Step Inside
“Consider different perspectives”:
How I REALLY learned about Making Thinking Visible strategies.
During this course last week, we were asked to create a project with our classmates. One of the criteria was to use 2 Thinking Routines by Richart. I must confessed that I wasn’t too thrilled about it. I didn’t really understand the strategies, yet. Googling for pictures to include in our project, I saw some visual depictions of some of the Making Thinking Visible routines. They were colorful, they had images, and I was intrigued. I deviated from our project and started researching more about what each strategy represented. One of my favorite strategies,which I included in our project, was Step Inside. I absolutely loved having to step inside someone’s shoes. I have previously done this strategy for another course here at FIU, but it wasn’t presented with the same simplicity as it was in this picture.Just by looking at it, I understood what to do. I have now incorporated “Step Inside” and “See,Think, and Wonder” to my classroom routines for exploring the Big Book and the Essential Questions. The responses that I am getting are phenomenal. The students don’t want to stop. But I am teaching them the strategy explicitly, with the hopes that they will remember it and use it in the other grades as they try to understand.
Here is my link to the actual group project: