Learning Environments

Six Key Principles of the Cultures of Thinking Project

1. Skills are not sufficient; we must also have the disposition to use them. Possessing thinking skills and abilities alone is insufficient for good thinking. One must also have the disposition to use those abilities. This means schools must develop students’ inclination to think and awareness of occasions for thinking as well as their thinking skills and abilities. Having a disposition toward thinking enhances the likelihood that one can effectively use one’s abilities in new situations.

2. The development of thinking and understanding is fundamentally a social endeavor, taking place in a cultural context and occurring within the constant interplay between the group and the individual. Social situations that provide experience in communicating one’s own thinking as well as opportunities to understand others’ thinking enhance individual thinking.

3. The culture of the classroom teaches. It not only sets a tone for learning, but also determines what gets learned. The messages sent through the culture of the classroom communicate to students what it means to think and learn well. These messages are a curriculum in themselves, teaching students how to learn and ways of thinking.

4. As educators, we must strive to make students thinking visible. It is only by making thinking visible that we can begin to understand both what and how our students are learning. Under normal conditions, a student’s thinking is invisible to other students, the teacher, and even to him/herself, because people often think with little awareness of how they think. By using structures, routines, probing questions, and documentation we can make students’ thinking more visible toward fostering better thinking and learning.

5. Good thinking utilizes a variety of resources and is facilitated by the use of external tools to “download” or “distribute” one’s thinking. Papers, logs, computers, conversation, and various means of recording and keeping track of ideas and thoughts free the mind up to engage in new and deeper thinking and help ensure that our thinking doesn’t get lost.

6. For classrooms to be cultures of thinking for students, schools must be cultures of thinking for teachers. The development of a professional community in which deep and rich discussions of teaching, learning, and thinking are a fundamental part of teachers’ ongoing experience provides the foundation for nurturing students’ thinking and learning.

Abriendo Puertas: Preguntas para Explorar, Ver, Pensar y Entender

Abriendo Puertas es un juego simple que te invita a disfrutar profundamente de una obra de arte, explorando, interpretando y reflexionando acerca de ella solo o con otros. El juego es para ninos, adultos, grupos o familias, con o sin experiencia en las artes.

Another Safe Haven: Portraits of Boulevard Arts Center Then and Now

This work documents the struggle and effectiveness over time of this Chicago center. 1996. 

The MUSE BOOK and Guide

The MUSE BOOK documents the work of Project MUSE and presents the background, development, and uses of MUSE learning tools and educational approaches, with comments from collaborating school and museum educators. The MUSE Guide, a training manual for using MUSE tools, accompanies the report.

Smart Schools: Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child

In this book, David Perkins draws on over twenty years of research which indicates that students from the first grade through college often have only the most superficial kind of knowledge even after considerable instruction in a subject. Here he reveals some commonly misguided strategies students use in trying to understand a topic, and why traditional-teaching approaches often fail. ISBN-13: 978-0028740188