Struggling is learning

Struggling is learning

Helping students to “learn how to learn” is crucial for understanding and becoming a life-long learner. To discover how aware students are of their thinking at different ages, it is necessary and really helpful to build “cultures of thinking.” The theory behind is that if educators can make thinking more visible, and help students develop routines around thinking, then their thinking about everything will deepen.

One example of this for this is the Harvard Medical School, where …….instructors were struggling to train students to listen to patients and make strong diagnoses based on the symptoms they heard. As an experiment, the medical school offered an elective module to students, where once a week they would join a fine arts class using the “See, Think, Wonder” thinking routine to observe art. After 10 weeks, all the medical students were assessed on clinical diagnosing and the students who had done “See, Think, Wonder” had improved much more than those who had not participated.

“One of the reasons we call them thinking routines is that through their use it is the thinking that becomes routine,” says Ritchhart said from Project Zero.

When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges

http://www.pz.harvard.edu/