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Over the last month I've shown the picture that you see to the left during a number of presentations and workshops. I've used the picture to model using pictures to spark students' minds at the beginning of lessons on search strategies. This is a strategy that I've developed by borrowing ideas from Daniel Russell's Search ReSearch activities and Dan Meyer's strategy of using videos and pictures to prompt students to ask math questions.

Thinkers Keys Welcome to an exciting framework for the teaching of thinking to young people. The Thinkers Keys are twenty powerful strategies for generating quality thinking in many learning situations. They were written explicitly for 8 to 14 year-olds, although we have often found them being used in classrooms of 5 year-olds, and also in senior school and university environments. Here's a 2-min video about the electronic Thinkers Keys.

Thinking is pretty much invisible. To be sure, sometimes people explain the thoughts behind a particular conclusion, but often they do not. Mostly, thinking happens under the hood, within the marvelous engine of our mind-brain. As the name suggests, the basic strategy is to make thinking visible in the context of learning.