If you’ve spent time teaching early adolescents, then you know this to be true: middle school students are highly curious, display a broad range of interests, and are eager to learn about topics they find interesting, useful, or even provocative. Growing in their capabilities to be both metacognitive and independent, early adolescents are right in the midst of an intense and wonderful time in their lives for intellectual growth and development. By their very nature, they are explorers! For this very reason, middle school teachers naturally want their students to develop deep and lasting thinking habits that help them to explore the world they’re growing up into.
But when teachers say they wish to cultivate their middle school students’ thinking, what do they actually mean? What types of thinking do middle school teachers value and promote in their classrooms that grow the exploring nature of their students? A real dilemma arises when they’ve never stepped back to consider what it is exactly they want their students to do mentally. In our desire for them to explore, without a clear vision of what kind of thinking truly maters, might classrooms become places of simply “getting through the work?”
The premise of Project Zero’s Making Thinking Visible is aimed, in part, towards addressing this dilemma. If teachers want to improve their students’ ability to think and to create classrooms where student thinking is visible, valued, and actively promoted as part of the regular experience of all learners, they must first become aware of what kind of thinking is worth setting in motion. Only then can teachers create classroom cultures with this thinking fueling the learning within.
A typical approach seems to be taken on by many schools: teach students about thinking, rather than to consider how thinking is enacted, cultivated, and grown as thinking dispositions. In fact, when we’ve asked teachers to identify the kinds of thinking their lessons help students develop, we often see some perplexed faces, until some hesitant teacher speaks up, “You’re talking about Bloom’s, right?” Ah, familiar territory from teacher training days. While it is quite common to see the language of Bloom’s in lesson plans, assignments, and tests, we wonder to what extent students are truly taking on thinking dispositions that become so much a part of who they are, they’ll carry such habits with them years after they’ve left middle school. Even with Bloom’s language commonplace, could lessons still become work for work’s sake — not learning to be explored?
To be fair, Bloom’s categories capture critical and important types of mental activity, and thus are useful as a starting point for thinking about thinking. Yet the idea that thinking is sequential
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