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.