First Grade

Academic Ownership

  • Guiding Question: Are All Students Responsible for Doing the Thinking in This Classroom?

    Powerful learning both engages and empowers students. It is an active process and involves students getting personally involved. Throughout each day and across the school year, ensure that each and every student is responsible for doing the thinking in the classroom.

  • Continuum from teacher-centered to student-centered - moving from compliance to engagement to empowerment

    Engage students in rigorous, grade-level-specific skills development. Use each Deeper Learning Instructional Priority below to support academic ownership across all content areas.

    Priority Instructional Practices

    Three people linked with a dotted line to a book

    Equitable Access & Demand

    Person looking at images and text on a wall

    Inquiry

    Three students working together

    Collaboration

    Two people talking or communicating

    Assessment for Learning

    Cross-Curricular Thinking Routines

    Thinking Routines loosely guide learners' thought processes and make their thinking visible. They are short, easy-to-learn mini-strategies that extend and deepen students' thinking and become part of the fabric of everyday classroom life. Use these routines, and routines like these, regularly with your first-grade students. 

    • Thinking Routines

      A short introduction to thinking routines:

      • What are they?
      • Why would I want to use them?
      • How can I get started?

    • Think, Pair, Share

      This routine encourages students to think about something, such as a problem, question, or topic, and then articulate their thoughts. The Think, Pair, Share routine promotes understanding through active reasoning and explanation. Because students are listening to and sharing ideas, Think, Pair, Share encourages students to understand multiple perspectives.

      Instructions

    • What makes you say that?

      This routine helps students describe what they see or know and asks them to build explanations. It promotes evidential reasoning (evidence-based reasoning) and because it invites students to share their interpretations, it encourages students to understand alternatives and multiple perspectives.

      Instructions

    • See, Think, Wonder

      This routine encourages students to make careful observations and thoughtful interpretations. It helps stimulate curiosity and sets the stage for inquiry.

      Instructions

    • I used to think... Now I think...

      This routine helps students to reflect on their thinking about a topic or issue and explore how and why that thinking has changed. It can be useful in consolidating new learning as students identify their new understandings, opinions, and beliefs. By examining and explaining how and why their thinking has changed, students are developing their reasoning abilities and recognizing causal relationships.

      Instructions

    • Headlines

      This routine helps students identify the essence, or the core idea, of the topic/issue being discussed and reinforces taking notice of central themes as an essential tool in cultivating understanding.

      Instructions
    • Diagram of types of thinking categories

      Project Zero's Thinking Routine Toolbox

      Explore More Thinking Routines

      Academic Ownership CORE Rubric Teaching Practices

      Require Students to Take on The Cognitive Lift

      • Implement and practice norms and routines for classroom discourse, including structured talk protocols.
      • Structure and implement lesson activities so that students do the appropriate amount of thinking required by the lesson.
      • Elicit and interpret individual students’ thinking through questioning and instructional activities.  
      • Support students to cite evidence to support their thinking.
      • Promote the persistence of students to get accurate, reasoned responses.
      • Support students to use academic language, through modeling and providing structures for students to practice.
      Link to this item

      Build Critical Thinking Skills
      • Encourage creative thinking and problem-solving.
      • Empower students to respond to and build on their peers’ ideas through small and whole group discussions (e.g. using talk moves).
      • Provide scaffolds for students to access and complete instructional tasks requiring higher-order thinking.
      • Facilitate connections within and across fields and areas of interest.
      Link to this item

      This page was last updated on May 17, 2023