Eric Mazur
Thank you for joining us today for this episode on cultures of thinking in the Social Learning Amplified podcast series. I'm your host, Eric Mazur, and our guest on the episode today is Ron Ritchhart. Ron is a world-renowned educator, researcher, and author. For over 25 years, Ron served as senior research associate and principal investigator at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where his research focused on understanding how to develop, nurture, and sustain cultures of thinking for both students and teachers. After leaving Harvard in 2021, Ron has continued his classroom and school-based research and writing to further the ideas of visible thinking and the creation of schools as cultures of thinking. Ron's ability to seamlessly merge theory, research, practice, and application together in a highly accessible and engaging manner has made him a bestselling author of numerous books, including Intellectual Character, Making Thinking Visible, Creating Cultures of Thinking, The Power of Making Thinking Visible, and his highly anticipated new book, Cultures of Thinking in Action. Ron is a sought-after speaker for his ability to connect with and engage fellow educators in these powerful big-picture ideas while simultaneously providing useful insights into and practical ideas for advancing the complex world of teaching and learning. This is no doubt due to Ron's diverse experience, which includes teaching elementary school, art, and secondary mathematics. Upon Ron's retirement at Harvard, Howard Gardner commented, "Of all of us at Harvard Project Zero, you've had the most influence on what teachers around the world do in their classrooms and how to talk and think about it." Ron, it's an honor to have you here. Thank you for joining us today.

Ron Ritchhart
Great to be here with you, Eric.

Eric Mazur
The word "thinking" appears central to all you do. We just heard it when I was just reading the titles of your book. And last time we had an opportunity to talk, I think it was during the pandemic, we talked about your work on cultures of thinking. Can you explain to our listeners what you mean by cultures of thinking?

Ron Ritchhart
Yeah, our research kind of defines a culture of thinking as places, so not necessarily schools, not only classrooms, but we could think about, you know, a committee group. We could think even about a family unit as being a culture of thinking. So there are places in which the group's collective, as well as individual thinking, is valued, visible, and actively promoted as part of the regular kind of day-to-day experience of all group members. As I said, there are several things in that kind of definition there. That idea that the thinking is valued. You know, I have to say, in working with schools all over the world, one thing that doesn't happen is someone doesn't come up to me and say, we don't value thinking here. Instead, what they're going to say is, of course, we value thinking.

But if you value thinking, you have to be able to identify, well, what kind of thinking are you really after? So what kind of thinking is important in your science class? What kind of thinking is important in your art class? What kind of thinking is important with your five-year-olds? So we have to be able to articulate that rather than have that kind of just amorphous idea, because only when we are able to identify that as educators are we able to communicate that to our students. And then we want to strive to make this very mysterious process of thinking, something that happens in an individual's head, visible. How do we make that more apparent so that we can promote it, so that we can advance it and accomplish what, to my mind, is one of the biggest and most important goals of education—that is, to develop students as powerful thinkers and learners. And that's what we're kind of trying to do by developing a culture of thinking.

Eric Mazur
And what are some of the barriers that you've encountered in implementing these cultures of thinking?

Ron Ritchhart
Well, you know, not surprisingly, in terms of the way that schools have been set up for a very, you know, kind of long time, there is this focus on content. And the barrier is that teachers sometimes make this kind of false dichotomy between, I've got to teach the content or now you're telling me I need to advance thinking. So they think about those as two separate goals rather than as very, very compatible goals.

Recently, my colleague Mark Church, who I've been co-author with on several books, was working in Australia with high-stakes year 12 exams. He was finding that the teachers were constantly saying, like, yes, but we've got to get all this. We've got to prepare kids for the test. And they literally sat down and looked at the test, looked at what students were asked to do. And he asked them, you know, look at each of these questions and say, you know, which of these questions can you get full marks on by just having answers, by just having memory, by just having the knowledge? And the teachers found actually very few, very few of the exam questions could you get full marks on just by having knowledge. You needed to think, you needed to make connections, you needed to explain, you needed to justify, you needed to bring in different perspectives. And once the teachers saw that, they began to see this isn't either teaching the content for the test or teaching thinking. Actually, to do well on the test, students do need to think. And that was a real kind of breakthrough for that group of teachers.

Eric Mazur
Ron, before we end here today, if you had to, and just a short answer, if you had to recommend to our listeners one thing that they could easily implement in their teaching to, or maybe we have students listening and they want to implement this in their learning to promote a culture of thinking, what would that be?

Ron Ritchhart
I would go back to that kind of, you know, in terms of an easy place to start, that one single question, what makes you say that? So if teachers begin to do that, when we first began this research in Sweden, the teachers there said, that's the magic question. All we have to do is ask, what makes you say that? And the things that students respond are things we never knew that they were thinking.

Eric Mazur
I see. Well, I'm very tempted to ask the question to you now, "What makes you say that?" but we're out of time. So Ron, thank you so much for a thought-provoking discussion. I would like to conclude by thanking our audience for listening and inviting everyone to return for our next episodes. On behalf of all our listeners, Ron, thank you again for joining us today.

Ron Ritchhart
Yeah. It's been my pleasure. Always enjoy talking with you, Eric.

Eric Mazur
You can find Ron's book on cultures of thinking on Amazon. And on February 10th, Perusall will host an Engage event on Ron's latest book, Cultures of Thinking in Action. To find out more about this event where you can interact with Ron and other educators who are interested in the subject, go to perusall.com/engage.