Cultures of Thinking (CoT) is something that I have over the years focused more on in my classrooms. It is essentially an understanding or mindset that highlight various cultural forces found in our classrooms or any learning situation. One of my go to resources is the book by Ron Ritchhart – Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools. These 8 forces are expectations, interactions, language, time, environment, routines, modeling, opportunities and expectations.
This link will take you to a downloadable pdf of the image below.
8 Cultural Forces
Stephen Taylor a fellow educator (I highly recommend you follow on Twitter) here in Beijing has made these superb two sided cards that I have now have on my person all the time at school.
The podcast below with Ron Ritchhart looks deeper at intelligence and dispositions and the cultivation of intellectual character.
Ron Ritchart is the Principal Investigator for the Cultures of Thinking Project and Senior Research Associate at Project Zero (Harvard Graduate School of Education)