Hello! This is a brief blog just to give you an update on summer happenings, updates and some powerful news for all schools about the importance of thinking as the foundation for learning. Read on to find out about a special TV report out of Mississippi last week!

The Pass teachers and administrative leaders have been focusing on cognitive and critical thinking through the use of Thinking Maps since 2002. They have well documented the highest levels of performance within Mississippi and across the country and we have helped them to create a near TV-ready documentary on their amazing story.

Just last Friday the local TV station WLOX ran a story about the continued success in The Pass and used pieces of the the documentary. Here is just one of the most insightful and powerful quotes from a principal in The Pass:

“…. we lost everything…. But not our students’ abilities to think…”

Please link to the WLOX report televised on Friday, September 10 out of Biloxi !

http://www.wlox.com/global/category.asp?c=194069&clipId=5106093&autostart=true

The Pass story will also become part of the 2nd edition of “Student Successes with Thinking Maps” (in press: Corwin Press; 2011) that many authors have worked on in the past year to add new chapters and bring forward revisions and new successes.

Read more about the pass story and view the documentary trailer here on the Thinking Foundation website.

And… last but not least, Bob Price is returning to Ethiopia to continue the deep and expanding collaboration with a focus on our global Thinking Schools initiative Please return to www.thinkingfoundation/ethiopia for more information. Thinking Foundation is now working with Bob and others to get significant funding for this project (and film documentaries) from individuals and private funders, foundations, and even NGOs in order to help sustain the collaboration. Send word if you can help out!

Of course, all over the world, from The Pass in Mississippi, to Ethiopia, to Haiti to Afganistan, Los Angeles and New York City…. school buildings are being rebuilt, but upon what educational foundation????

What kind of teaching and learning and leading is happening within these temporary canvas concrete walls or the trailers in The Pass after Katrina?

We believe that thinking is the foundation for grounding learning in the 21st century in huts in Ethiopia or gleaming new buildings in the United States.

Think about it!

David

“… father, father, father, we don’t need to escalate….
war is not the answer…
we need to bring some lovin’ here today…
we got to find a way…”

With so much going on in this world, from multiple wars, famine, and worldwide drug and human trafficking…. to economic recessions and global warming…. to one of the greatest human-made ecological disasters in history rippling across the Gulf Coast…. we got to find a new way… to educate.

For most children, parents, and educators around the US the school year is coming to an end… and with each year we educators wonder what will happen next. What’s goin’ on?

Around the world, most say that it will be education that turns things around—across fields such as healthcare, sustainable agriculture, ecological awareness, entrepreneurial spirit, even financial literacy. But will education around the world as we know it —teachers in front of classes dispensing information to 50 or more children--be enough? Will computers downloading infinite, overwhelming, multimedia information to kids in a classroom—be enough?

Will “experts” going out into the field to help others use the highest quality teaching approaches as they “convey” information to adults and elders in devastated, underserved communities? Or will they just “tell” people their “information.” We certainly must build schools as a starting point… as Greg Mortensen has done in a profound way… but what happens inside the walls of these schools? (See the book “Stones into Schools”)

We at Thinking Foundation believe that we must ReCharter schools around the world with a practical, buildable foundation based on creative thinking, analytic thinking, systems-ecological thinking, collaborative thinking, and critical reflection as THE guideposts for teaching, learning, leading and assessment. For what? For the improvement of human capacities to think and the development of deep, contextualized content knowledge for problem-solving and decision-making at every level of a community.

We got to find a different way. How?

Today I leave for England to attend the National Conference on Thinking Skills—and the launch of the International Association of Thinking Schools (more on this in the next blog!) Yesterday I just picked up a book for my flight over: “How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas” by David Bornstein. My belief is that we need to become educational entrepreneurs by ReChartering the mission of schools.

Bornstein details in the first pages that the term “entrepreneur” means, in translation from the original in French, “one who undertakes.” As the author points out, social entrepreneurism is a global phenomenon led by people relatively unknown who are advancing creative solutions to problems big and small… and who are also often attempting to advance systemic change. Call it a paradigm mind-shift. Reframing the old view.

