How would you teach differently if you couldn’t give your students a test until a year later?
Ron Ritchhart posed this question in his book Making Thinking Visible. It’s also one of the favorite quotes of Judy Higgins, a veteran fifth-grade science teacher in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
When Judy first began teaching, she often wondered why her students would come in on Tuesday and not remember what they learned on Monday. This challenge led her to make changes to create a culture of thinking in her classroom. This culture shift helped her students make meaningful connections, prompting deeper learning—and stronger retention.
“I help my students become thinkers, become curious, and learn how to solve problems; I have seen them be able to do end-of-the-year tests with great confidence because they know how to think,” Higgins says.
How did she do it?
She shifted the ‘thinking work’ back to the students. Higgins went from doing most of the cognitive work herself to using Thinking Moves to inspire students to take on that task.
Thinking Moves are teacher-tested strategies designed specifically to propel students toward their own natural curiosity and cognitive abilities—an essential part of meeting Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).
Many of these techniques are easily adaptable to a remote or blended learning environment as well.
“It’s nothing really difficult; it’s more about what you model and letting them struggle,” says Higgins.
It takes a while to create a thinking culture in your classroom, but you can get started today.
Watch our 45-minute webinar on fostering curious and confident thinkers to see how Judy engages her students in practicing critical thinking skills. Here are some of the highlights:
One of the strategies Higgins finds most useful in a remote learning environment is asking students to observe their own environment closely and describe it in detail. “My goal was to get a pre-assessment of certain properties,” Higgins says. She asked her students to describe the properties of an object in their homes to a family member to see if he or she could guess what it was.
“I deliberately did not tell them what properties meant,” Higgins says.
When she looked at the various ways that students approached the task, Higgins noticed that her students chose things that were important to them. For instance, one student described the properties of his phone, citing the texture, state of matter, and shape.
The activity served as an excellent pre-assessment, while engaging students in creative thinking and personal reflection.
“I don’t know how the students found the definition of properties, but they did it on their own,” Higgins says.
The take-away? When students can connect a concept or idea to their life or environment, the better chance they have to encode, remember and use it.
This Thinking Move is all about building expectations around thinking. It’s also an excellent tool for teachers to use to improve how we ask questions that engage our students in deeper thinking.
When students aren’t used to being questioned, they can respond defensively and feel the need to justify their choices rather than explain them.
“My students expect me to question them in all stages of scientific investigation,” Higgins says.
For example, Higgins may ask a question such as “Why did you use dirt as your first layer of your filtration system?” Good questions like these send the message that she is curious about their thinking, not looking to judge it.
“Once they realize that if you are going to make a choice, the teacher will ask you why you made that choice, that promotes the thinking process,” Higgins says.
As a result, students learn to make their thinking visible. In this example, by explaining why they chose dirt as opposed to sand or cotton balls.
It’s also a great way to identify when a student is going off track and give them a little nudge in the right direction by asking a probing question.
“What I learned through the years is how to ask better questions,” Higgins says.
These are questions with answers that can’t just be regurgitated from the textbook. Instead, they challenge students to think deeper and connect the concept to what they already know.
To showcase this type of creative thinking, Higgins will often visit a group and read their examples aloud to the class.
“The student has then taught their peers something about expectations,” she says.
Scientific inquiry, after all, relies on solid evidence. This Thinking Move can be applied in many different ways. For example, in one lesson, Higgins asks her students to analyze a picture of an engineering design solution that uses magnets that clearly weren't working correctly in the illustration.
“I could hear that they were arguing about what was happening and why,” she says.
One of the girls came up to her and asked to use some magnets to check their thinking. It was a great reminder to Higgins why we should always have extra materials that are needed to test different hypotheses in reach of our students. Providing a limited set of materials in this case showed a bias towards a specific solution.
Allowing students the time and space to be creative, to reason it out and argue with one another before they share their ideas with the class takes time, but it’s time well spent.
It’s so exciting to see students make connections on their own. However, sometimes teachers can get so consumed by giving students all the information or “stuff” they need to know that there isn’t enough time left in class for students to engage with their own and others’ ideas to make personal connections to the topic. Higgins can relate.
“I was talking too much,” says Higgins.
To ensure enough time for student-led inquiry, Higgins shifted her instruction so the majority of time was focused on students actively working with their own ideas and using what they learned to make connections.
To spark student engagement, Higgins uses KnowAtom’s picture-thinking graphic organizer, which asks students to make predictions about what is happening in an image in order to infer meaning.
“I would hear students say, ‘I remember this picture of the food web from third grade’—that’s them doing the thinking work,” Higgins says.
While students are thinking aloud in a group, they become a catalyst for their peers to think critically too. At this point, their brains are already comfortable thinking deeper, so students can quickly and confidently make connections once they begin reading.
Another tool she uses to engage students in making connections is the Frayer Model Four Square, a graphic organizer used for building student vocabulary. It has four quadrants where students can define a concept in different ways. Higgins modifies the standard tool for her classroom. For instance, she asked students to write words that were related to “translucent” in one of the squares.
“It’s interesting to me when I see a word that I don’t understand,” Higgins says.
Sometimes students make an unusual but very personal connection that shows they absolutely do understand it. Rather than “step on” that thinking by saying that it doesn’t have anything to do with the term translucent, Higgins simply makes inquiries.
“My job is to ask questions and to help them make their thinking visible to me,” she says.
Watch our 45-minute Propel Learning webinar to delve deeper into these highlights and learn about four additional Thinking Moves that can help you ignite curiosity and confidence in your learners:
With KnowAtom’s NGSS resources, you can create a classroom culture where questioning is encouraged and thinking is explored.
“The object of teaching a child is to enable him or her to get along without a teacher… and I can guarantee when you start creating a culture where they're pushing each other, you learn so much,” Higgins says.
Access our Propel Learning webinar and start planning your discussion strategy today.