Episode 27 Visible Thinking with Holly Clark

Dan interviews Holly Clark to discuss how you can use visible thinking routines to help your students develop their skills required to become lifelong learners. You can find out more about Holly Clark and her resources by clicking the image below.Visible Thinking with Holly Clark is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Produced and Transcribed by Brad Keyes at Podgee.io.Join the Facebook CommunityTranscriptDan: [00:00:00] Hi everyone, and welcome to the effective teaching podcast. Today. I have my very good friend Holly Clark with me. So Holly, can you tell all of the listeners here in Australia a bit about yourself, who you are, and what you are currently doing over there in America?Introducing Holly Clark?Holly Clark: [00:00:15] So I am a lifelong teacher, but recently I have really started to travel around the world. I've been to Sydney quite a few times. I think something like, five to 10 I don't know. But talking about infused classroom and how we can infuse classroom with really strong pedagogy, and then we, we look at pedagogy and then how we can use the tools of technology to amplify that. And so really looking at students in our classrooms.[00:00:42] So right now that's what I've been traveling around helping schools do. And it's been so much fun because the tweaks we're making are working and that's the best part of it all. Dan: [00:00:52] That's always good to have what you say actually work, isn't it? When you're giving advice to people, particularly when you're traveling out of various contexts, I think it's really difficult because you know, I know as a teacher that you want to make sure that everything that you do is catered for your students.[00:01:06] And if you have someone you know from from America, for example, coming to Sydney to provide some advice. They used to be contextualized and relevant for us here still, and generally, a lot of things are in education, but, it's good to hear that it's working everywhere.Creating Lifelong Learners[00:01:20] So can you just tell me a little bit, Holly, about what strategies you see really helped you to create lifelong learners in our classrooms? Holly Clark: [00:01:28] So it kind of goes along with the tweak that I'm talking about. So one of the things that I've noticed that works is when we try to get students to make their thinking visible.[00:01:38] And when they do that, a lot of times I'm asking them to speak and articulate their thinking. So for example, let's say they're learning something in math, they might go on to flip grade and really talk about how they went through the process to solve that math problem, or maybe they're using, and if we're infusing in this instance, maybe they're using Seesaw or some tool that allows them to talk through their learning process and how this affects lifelong learning, in my opinion, is now we're letting kids talk and they're becoming more articulate, and these are the same kind of skills they're going to need in a job interview.[00:02:13] So often in schools we do a lot of writing a lot of things that are based around pencil and paper sometimes, and we don't give kids that opportunity to become articulate and that's what they're going to need to sell something, to get that job, to do the things that they need to do, to be really lifelong, successful, and also understand themselves as learners and how they learn so that they can apply that when they want to become the lifelong learner and understand their own curiosity and how it is that they can quench that curiosity. [00:02:51] As an example. I'm just going to use my own life. I've learned later in life that as I need to listen to books. I can't read them. I don't have the time to be walking and reading, and I'm traveling through airports. So if I could listen to books,