As we close up the school year, I see BIG openings from the relatively small actions taken by a few individuals with a little bit of support from Thinking Foundation-- all of which you can access on our website. From Carla Carvalho’s team-work in Bahia, Brazil, to Bob Price and Elizabeth Kesling through the Ethiopia Thinking Schools project, to Estee Lopez’s collaborative research with teachers in New Rochelle for ELL students and in New York City, to Suzanne Ishee and Marjann Ball’s amazing work in Pass Christian and across Mississippi. We see the difference in the minds of children. These are all educators with a focus on children, but they are, more to the heart, social entrepreneurs attempting to ignite systemic change.

Next week at the National Thinking Skills Conference in England, educators from across the UK will come together to exchange ideas about the big picture vision of ReChartering schools in the 21st century as Thinking Schools. We hope this will be a network for Social Edu-preneurs building Thinking Schools!

Every teacher, every educator, is in a sense a social entrepreneur… as we set out to engage and enlighten our students—and each other. But the lights are going out in classrooms because many of us have been pulled down by the past and not fully seeking what is needed right now and into the future.

Let’s ReThink what’s goin on! We gotta bring some good lovin to this….
But we also need to think it through to make sustainable, systemic changes.

What’s Goin On with You?

David

What is Going on with Thinking Foundation?
Thinking Foundation is based on the premise that the foundation for all learning is an array of fundamental cognitive processes, thinking dispositions, cooperative and creative learning structures, and the development of critical reflection within every learner and teacher. This premise is supported by over 70 years of cognitive science and neuroscience research and the comprehensive analyses of strategies and models for improving student learning. This view is also established as a foundation for developing a dynamic, equitable, and thoughtful democratic citizenry in the 21st century. The principle of equity in education means that those with the greatest needs, including children in poverty, those with different needs, children of color who receive inequitable access to high quality instruction, and those learning a second language require that we our work supports and demonstrates explicitly how the focus on facilitating thinking abilities ensures access to higher education and integration into the global community.

“The third millennium is characterized by wonderful scientific and technological developments. These advances create challenges for us as well. In order to meet these challenges we need to encourage education approaches that emphasize critical thinking and problem-solving skills. One of the ways to address this educational need is through the use of learning tools called Thinking Maps.”

Sanaan and I have been communicating over the past 18 months via email as she moved through her research at Zagazig University in Egypt, and I was held in anticipation up here in the woods of New Hampshire! She sent me student work. She sent me video clips of her work with colleagues in classrooms, and now we have her pre-post analysis of scientific problem-solving with significant effects using Thinking Maps. Go to the Minds of Egypt webpage on the Thinking Foundation website.

In a previous note I highlighted the work Bob Price is doing with colleagues there in Ethiopia. He returns this week to deepen the work. You may want to revisit the Case Study Bob has put together as you check out the new research results from Egypt.

Take a look at the video from Egyptian classrooms... and take a step into another culture. Climb a pyramid in your mind! Watch the video below, and more video clips in the Minds of Egypt webpage.

So I wondered back to this last Monday when I was leaving a meeting with an educator in New York City and we were discussing the common human processes of thinking. She said, in a matter of fact tone, as we stepped into the elevator: “A brain is a brain.” In any New York City district you may have up to 150 DIFFERENT languages and dialects spoken by children and in their homes!

(For an opposing view to mine, read a provocative book … “The Geography of Thought” by Richard Nesbitt)

As cultures come together and at times clash, we find common emotions that are simply FRAMED differently around the world.

And there are common, organic, dynamic processes of thinking among us through which we can communicate.

Is this an opening to a new form of dialogue?

David

No doubt I was inspired to these reflections knowing I was going to introduce you to a new documentary film trailer from the City of New Rochelle Public Schools, just a few miles out of New York City. We are launching this trailer now as a step toward a full-length film because it challenges all of us deeply to consider some essential, time-critical questions:

How do we help students articulate what they are thinking as they are learning a new language?

How do we teach ELL students with a focus on “higher order thinking” as they are learning and being tested on complex academic language and concepts?

