This strategy shapes a professional development program around helping teachers deepen their thinking through easily learned routines that target specific dispositions: asking provocative questions, making careful observations, exploring multiple viewpoints, and reasoning with evidence.

Thinking routines are a key element of the Artful Thinking program that is being developed by Harvard's Project Zero and the Traverse City (MI) Public Schools. The program is designed to integrate the visual arts into the teaching of other subjects to enhance students' thinking and learning. Teachers and leaders in the district report that this approach to teacher professional development has been powerful in moving the conversation away from what the teachers are doing to what their students are doing and thinking.

Project Zero: Artful Thinking
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/Research/ArtThink.htm

The Traverse City Story