Fourth Grade

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.

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

A short introduction to thinking routines:

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

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.

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.

This routine activates prior knowledge, generates ideas and curiosity, and prepares students for deeper inquiry.

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.

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.