learning hence their metacognitive skills are developed.    

Thinking Routines are at the core of the Visible Thinking programme. The underlying idea is that classroom life is structured upon routines which regulate diverse aspects such as student behaviour management, organization of the work and the process of learning, and the establishment of rules for interaction, communication and discourse. Thinking Routines can be conceived as flexible, simple structures, a set of questions or a short sequence of steps that can be used systematically to promote the development of students’ thinking and the classroom culture. They target specific types of thinking, are easy to learn and teach, can be used across a variety of context and can be subject to group or individual work. 

Many of the proposals put forward in Art least explore the possibilities of integrating the Visible Thinking approach in the efl classroom as a means of developing critical thinking and critical reflection.