Currently reading @ronritchhart’s ‘Making Thinking Visible’. In it, he outlines a clever study (also by him) in which concept maps were used to elicit students’ understandings of what thinking is, and how it happens. #ccotonline (You'll like this @MandiB17) 
Their premise was that if students are unable to articulate what makes effective thinking (would be curious to substitute 'thinking' for ‘learning’), it’s highly unlikely that they’ll be employing effective strategies when they’re attempting to make sense of concepts themselves.
Student responses broadly fell into four categories: Associative, emotional, meta, and strategic. Associative was things peripherally linked to thinking, such as where students are when they’re thinking (‘in maths class’). Emotional was affect related comments…
Strategic responses outlined specific ‘thinking moves’ or more general strategies that relate to thinking. These included memory based strategies (e.g., retrieval practice), nonspecific strategies (e.g., ‘metacognition’), self-regulation/motivation…
(e.g., ‘tell myself I can do it’), and specific thinking strategies (e.g., ‘consider different perspectives’, or ‘identify what I don’t yet now’). @ronritchhart reports how bringing structured thinking routines into your class can improve student’s abilities to articulate what...
makes successful thinking. I look forward to reading more of this book to hopefully find out how. The paper on the concept map study can be found here: pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/…
