Making Thinking Visible at Saint David's

Making thinking more visible to promote increased engagement, understanding, and independence in our boys' learning has been a focus of the curriculum this year.

Last week, small groups of Saint David's faculty members met with leading neural development and learning specialist Mark Church for follow-up workshops on strategies they are implementing in their classes to make their students' thinking more visible.

Mark, author of "Making Thinking Visible," and part of the team at Harvard University's Project Zero, began working with Saint David's a year ago and has made periodic visits to the school throughout the year.

During last week's session, he led the faculty members in discussion and analysis of their use of various routines that help boys to develop thinking habits, to be "reasoners with evidence" and "connection makers," rather than information absorbers.

These range from simply changing the question "Why,"to "What made you say that?" when seeking to reveal a boy's reasoning about a topic, to having the boys document their thinking in a visual manner.

It is essential for true scholars to go beyond acquisition of knowledge to experience more generative learning that leads to development of new ideas and solutions to novel problems.

As a school, we implement many ways for our boys to engage in deeper level thinking, whether in the classroom, the science lab, through our several learning partnerships with prestigious educational, cultural, and scientific organizations, or on the many class field experiences the boys partake of during the year.

The art, craft, and science of teaching is a principal focus of our professional development at Saint David's.

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