Brandon School District - Brandon School District - Leading the way in educational excellence and equality for all!

Oakwood: A Visible Thinking School

Four people from Brandon are participating in a special extended learning opportunity to learn about and nurture cultures of thinking in their respective schools at Oakwood and Harvey Swanson. Cultures of Thinking (CoT) is a project started in 2005 by principal investigators Ron Ritchhart and David Perkins of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Project Zero. It uses an approach called Visible Thinking, which is a means of helping people to make visible that elusive activity we call thinking. It is a means to help administrators, teachers, and students grow and deepen their thinking dispositions. Visible Thinking is a means of making thinking visible so that it can be discussed, reflected upon, and pushed further. It relies on the use of thinking routines, or protocols, and the use of maps to organize the resultant thinking.

Cultures of Thinking builds on the visible thinking work by focusing on the cultural elements within a classroom that lead to student engagement and substantive change. Those elements that lead to student engagement are: expectations for thinking and learning; opportunities for engaging in thinking; routines and structures that scaffold thinking and learning; language and conversations that name, notice, and highlight thinking; modeling of thinking; relationships and interactions that show respect for students’ thinking; physical environment in which the process of thinking are made visible; and time for thinking. 

Dr. Lauren Childs of Oakland Schools has coordinated a year-long learning opportunity for approximately 90 Oakland County educators from 13 of the 28 districts to work with Dr. Ron Ritchhart the principle author of the book Making Thinking Visible, which has continued the work of CoT. The principal and a lead teacher from Oakwood as well as two teacher leaders from Harvey Swanson make up the four people from Brandon who are participating. The goal is to grow cultures of thinking in these two buildings as a result of the work with Ritchhart and networking with other participants from around the county. Already there has been dialogue amongst the staff at Oakwood around our current culture, which has built on and reinforced the vision we have established for the types of thinking we are striving to nurture in all of our learners. We are using thinking routines and learning focused conversations to bridge where we are with where we want to be. The thinking routines are modeled in professional development meetings; and are slowly being implemented in classrooms. Borrowing from the Intermediate School’s model, teachers will be provided short periods of release time to visit other classrooms in the building so that they can look for evidence of instruction focused on thinking and helping students to make their thinking visible.  If you are interested in more information, I encourage you to check out Dr. Ritchhart’s website at www.ronritchhart.com