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Visible Thinking includes a number of ways of making students' thinking visible to themselves, to their peers, and to the teacher, so they get more engaged by it and come to manage it better for learning and other purposes. When thinking is visible in classrooms, students are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their thinking. When thinking is visible, it becomes clear that school is not about memorizing content but exploring ideas. Teachers benefit when they can see students' thinking because misconceptions, prior knowledge, reasoning ability, and degrees of understanding are more likely to be uncovered. Teachers can then address these challenges and extend students' thinking by starting from where they are.

This site, recommended by Suzie Boss, et al, contains several ideas about how to make thinking visible - akin to the Metacognitive Conversation work from WestEd - a worthwhile site to explore.

"Questioning: A comprehension strategy for small-group guided reading http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=408 A lesson plan for grades 3-5 English Language Arts * Learn more about language arts, metacognitive strategies, questioning, and reading. * Email * Delicious Delicious * Digg Digg * Facebook Facebook * StumbleUpon StumbleUpon\n\nIn this ReadWriteThink lesson, the teacher explains the difference between thin (factual) and thick (inferential) questions, and then models how to compose question webs by thinking aloud while reading. Students observe how to gather information about the topic and add it to question webs in the form of answers or additional questions. Students practice composing thin and thick questions, as well as monitoring their comprehension, by using question webs independently in small-group reading. This practice extends knowledge of the topic and engages readers in active comprehension. "

"Effective Reading Comprehension Strategies Introduction Reading comprehension is fundamental to ultimate educational success. Yet elementary students struggle with it on a daily basis. In order for students to comprehend their reading materials, it is helpful to explicitly teach comprehension strategies. (Check out this list!) I will be looking at three aspects of human cognition to be of assistance in this task: metacognition, working memory, and activating prior semantic knowledge. As an educator, it is important that I help my students reach as much of their potential as I can. Testing different strategies on my students can help me, but even more importantly, can help my students identify the best ones for each of them."

"This web site provides personal, practical, and published materials collected to help you cultivate critical thinking skills in your students, especially first-year students. How these materials are organized These materials are contained in 14 modules--ten focused on specific critical thinking skills, and four on specific teaching methods. These modules are then categorized using Halpern's (2003) framework for teaching critical thinking skills across disciplines. According to this framework, well-rounded critical thinking instruction helps students acquire: 1. a critical thinking attitude or habit of intellectual deliberation; 2. individual intellectual skills like analysis and inference; 3. the ability to use these skills in new contexts, and 4. the ability to reflect upon and evaluate one's own thinking (metacognition)."