Visible Thinking Tools

Exploring Complexity

Exploring Complexity features tools and strategies for supporting learners to enter and investigate the complexity of ideas, objects and systems from a variety of vantage points. Exploring complexity involves identifying multiple and often competing perspectives, looking closely at interacting factors, recognizing conflicting values and forces, and appreciating issues of power, truth, and leadership. The outcome of such an inquiry is a deeper understanding of the anatomy of the object, issue, or idea under study – an understanding of its parts, its dimensions, its tensions, its uncertainties.

Global Thinking

Global Thinking offers thinking routines that foster understanding and appreciation of today's complex globalized world. The materials and tools include a framework to think about global competence and offer clarity about various capacities associated with global competence. The bundle describes how to plan and document your experiences bringing global thinking routines into your classroom and to share these experiences with others.

Pathways to Understanding: Developing Students' Memory & Note Taking Skills

Pathways to Understanding: Developing Students' Memory & Note Taking Skills leverages contemporary understandings of how memory works to advance both memory for and understanding of content. These materials offer tools and strategies for developing students’ memory and advancing their note taking and synthesizing of content. Also, the materials facilitate students’ deep engagement with content.  

Portable Knowledge

Portable Knowledge helps learners transfer what they learn in particular subjects to other contexts and studies far and wide, instead of just storing up knowledge for the unit test or essay. The bundle encourages applications not just to other academic contexts but everyday settings and activities. We want knowledge that travels, not knowledge that stays stuck, which research shows is the trend unless transfer receives direct attention.