If you were moved by the Minds of Mississippi documentary trailer still found on our home page… this piece will move you to a new place in your heart and mind as film maker Keith DeCristo continues the work of surfacing what matters most in education today.

What matters here? Hispanic children, from the largest “minority” population and the highest percentage of second language learners in this country, MUST NOT be given watered down content for years on end as they learn a second language. This will only place these kids on a remedial, cognitive side track … leading to high drop out rates just a few years down the line. The teachers and administrators interviewed in this film show us that, yes we can and must explicitly focus on high order thinking development as we teach a rigorous curriculum grounded in deep academic language growth... using Thinking Maps as a pathway integrated with a strong literacy approach. Thought and Language. It is not either-or. The stakes for these children and our nation are just too high, now and into the future.

So how can we develop both high quality thinking and rigorous content learning?
The New Rochelle educators and students in this film are showing us the way beyond the tipping point: We MUST do both.

Watch the film trailer online here at the Thinking Foundation website.

Thinking IS the foundation for learning.

David

Last year Kim Williams and I wrote a journal article for the ASCD-Plymouth State University New Hampshire Journal of Education and here is the link www.thinkingfoundation.org/david. Kim gave our article a great starting point by going back a few centuries and then into the future … to an invention that gave us the metaphor for what happens when Thinking Maps are used in “21st century classrooms” for formative (and summative!) assessment:

Among his other revolutionary accomplishments, Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals to allow us to see things more clearly—that which is right before our eyes as well as that which typically requires closer inspection—with the same tool. The most effective, revolutionary tools are elegant in their simplicity, leading to complex applications. Thinking Maps, as a fundamental language of cognitive patterns, have shown promise to become a revolutionary model for transforming educational assessment. This set of visual tools allows us as teachers the capacity to see student content learning and thinking processes through the same bifocal lens—viewing the content at the surface and the cognition more in depth. Our cognitive age requires that our assessment tools keep pace with our new understanding about how the brain learns and processes information. In this writing we offer tools for educators and learners to determine not only “what” is learned but also “how” it is learned.

On Monday, March 8, Kim and I will systematically present student work that reflects how we can move students to a high level of fluency with Thinking Maps so that teachers may assess and students may self-assess the discipline specific concepts being developed while at the same time seeing the development of thinking processes. Read more on the ASCD presentation.

Of course, in Texas, as in most other states, one of THE most important needs is captured in this question:

How do we assess ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS on their content learning as they are on a developmental path toward fluent language use in a second language?
What happens when one’s language abilities prevent students from fully expressing their best thinking?????

So we will address what Dr. Stefanie Holzman wrote about in her chapter of Student Success with Thinking Maps, and explicitly brings forward in this interview at Roosevelt Elementary School in Long Beach, CA…

… if you want to assess their content learning… leave it in a map!

SPREAD THE WORD to colleagues about our presentation and we hope to see some of you there!

…thinking IS the foundation for learning…

David

ASCD PRESENTATION information:

Title:
Bifocal Assessment:
Combining Teaching and Learning with Thinking Maps
David Hyerle, Ed.D. and Kimberly Williams, Ph.D.

Session # 3201

When:
12:15 – 1:15 pm Monday, March 8
Where: Henry Gonzalez Convention Center, Second Level
ROOM 217, C Room Capacity is 190

Usually in these blogs I offer my thinking in the moment, playing with ideas, sharing discoveries from educators in the field, some from those who have received grants from Thinking Foundation. This time, I will simply share the edited video and selected transcript of feedback from participants — View Bob’s Case Study here on the Thinking Foundation website. It is THAT powerful. The ideas and the deep reflections from the hearts and minds of these educators stand as beautiful, meaningful, inspiring signposts for us all.

One participant said at the end of the week, already welcoming Bob back to their country: 'I hope this journey will not be for first and for the last.'

Bob… have a good return journey this next week. And, bring back more signposts from Ethiopian educators!

