Thursday, April 24, 9:30 am-12:30 pm, Milam 215

Getting students to actively engage with course material in thoughtful and substantive ways is fundamental to the development of understanding. But how do we create situations in the university classroom to accomplish this goal? How do we infuse the presentation of material with opportunities for deeper reflection on that material? In addition, how to do we provoke students to think about and question what they are learning? One strategy is through the use of thinking routines, simple structures that invite students to think about the content before them. These strategies can be easily woven into the classroom so that an expectation for meaning making, active engagement, reflection, and questioning become a part of the culture of the classroom.

Researchers at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have worked over the past eight years to develop a set of thinking routines as part of the Visible Thinking initiative. While these strategies have been designed with K-12 teachers in mind, they proven equally effective for adult learning and have been used a variety of settings, included lectures at HGSE, universities in Michigan, and in adult professional development classes. In this session, we’ll discuss the structure of thinking routines, how they operate in classroom settings, see some videos of them in action, and have a chance to try some ourselves.

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