Joseph and His Visible Thinking

"Visible Thinking" is a tool to help us understand how we come to arrive at a perspective we did not previously enjoy. "I used to think ... but now I think ..." 

Visible Thinking.

It's an odd term, isn't it? Maybe even an oxymoron, since thinking happens in your head, where no one can see it happening, not even you.

"Visible Thinking" (VT) is the name for a collection of educational methods to help students learn to reason and thus understand information better. These methods, developed at Harvard and other schools, are used in elementary schools as well as university settings including the United States and other parts of the world.

One published comment about VT explains, "Effective thinkers make their thinking visible, meaning they externalize their thoughts through speaking, writing, drawing or some other method. They can then direct and improve those thoughts."


I used to think, but now ...

One of the VT routines is described by the vocabulary it uses: "I used to think ... but now I think ..." In practice, the teacher reminds students about the topic or unit they have been studying and asks them to write a response using these two sentence...