Four staff members (Jen Steffes, Melina Chynoweth, Bill Staugaard, Nick Ontiveros) of our Cultures of Thinking (CoT) Team facilitated a staff discussion on the first two chapters in Making Thinking Visible. In small groups the thinking routine Sentence-Phrase-Word was used to debrief on the chapters and the best ones from the groups were shared with the entire staff.
Staff was also provided a toolbox card for this routine to use for future implementation in their own classrooms. The session finished with a 4 C's thinking routine that provided the opportunity for staff to wrap-up their thoughts about the chapters. The CoT Team collected these responses to assess the staff's thinking process in order to plan future PD sessions centered around Visible Thinking.
Staff was assigned to read Chapters 3 & 4 for the next PD session scheduled for November 5, 2013. In addition, they were asked to implement one of the routines from those chapters and bring the student samples to the upcoming PD as well.