David

Bringing Thinking Maps to students and teachers in Mississippi has been Marjann’s calling for nearly twenty years. It is also a family affair, as Marjann’s sister, and other members of the family including a daughter and her niece have worked across the state. And then there was a greater calling. Marjann’s youngest daughter, Ariel, was diagnosed with bone cancer some years ago, fought hard and with grace to survive, and then passed away from all of us. I had some delightful, meaningful times with Ariel… one time sitting by her bedside as she was fighting the rare disease, talking with her as she watched one of her favorite shows: Gray’s Anatomy. She spent so much painful time in hospitals and she was still intrigued by a television show that dealt with the most difficult part of her world. She wanted to understand. She was a special child who was thoughtful and full of heart. Young Ariel was and IS an inspiration to many of us. You can read about her through Marjann’s letter.

When I suggested to Marjann that we offer annual Ariel Awards to honor inspired student work, she immediately agreed. With this background, Thinking Foundation is pleased to announce the establishment of the annual Ariel Awards in honor of Ariel Ball of Laurel, Mississippi who left a gift of thoughtful, artful thinking to this world.

Read about the annual awards at www.thinkingfoundation.org.

In the next few months, through this blog, we will be highlighting students who have created some amazing work, from abstract art to mapping out a whole biology textbook! We will honor them with an Ariel Award.

We hope, in a small way, that these awards honor Ariel for endless years to come and inspire more students to open their minds and hearts, as Ariel did, to the full range of possibilities in the lives they lead. We will keep a gallery of student work on this website, whether or not the students received the few awards we are able to give every year. Hopefully, this student work will also help all of us reflect on what is essential for educating our children, now and into the unknowable future.

David

Over the years, on average 70% of the children in “The Pass” (as the town is called) live in poverty. 85 % of the students and teachers lost everything in Katrina, but this diverse population is also the highest performing in the state. As of November 22, 2009, The Pass was awarded Federal “STAR” status, meaning that the performance of Pass students is comparable to the other highest performing systems in the country.

18 months after Katrina I visited Pass Christian, landfall for the storm on the Gulf Coast. The context for my visit was that The Pass had been using Thinking Maps as a foundation for growing and sustaining the quality of performance across their schools to Blue Ribbon status. I wanted to show support. I walked in the mud and on boards between the FEMA trailers that today still remain classrooms for displaced students and teachers.

See the film trailer and read the story online at the Thinking Foundation website.

I have spent lots of time working in under-resourced rural and urban schools, and since the late 1980’s I have done consulting work in Mississippi schools. I have seen around this country schools amidst economic deprivation that was systemic and generational, and the great courage of teachers, but never have I seen teachers working with such extraordinary clarity and sustained focus to respond to a communal disaster. They rose up.

During that visit, I also stepped into the cramped trailer from which Dr. Sue Matheson, the Pass Christian School Superintendent, and her leadership team, were leading a community of learners to excel beyond the expectations of anyone around them. We talked. I told Sue I would return.

Little did I know that last year I would return to be part of the filming of a documentary about Pass Christian, the story told only in part through this trailer. This is not just a “feel good”, isolated story of success as you can see by looking at the results from around the country and globe… all on this website. We have provided data and documentation from The Pass, along with writing and poetry by Suzanne Ishee, a middle school teacher in The Pass, all giving context to this documentary. Take a deep breath and look through these frames into a story that not only inspires us, but also offers us insights …

… into thinking as the foundation for learning.

David Hyerle

See the film trailer and read the story online at the Thinking Foundation website.

We have a new case study to share from England and it is extensive. You can check out a range of research and reflections.. and look at video clips sent across the now “virtual” pond from St Robert (a secondary school in American terms).

Kevin Steele, a lead administrator, and his colleagues at St Robert of Newminster Catholic School and Sixth Form College drilled down to study “Thinking Maps and School Effectiveness"; in a UK Comprehensive School.” One of the outcomes of the research shows that students and teachers are now spending more time at the higher levels of thinking at St Robert School. Hmmm… What does that mean? Kevin and his team are tracking an essential question here in the 21st century… asking about Higher Order thinking...

