Our school‘s fabulous PE teacher, Claire Arcenas, is bringing blogging to her PE classes. She is incorporating Visual Thinking Routines to help her students become reflective commenters.
In a recent planning session, she reminded me of the book Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchard, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison, that I had download but not read yet. We then started diving into the core routines outlined on Visible Thinking from Harvard University.

The core routines are a set of seven or so routines that target different types of thinking from across the modules. These routines are easy to get started with and are commonly found in Visible Thinking teachers’ toolkits. Try getting started with with one of these routines.

What Makes You Say That? Interpretation with justification routine
Think Puzzle Explore A routine that sets the stage for deeper inquiry
Think Pair Share  A routine for active reasoning and explanation
Circle of Viewpoints A routine for exploring diverse perspectives
I used to Think… Now I think… A routine for reflecting on how and why our thinking has changed
See Think Wonder A routine for exploring works of art and other interesting things
Compass Points A routine for examining propositions
3-2-1-Bridge A routine for activating prior knowledge and making connections

Each one of these routines seemed well suited to help guide students in quality blog post writing as well as  commenting. We couldn’t help but expand the notion of the above by developing specific ROUTINES, to define thinking moves, support and make thinking visible as students were blogging.

Here is our first attempt:

Blogging as Information/Research

1. Research- What have you read that has informed your position?
2. Remix- What are you modeling after and how can you re-purpose it?
3. Add- What new perspectives, value and resources have been added to original research?

Purpose– What kind of thinking is involved-
To make sense of a concept that I am trying to understand or wrapping my mind around. Drive for further inquiry.
Application– When and where can it be used?
To help learner document and carefully think about, analyze and amplify information that has influenced their thinking.
Launch– Learner looks at topic, concept, image, video, art work, etc.Follow thinking thinking routine, in order to represent train of thought.

Blogging as Reflection

1. artifact
   choose a variety of media platforms beyond text to display many different forms of creativity and communication.
2. reflection
   (you can use any of the Visible Thinking Routines above)

Blogging as Documentation

1. summarize
   Review, recap, give the main points or the run down of what occurred.
2. add
   Add images, videos or other media, that enhance, support and bring perspective to documented content.
3. label
   Make your documentation searchable. Label, categorize and/or tag your blog post, to strategically link to other written posts with the same thoughts, ideas or topics.

Blog Commenting- Feedback- through strategic and thoughtful commenting routine.

1. read
   Read the blog post, read other blog posts, articles and books on the topic.
2. connect
   Make connections to your own experience, knowledge and related information. Link these connections to original source.
3. add
   Don’t just agree or disagree or compliment the author of the post. Add value to their writing.

Click on infographic below to enlarge

What are some thinking routines you use with your students to support them in making their THINKING visible as they are blogging or commenting? Please add your thoughts and ideas as a comment (maybe even be inspired to use one of the above routine ex. commenting : read-connect-add