June 2023

Leveraging language throughout the 3-2-1 Bridge routine (Year 8 Astronomy) When planning to embed this thinking routine into my Year 8 Astronomy class, I was aware the cultural force of language would play a crucial role in the delivery. Our students are exposed to an array of situations that require thinking in their daily lives. To prepare them well, they need authentic learning experiences that help them learn to think (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), 2008). The type of language used by the educator can either nurture or diminish opportunities for students to practice the tangible skill of thinking. By carefully choosing my language during this routine, I fostered my students’ ability to think critically about a visual stimulus and draw their own conclusions. In the 3-2-1 Bridge routine, I used a flat map of the Earth that had particular regions shaded to resemble night-time, as well as the relative positions of the Sun and Moon at a specific time in the Earth’s rotation. Before the delivery of content in this lesson, I asked students to generate three thoughts, two questions, and one analogy associated with the image. This individualised task allowed students to become curious thinkers before even being taught the nuances of how we experience day and night. As students completed this initial phase of the learning experience, I noticed that by using the language of thinking I was assisting in metacognition and optimising the engagement of students who were struggling to adhere to the task requirements (Ritchhart, 2015). I leveraged the cultural force of language in the ways specified in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Language of Thinking used in my Year 8 Astronomy class during the 3-2-1 Bridge thinking routine (Ritchhart, 2015).

Example of classroom language

Instructional purpose for educators

Naming student thinking • ‘I can see that you have thought about the relative position of the Sun when writing that question.’ • ‘It is great that you have thought about the reason why the North Pole is experiencing night-time in your metaphor.’ Probing students to notice their own thinking • ‘How did you identify that it is summer in the South Pole in your question?’ • ‘Do you think your reasoning for day and night would be transferrable to a spherical globe?’ • ‘How does your metaphor translate to your own experience of daytime during summer in Brisbane?’

• Recognising students’ scientific thinking through commending enterprise behaviours such as open-mindedness and curiosity (Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), 2012). • Creating a subtle blend between highlighting thinking, giving students autonomy, and limiting scaffolding reduces any tendency for ‘recipe-style’ instruction (Dawson, et al., 2019). • By using higher-order questioning in this first phase, deep thinking is promoted. • Just like scientists, students are engaging in the evidence-based nature of looking at a stimulus and extracting information that is scientifically accurate.

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Brisbane Girls Grammar School