Here are some clips to view. The first clip is of students showing and talking about the effectiveness of Thinking Maps for interpretation of poetry and essay writing;

the second clip is a new teacher being coached on pre and post lessons by Kevin—a seasoned teacher and administrator--using the very same tools. A secondary student, a new teacher, a seasoned administrator using the same tools. Hmmm… The young teacher is shown in the clip talking about how the maps helped her improve her own thinking and teaching effectiveness--- using a common language for thinking.

How can that be? Isn’t the teacher just naturally thinking at a “higher” level? The normative view (call it a paradigm) is that we all just “naturally” progress from lower order (concrete) to higher order (abstract) thinking in some grand stage theory staircase to “adult” thinking! As my teenage son might say: not. Let's not confuse Piaget with Bloom!

This all takes me back to when I was a young teacher 30 years ago (it could have been the 12th century)—the early 1980’s in Oakland, California teaching mostly African American youth living in a high poverty area—and I went to a workshop on Bloom’s Taxonomy. I was told to ask more questions at the upper end of Bloom’s taxonomy-- you know: analysis, synthesis, evaluative (FYI: see the revised Bloom, 2001--an Addison Wesley Longman book). These questions were to be asked of my students who were in schools that would be closed down today for lack of AYP. Talk about left behind. Sadly, most of the children I was teaching, in statistical terms and in life, were BOUND to failure by the system. Why?

All I know is that when I went back to the classroom after the workshop I asked more complex questions. I cajoled. I pleaded for responses. I didn’t know what to do. Later I went to a presentation by Art Costa on Habits of Mind (then called “intelligent behaviors”). I realized in that moment that I was just one in a string of teachers slowly remediating my students toward failure (imagine the slow simmering of frogs in water… they can’t save themselves and jump out… they are mesmerized by the
dullness of it all). I was re-mediating the content they hadn’t “learned” the first time. Or the second time… or for the previous eight years of their schooling. They had been “remediated” in reading groups during their first days of kindergarten. My students’ now had fully REMEDIATED MINDS!

OK, I’ll get to my point: What Art Costa offered was a vision of cognitive mediation (Google: Reuven Feuerstein). They were not being mediated through their fundamental cognitive processes. So then the question becomes: Where is the line between lower and higher order thinking? Consider: The fundamental cognitive skills—thinking skills—are at play at every level of Bloom’s taxonomy. Bloom’s taxonomy is NOT a stage theory of cognitive development: it is a LEVELED taxonomy of objectives all at play in kindergarten and preK!

So take a look at the two video clips, one of students, one of a new teacher being coached on the content AND her thinking. Look for the commonalities in thinking. The message was delivered long ago by Lauren Resnick and others: higher order thinking occurs at the earliest ages of schooling and through, dynamically, our latest years of life. And now we even know of the plasticity of our brains… networking patterns of thinking as we sleep.

We can’t wait
and THEN…
remediate.

So how are you thinking about this?

David

I have waited a bit until everyone is back in school to kick off a new year of blogs. But now I can't wait any longer.

Expect many this year as we have some remarkable stories to tell, including the unveiling of new research case studies from England, New Zealand, North Carolina, California, Mississippi, and New York ... we will soon let you in on a documentary movie trailer about what happens when a school system rises up against adversity and devastation (and 70% poverty rates) to become THE highest performing system in their state... how did they do it? An explicit focus on students' thinking.

So I was moved to write this morning because of what I read last night in a groundbreaking research book 15 years in the making. Actually I woke up thinking about this in the middle of the night-- crazy right?

The book is "Visible Learning" by John Hattie-- a Routledge book. It is the most comprehensive synthesis of 800 meta-analyses ever completed on what drives high quality student performance. Bob Marzano has offered us many insights down this line and now John Hattie of Auckland, New Zealand has taken the research to new heights.

So what is one of the most important influences on student learning?

Make a Guess, then read on.

The findings, in THE summary statement of the book.. are visible before
our eyes:

".... The story is about the visibility of teaching and learning: it is the power of passionate, accomplished teachers who focus on students' cognitive engagement with the content.... developing a way of thinking, reasoning, and emphasizing problem solving and strategies in their teaching about the content they wish students to learn."

Surprising? Not really, but then educators around the world really do not explicitly focus on thinking and cognitive development. The direct teaching of, for, and about thinking (Brandt/Costa) does not happen systemically across grade levels and classes. Students may even learn about how the brain works.. but not the mind.

John Hattie identifies an array of factors, but the vision is clear:
1. cognitive engagement,
2. metacognition,
3. dynamic feedback between students and teachers...

these focal points have high effects and great power in the lives of learners... and teachers.

John is clear cut in his warning: this is an explanation of results from studies and does NOT pretend to suggest direct causality. This basically means ... don't read these results as a list of TO DOs. Many people have misinterpreted Bob Marzano's work as a shopping list of nine "things" to do in classrooms to bring about change. But the cluster of results explains what success looks like from across the seemingly endless research studied.

Where do we start? At every grade level pre-K through college.

How?

Here is an example of a pre-K teacher in Syracuse, New York who fully engaged her students' cognitive abilities --- EXPLICITLY..

thinking IS the foundation for learning.

let me know what you think.

David

It takes a school—a whole school and systems working very consciously toward becoming a thinking community. What does it look like? Check out this interview from a school in Rochester, New York. Thinking Maps had been successfully used across the school for the students and teachers, but Marcie Roberts, principal at Norman Howard School in Rochester, NY began using Thinking Maps for leadership decision making --- and for communicating and working with the school board. The result? Marcie transformed a dull strategic plan into a dynamic change document by using the maps as tools for transforming information into action-based knowledge for her school board.

In this wide ranging interview that we have edited down to a few minutes, Marcie and two members of her leadership team share how Thinking Maps are used in their thinking and decision making. And then Marcie tells her story and shows the process in action.

Marcie doesn’t tell you in this interview, but off camera she told me that she got a standing ovation from her school board after presenting the dynamic document. Rock stars, politicians, and motivational speakers get “standing O’s”… but school directors in front of their school board?!

David Hyerle

See more leadership video clips including a conference Leadership Panel.

After I calmed down, I have been reflecting on the election of a new
President OBAMA and the ripple effect of his election on the rest of the
world. From Kenya to Indonesia and around the globe, people may be
reframing their view of US.

There is something deep and exciting about the interdependency many of us
now feel that did not exist before global communication networks and
citizen travelers. As I think about what it means to be global citizens
in the 21st century I also think about how we can work to bridge across
cultures and languages. I believe that our common emotional states and
fundamental patterns of thinking are entry points.

So I invite you to take a few minutes and visit Japan and Mexico and
consider how common thinking patterns may traverse the global landscape:

http://www.thinkingfoundation.org/video/topic/video-global.html

David
--
David Hyerle, Ed.D.
Founding Director
Thinking Foundation
www.thinkingfoundation.org
ph: 603.795.2757
fax: 603.795.4620

"The years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing,
their alternations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence
into the light--only those who have experienced it can understand that."

Einstein
"Notes on the origin of the general theory of relativity"
1934

View the video clips from my last trip here...

I especially like the young high school guy who, when he found out I was the developer of the maps exclaimed "BRILLIANT!" funny... like out of a Guinness commercial I love!

More upon return!

And I hope you consider submitting a grant for the 2008-09 RFP on assessment!

jolly good!
David

The leaves are falling off the trees her in New Hampshire, and so is a new RFP.

Over the past few weeks I have been receiving extraordinary video clips, results, and insights from the 2007-08 Thinking Foundation grant recipients. And they are all expressing to me how meaningful their experience is as they look at leadership and learning about how they work together using Thinking Maps. In the next few months you will get a look at the results as well.

But for now, I hope you consider putting together a short proposal for the 2008-09 request for proposal centered on assessment. How do we assess student learning? Thinking? and, as Art Costa and Bena Kallick ask us: How do help students become self-assessing? Check out the new RFP, due in mid-November.. plenty of time!

An overview of the 2008-2009 Request for Proposal is available online including the description, steps for completion, proposal preparation and submission instructions, forms and instruction, and other support materials. Download the Request for Proposals 2008-2009 – Assessing Thinking and Learning overview. Also read more on the Thinking Foundation "funding" web-page.

take care,
David