A thinking routine for assessment

Thinking routines are a really powerful tool for assessment. They could help teachers to know where their students are, how they are starting the lesson, what they have understood or sometimes just what they like to know about the topic. 

Here you have an example of a thinking routine assessment contextualized in a project called Let's go for a trip around Europe.

• Title of the thinking routine: What makes you say that?

• Explanation: This routine helps students describe something they know  (object or convcept) and build explanations about that though evidential support reasoning. They also have to share their interpretations and, at the same time, understand alternatives and multiple persperctives. In this routine the basic questions are flexible (What do you know? What do you see or know that makes you say that?) that’s why it can be used in almost all the subjects or tasks: for works of art, historical artifacts, explore poems, make scientific observations and hypothesis or investigate more conceptual ideas. In addition this thinking routine it could be useful for gathering information when the teacher introduce a new topic.This routine starts in a class/group conversation around an object/topic. Then the teacher may scaffold students by continually asking the follow-up questions after a student gives an interpretation. While students are talking they have to support their interpretations/ideas with evidence in order to internalize the routine. When the routine is used in a group conversation it may be necessary to think about alternative forms of documentation for example: record class discussions using video or audio listening and noting students' use of language of thinking, make a chart or keep an ongoing list of explanations posted in the classroom,  students documenting their own interpretations through sketches, drawings, models and writing, etc.

• Resources: For this activity pupils are going to need computers and internet with some webpages about European countries, atlas, maps, books in where they can
  

  find more information about the country they are studying.

• How I’m going to use it?: According to that, in my case I’m going to use this thinking routine after the exercise to search and found information about one country’s topic. The students are going to work in cooperative groups and each group have to choose one European country and search information about that. In order to distribute the work, each student of the group is going to become an expert about one topic of the country (geography, climate, currency, culture and traditions, food, etc). So, idividually, they will have to search infromation about the topic of study using different tools (internet, books, atlas...). After this search information each student is going to expose through this thinking routine called What makes you say that? all they learned during the searching supporting their ideas with the information found. In this way all of the members of the grpuo are going to share theitr knowledge and are going to learn more about the country through the other groupmates work and contributions. After the shearing knowledge all the grpuo together is going to fill up a grill with the main information about each topic of the country of study in order to summarize all the infromation and the ideas and share them with the rest of the class and the teacher.
  

  This grill can also be a part of the assessment.