Exploring Engagement and Empowerment in a Culture of Thinking

This workshop helps educators shift from a culture of "just getting through the curriculum" to fostering engagement with ideas and one another, and to be empowered to take action. Conversations and reflections will be grounded in creating and sustaining a classroom culture that values powerful thinking, deep understanding, and student ownership of learning.

Educators face constant choices when working with learners: Is this the moment to step in and guide the learning? Is this the moment to be still and wait? Should I give my students a model to follow? Could giving them an example limit what they could come up with on their own? Of course, a strong curriculum is essential, but teachers' decisions drive the classroom experience and send powerful messages about engagement and empowerment. This workshop focuses on fostering a culture of thinking in the classroom. When classrooms become places where learners’ thinking is a focus, teachers move beyond simply implementing techniques to actively examining their role in engaging and empowering their students. They prioritize reflection over reaction and strive to make intentional choices that shape their students' thinking and learning. 

We'll delve into key decision points that teachers grapple with when creating a rich culture of thinking: promoting student engagement, finding focus, pressing for depth, and creating opportunities for critical thinking. Specifically, we'll consider what it means to shift from delivering information towards fostering engagement with ideas, from equipping students with factual knowledge towards focusing on big ideas worth understanding, from simply covering material to going deeply into content, and finally, from a just-get-the-work-done learning environment to one which values and promotes thinking in service of deeper understanding. 

WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS: This workshop is suitable for any PreK-12 educator interested in developing and deepening a Culture of Thinking in their context. We'll explore various forces that give shape to a classroom culture where learners are both engaged and empowered. Specifically, we'll look at cultural forces such as the use of routines, interactions, opportunities, language, time, and modelling.

Presenter(s) Bio:

Mark Church works with schools throughout the world wishing to create cultures of thinking in their classrooms. He believes in the difference teachers can make for students when they strive to make thinking visible, valued, and actively promoted as part of the day-to-day experience of their learners. Mark encourages teachers to become students of their students, and more broadly, students of themselves and the choices they make to leverage the power of making thinking visible.

Mark is currently a consultant with Harvard Project Zero’s Making Thinking Visible and Cultures of Thinking initiatives, drawing upon his own classroom teaching experience and from the perspectives he has gained working with educators throughout the world. Together with Ron Ritchhart, Mark is co-author of the book Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners (Jossey-Bass, 2011) and The Power of Making Thinking Visible: Practices to Engage and Empower All Learners (Jossey-Bass, 2020).

Host or Publisher International School of Amsterdam