“Many teachers mistakenly assume kids know how to think,” she says. In most cases, though, children — many adults, too — experience thought as Zen masters describe it: a drunken monkey swinging haphazardly in a mind-forest, from thought-branch to thought-branch and idea-tree to idea-tree. Thinking Maps, she explains, help students gain control of the process by offering them eight distinct ways to organize their inquiries — a circle map for defining in context, for example, or a bubble map for describing with adjectives, etc. Thinking Maps, she continues, introduce students to the notion of thinking about thinking —