Thinking Made Visible: Generate Sort Connect Elaborate

As the school year begins, I am excited to practice with some of the Thinking Routines discussed in Making Thinking Visible.  Following the authors' advice, I identified the type of thinking that I wanted to elicit from my students and then chose a routine to correlate with the type of thinking I desired to see.  As a result, I tried the Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate routine.  I wanted to see what prior ideas and knowledge my students had when working with our first quarter essential question: What does it mean to be healthy?

I had students individually work through the first three steps (Generate, Sort, and Connect).  Instead of giving the entire task at once, I broke this up into three distinct steps, only explaining the step that the students were currently working on.  After a bit of preliminary modeling, students were able to complete this task independently.  

A student works on her individual chart.

Once they had finished, I had them get into groups of 3-5.  They then combined all of the ideas from their charts into a larger chart that could be hung on the wall.  While monitoring the conversations, I was excited to hear students disagree about where a certain element should be placed during the Connect phase.  These conversations resulted in increased understanding and more nuanced Connections.  

Using the individual charts, the group collaborates to Sort their ideas.

After Sorting, this group works to identify Connections.

In addition to providing me with a snapshot of their current thinking on this topic, I also plan to return the charts to the groups periodically throughout  the quarter and have students further Connect and Elaborate to see how their thinking on the topic has deepened. The thinking made visible through these charts will also help me to identify missing perspective that could be addressed through articles or other media that will further stretch their current conceptions.

To see this Thinking Routine in action, check out this teacher's webpage.  She has a video of using Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate with her students.

Self-Diagnosing with Assessment Dialogues

One difficulty I have experienced with implementing more effective feedback strategies is that for my 11th and 12th grade students many of the quick feedback techniques are more appropriate for comprehension types of tasks, not for tasks that require an assessment of quality.  Chappius, thankfully, offers a few recommendations for getting students to self-diagnose first, so the teacher can then "tailor [his] comments to offer as much or as little help as the student truly needs" (pg.79).

Her first suggestion is to use an Assessment Dialogue form which has students explain their strengths and areas they need to work on, has teachers explain strengths and areas to work on, and then has students write out a plan where they explain what they will do now.  I have used another type of form with my students, but I think I like this one better.

Her second strategy is two color highlighting.  Students use the scoring rubric and highlight in yellow how they think their product lines up with the performance indicators.  The teacher then does the same with a blue highlighter. The text that is green signifies the areas that the teacher and student agree on; no further comments need to be made on these areas because the student already understands their progress.  The teacher could then provide additional feedback on those areas that were significantly varied.  This would save be quite a lot of time and energy, especially when I assess drafts of longer essays.

Making Thinking Visible

Some of the reading I have done dealt with identifying miscues or misconceptions that students hold and helping them to confront these ideas through meaningful and timely feedback.  However, I did not receive much guidance as to how to identify these.  Now I feel like I have a little more tangible help. For the last week, I have been reading Making Thinking Visible by Ron Richart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison. The book is replete with "thinking routines" that if practiced will help to make students' thinking visible so the teacher is able to see it.  I am hoping to try out a few of these routines in my classroom next week when the new school year begins.