Making Thinking Visible with Mark Church

Harvard’s Project Zero – Critical and Creative Thinking

Put the General Capabilities into action with global educational leader Mark Church from Harvard’s Project Zero. This event is a half day workshop where participants will explore how making thinking visible and thinking routines can support students developing their critical and creative thinking skills.

Mark Church

Mark Church works with educators throughout the world striving to create cultures of thinking in their classrooms and schools.

Mark challenges teachers to foster thinking dispositions in students in service of deep understanding. He invites teachers to promote a discourse of thinking in their classrooms that communicates value for student sense-making. Mark encourages teachers to make their classroom environments rich with the documents of student thinking processes.

Mark is currently a consultant with Harvard Project Zero’s Making Thinking Visible and Cultures of Thinking initiatives worldwide, drawing upon his own classroom teaching experience and from the perspectives he has gained working with educators throughout North America, Australia, Asia, and Europe. Mark enjoys helping teachers examine opportunities for student thoughtfulness, use thinking routines as supports and scaffolds, interact with students in ways that demonstrate interest in and respect for students’ thinking, and send clear expectations about the importance and value of thinking in learning.

Together with Ron Ritchhart and Karin Morrison, Mark is co-author of the book Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Founded by philosopher Nelson Goodman at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1967, Project Zero began with a focus on understanding learning in and through the arts. Over the years, PZ has continued their inquiry into the arts and arts education, while drawing together diverse disciplinary perspectives to examine fundamental questions of human expression and development. PZ research endeavors are marked by a passion for the big questions, a passion for the conceptual, a passion for the interdisciplinary, a passion for the full range of human development, and a passion for the arts.

Today Project Zero is an intellectual wellspring, nourishing inquiry into the complexity of human potentials – intelligence, understanding, thinking, creativity, cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural thinking, ethics – and exploring sustainable ways to support them across multiple and diverse contexts. Anchored in the arts and humanities, and with a commitment to melding theory and practice, PZ continues to work towards a more enlightened educational process and system that prepares learners well for the world that they will live, work and develop in.

www.pz.harvard.edu

Schools of Thinking was born of a shared belief in the power of paying attention to students’ thinking to facilitate deeper learning, understanding and connection to knowledge. SoT seek to build upon and share the passion of educators for innovative practice leading to powerful opportunities for students by:

SoT was founded by a group of dedicated teachers and school administrators. They are a not-for-profit organisation, and board members work on a voluntary basis to run events, write blogs, create resources and advocate for innovative curricula in the hope of inspiring other teachers to put students’ thinking at the forefront of their daily practice.

www.schoolsofthinking.org