Tricia Ebarvia

I‘m currently reading Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison (2011). I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make thinking processes like writing and reading visible to students. Writing, for example, is part art but mostly craft. While some students think of good writing as something that just magically happens for certain individuals, I try to show students how many decisions actually go into writing—how much thinking really happens. The same can be said for reading.

I’ve read the introductory chapters and almost finished the second half of the book where all the strategies are described (more than twenty are included). In the opening section, the authors point out that we need to move beyond Bloom’s taxonomy. Framing thinking as a sequence or hierarchy is problematic because we know that many of the types of thinking in Bloom’s taxonomy can be happening simultaneously, out of order, and at varying levels of complexity. I’ve had students, for example, who can apply their knowledge with greater complexity than other students who analyze. Yet analyze is higher on the taxonomy than apply. It also seems to me that understanding—true understanding—is achieved by analyzing, applying, and synthesizing, yet understanding is lower on the taxonomy.

So what the authors suggest instead is a list of “high-leverage thinking moves” Read More