Powerful Thinking Routines (That Work Online Too!)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: “Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners,” written by Ron Ritchhart et al., is the best professional development book I have ever read. I was introduced to this book during a district book club in the spring of 2017. I love two things about this book: 1) how easy it is to use across disciplines and 2) that I can use various routines depending on the text I’m using and the thinking I’m hoping to foster within my students. Over the last three years, I have used each of the thinking routines multiple times. I use them so much that my students wind up learning many by name. 

During distance learning, not using these thinking structures has been frustrating for me because of how often I used them in the classroom. I thought about how I could virtually recreate the routines, but I couldn’t visualize how it would have the same impact. So, with the stress of everything else, I put this recreation on the back burner. Then, an educator friend then shared this article with me, and I was instantly excited by the possibilities. 

Since reading the article, “Support Online Learning with Powerful Thinking Routines,” written by Caitlin Tucker, I have been able to use a couple of the thinking routines in my virtual classroom with my students. Tucker took five routines and “created Google Slides for teachers to copy and use in an online learning scenario. Each slide deck focuses on a specific thinking routine and is designed to engage the entire class. That way, students can learn with and from each other.” Each slide deck has 30 copies of the same slide so that each student may work on their slide and have the ability to see what their classmates are thinking. The teacher may also share a particular slide with the whole class to showcase certain thinking. 

Here is the first thinking routine that I introduced to my students: 

Chalk Talk 

What? This routine helps students build understanding in a collaborative way by putting forward ideas, questioning one another, and further developing the ideas. 

How? I used Jamboard to do this with my students. I started with a question in the middle of the board and asked students to respond using a yellow post-it. They were given 2 minutes to add their initial post-it. Then, I gave them two minutes to read over their peers’ answers. I invited them to reply to one of their classmates’ thoughts with a green post-it. On this green post-it, they could question their peers, agree with them, or challenge their thinking. Finally, I asked students to read through the post-its for the third time
and respond to an original post or question in a pink post-it. 

When? Over the last two weeks, I’ve used the chalk talk routine three times with each of my classes. We’ve used it with an SEL lesson (pictured), an ELA writing brainstorm, and a reading discussion. My next step with this routine is to have multiple questions on different slides of the Jamboard for students to choose which questions they’d like to answer. 

What students think? One student said that she loved how this routine “forced her to read her classmates’ thinking.” Overall, I felt that my students were more engaged than our typical lessons, and I felt like my old teacher-self, which puts a smile on my face. 

Jenni Merry