Visible Thinking is a flexible framework aimed at enhancing learning by making students' thinking processes visible, promoting deeper understanding, motivation, and positive attitudes toward learning. It emphasizes the importance of abilities, alertness, and attitudes in effective thinking and incorporates various routines to facilitate thoughtful engagement in classrooms. The framework encourages a culture of collaborative thinkers and learners, utilizing methods that foster diverse perspectives and reflective thinking.

1. Harvard Project Zero

2. What is Visible Thinking?
Visible Thinking is a broad and flexible framework for enriching classroom workplace learning in the content
areas and fostering students' team members’ intellectual development at the same time.
Here are some of its key goals:
● Deeper understanding of content.
● Greater motivation for learning.
● Development of learners' thinking and learning abilities.
● Development of learners' attitudes toward thinking and learning and their alertness to
opportunities for thinking and learning (the "dispositional" side of thinking).
● A shift in classroom workplace culture toward a community of enthusiastically engaged thinkers
and learners.
Visible Thinking includes attention to four "thinking ideals" -- understanding, truth, fairness, and creativity.

3. Why Visible Thinking?
The central idea of Visible Thinking is very simple: making thinking visible.
We learn best what we can see and hear.
We watch, we listen, we imitate, we adapt what we find to our own styles and interests, we build from there.
Imagine learning to dance when the dancers around you are all invisible. Imagine learning a sport when the
players who already know the game can't be seen.
Strange as it seems, something close to it happens all the time in one very important area of learning:
Learning to think, which includes learning to learn.
Thinking is pretty much invisible. It happens under the hood, within the marvelous engine of our mind-brain.

4. What happens when thinking is visible?
Students Learners are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their
thinking.
It becomes clear that school office is not about memorizing content grunt work but
exploring ideas.
We benefit when we can see each other’s thinking because misconceptions, prior
knowledge, reasoning ability, and degrees of understanding are more likely to be
uncovered.
We can then address these challenges and extend our thinking by starting from
where they are.

5. A bit about the research
Visible Thinking is the product of a number of years of research concerning children's thinking and learning,
along with a sustained research and development process in classrooms.
One important finding was that skills and abilities are not enough. (abilities)
They are important of course, but alertness to situations that call for thinking and positive attitudes toward
thinking and learning are tremendously important as well. (alertness)
Often, we found, children (and adults) think in shallow ways not for lack of ability to think more deeply but
because they simply do not notice the opportunity or do not care. (attitude)
To put it all together, we say that really good thinking involves abilities, alertness, and attitudes, all three at
once. Technically this is called a dispositional view of thinking. Visible Thinking is designed to foster all three.

6. How to start?
There are three ways to get started using Visible Thinking...
Start with Routines
Start by exploring Ideals
Start by focusing on Documentation

7. Starting with Routines
Any procedure, process, or pattern of action that is used repeatedly to manage and
facilitate the accomplishment of specific goals or tasks.
Routines help direct student learner thinking and structure classroom office
discussion.
What makes them routines, versus merely strategies, is that they get used over and
over again in the classroom office so that they become part of the fabric of
classroom' office’ culture.

9. Circle of Viewpoint
Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?
This routine helps students learners consider different and diverse perspectives
involved in and around a topic.
Understanding that people may think and feel differently about things is a key
aspect of the Fairness Ideal (Other three ideals are understanding, truth, and
creativity).

10. Application: When and Where can it be used?
This routine can be used at the beginning of a project to help team members
brainstorm new perspectives about a use case, and imagine different user personas,
and questions connected to it.
It can be used after developing a prototype.
Provocative topics and issues are encouraged and the routine also works especially
well when learners are having a hard time seeing other perspectives or when things
seem black and white.
The routine can be used to open discussions about dilemmas and other controversial
issues.

11. Graphic Organiser
For Circle of Point of View

12. I used to think...But now I think...
Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?
This routine helps learners to reflect on their thinking about a topic or issue and
explore how and why that thinking has changed.
It can be useful in consolidating new learning as students identify their new
understandings, opinions, and beliefs.
By examining and explaining how and why their thinking has changed, students are
developing their reasoning abilities and recognizing cause and effect relationships.

13. Application: When and Where can it be used?
This routine can be used whenever learners’ initial thoughts, opinions, or beliefs are
likely to have changed as a result of instruction or experience.
For instance, after reading new information, watching a film, listening to a speaker,
experiencing something new, having a class discussion, at the end of a unit of study,
and so on.

14. Graphic Organiser for I used to think...But now I think

15. Compass Points
Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?
To help learners flesh out an idea or proposition and eventually evaluate it.
Application: When and Where can it be used?
This routine works well to explore various sides and facets of a proposition or idea prior to taking a stand or
expressing an opinion on it.
For instance, the company may be considering the idea of a dress code, a product owner might present the
product team with idea of altering a feature, a character in a book might be confronted with making a choice,
a politician might be putting forth a new way of structuring taxes, and so on.

16. Graphic Organiser
E = Excited
What excites you about this idea or proposition?
What’s the upside?
W = Worrisome
What do you find worrisome about this idea or
proposition? What’s the downside?
N = Need to Know
What else do you need to know or find out about
this idea or proposition? What additional
information would help you to evaluate things?
S = Stance or Suggestion for Moving Forward
What is your current stance or opinion on the
idea or proposition? How might you move
forward in your evaluation of this idea or
proposition?

17. Explore on your own
Rest of the thinking routines...

18. Resources
http://www.visiblethinkingpz.org/
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/visible-thinking

19. Thank you
Abhishek Desai
Let’s make a thinking workplace...