Dr. David Perkins, senior professor of education at Harvard University and director of Project Zero, visited First Steps International Academy and VIP Kids Bilingual Preschool (two Edu1st.Schools) on Friday, May 15th.

Visible Thinking is a research-based approach of Project Zero, from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. This educational approach, emphasizes the use of thinking routines and documentation to make thinking visible in classrooms and to engage students in deep thinking around the content while also cultivating the student’s disposition towards thinking. Actually, Visible Thinking includes a variety of fun and interesting classroom routines that are integrated with the curriculum content.

Education has always been a topic of conversation for parents. In fact, for many parents it becomes a quest to look for the best education for their children. A similar situation faced a company called Education First Inc, which not only had the vision to find the top models of education in the world, but was committed to bring and apply them in Broward. In 2006, the Edu1st.Schools decided to take the challenge and fully implement the Visible Thinking methodology to teach children from 1 to 5 years old.

There are three important benefits of using this approach with young children. First, the methodology is fun and really engages students, even toddlers where the attention span is really short. Second, modeling the thinking routines helps children develop a structured and profound thinking and exposes them to different points of view. Third, the documentation allows both, teachers to visualize the thinking process of every child through the verbal and non verbal communication, and children to visualize their thoughts and ideas.