Ron Ritchhart Speaking Topics

• Transform Our Teaching and Students’ Learning: A Look at Toolsets, Skillsets, and Mindsets

  There is no shortage of educational tools, frameworks, and innovations in the world today. My colleagues at Harvard Project Zero and I have produced a variety of potentially powerful tools over the years. These have been aimed at fostering understanding, engagement, creativity, agency, and the development of students as powerful thinkers and learners. The success of these tools depends on much more than their mere adoption and implementation, however. To use these tools and frameworks in truly transformative ways, educators must understand and embrace the underlying core beliefs and values behind them. What are their deeper motivations? What assumptions about learning, teaching, and the purpose of education are they built upon? This is the grounding that adds cohesiveness, flexibility, fidelity, and drive to our use of these tools and frameworks.

  In this Keynote, we will explore the key mindsets we need if we are serious about creating powerful thinkers and learners. These mindsets emerge from over two decades of research and reveal the deep, structural foundation of Cultures of Thinking™. At the same time, these are not unique to Cultures of Thinking™ but are also key motivators, beliefs, and values of our work at Harvard Project Zero more broadly.

  This session draws on work from my new book "Cultures of Thinking in Action."

• The Six Powers of Making Thinking Visible

  Thinking routines have become extremely popular over the last decade and are often recognized as a hallmark of Project Zero practices. With this popularity and widespread use has come the opportunity to look more closely at just what effect thinking routines have on teaching, learning, and schooling. These issues could not have been properly examined when thinking routines were first introduced. Drawing from the research presented in the new book by Ron Ritchhart and Mark Church, The Power of Making Thinking Visible, this keynote will review both the goal and practices associated with making thinking visible and examine six specific ways they identified that thinking routines have “power.” These include promoting deep learning, engaging students, changing the role of teachers and students, enhancing formative assessment, improving learning outcomes, and promoting dispositional development. In this keynote, we will explore these “powers” and look at examples of how thinking routines promote them.

  This session draws on work from my book, "The Power of Making Thinking Visible."

Creating a Culture of Thinking Right from the Start: 10 things to Say Every Day to Your Students…and Why They Matter

From the first day of school, we begin the process of growing a culture of thinking. We do this by marshaling each of the eight cultural forces (expectations, time, modeling, language, routines, interactions, opportunities, and the physical environment) as we teach day-by-day, week-by-week, and month-by-month. While each force is important in building a strong and cohesive culture, our interactions with students early on are especially salient in setting the tone and building the relationships and trust we need for a productive year. This keynote session will focus on important ways we interact with students through our use of language to build a culture of thinking. The end of the school year provides a perfect opportunity to reflect on how we have built a culture of thinking with our current students, learn from the effective practices of others, and begin to prepare for the next school year.

This session draws on work from the book "Creating Cultures of Thinking."

Learning Is a Consequence of Thinking

Learning is a consequence of thinking. Therefore, promoting and supporting students’ thinking around worthwhile content is a central goal for us as teachers. We want to ensure that our students don’t merely know a collection of facts but have a rich, robust, and deep understanding of the big ideas we are exploring in our classroom. How do we do this? What are the tools, structures, and practices that can help us in this endeavor? What kinds of thinking are important to promote? In this opening keynote, we will explore these questions while drawing on the two decades of research into making thinking visible conducted by researchers at Harvard Project Zero.

The Four Ways We Make Thinking Visible

The use of thinking routines and the idea of making students’ learning and thinking visible originated at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and has captured the interest of schools and teachers worldwide. With such popularity, we sometimes get superficial use of the routines. For example, teachers may use thinking routines as simple activities. However, the real power of thinking routines comes from using them to establish patterns of thinking in the classroom, but how do teachers move beyond the use of routines as good activities to their establishment as patterns of thinking? What do classrooms look like when such patterns take hold? How do thinking routines engage students in active learning? In this interactive master class, participants will have a chance to learn how teachers are working with thinking routines to transform their classrooms into cultures of thinking, and to use the routines themselves to see how they work as tools for all learners. We will explore specific routines for engaging students with others, engaging them with ideas, and engaging them in action.

This session draws on work from my book, "The Power of Making Thinking Visible."