This is the first post in a new series: Playful Thinking — exploring Harvard Project Zero’s Visual Thinking Routines (VTRs) and how they can make learning more purposeful, more playful, and more powerful for every learner.

The Day a Student Asked If It Was MY Room

I teach English Language Acquisition in middle school. We have a lot of the same units that many language classes have. During a unit on rooms and furniture, I projected a picture on the board. It was a bedroom — but not just any bedroom. Every detail was math-themed: equations on the wall, geometric patterns on the bedding, a bookshelf full of math textbooks. I asked my students: What do you see?

They noticed everything: The numbers. The angles. The posters. Then I asked: What do you think?

One student, very seriously, said “I think it is our math teacher’s room.” We all laughed.

Then came the wonder phase — I asked: What questions do you have? A hand shot up in the back.

“Is that your room?” We all laughed again. To be fair, I did show them MY house when we started our unit.

In that moment of laughter, something real had happened: students had made careful observations, built an interpretation from evidence, and asked a genuine question. They were thinking. They were learning. They were playing and having fun.

That three-step sequence — See, Think, Wonder — is one of Harvard Project Zero’s Visual Thinking Routines. And it is one of the most frequently used tools in my VTR toolkit. classroom.

 

What Is Project Zero?

Project Zero is a research centre at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It was founded in 1967 with a deceptively simple question: can thinking be taught?

Decades of research later, one of their most enduring contributions is a framework called Visible Thinking — a research-based approach designed to do two things simultaneously: develop students’ thinking skills and dispositions, while deepening their understanding of content. Not one or the other. Both, together.

At the heart of Visible Thinking is a toolkit of thinking routines — short, repeatable sequences of questions or steps that help make student thinking visible. To teachers AND to the students themselves.

 

 

What Are Visual Thinking Routines?

Think of a VTR as a structured invitation to think.

Different from a worksheet. Different from a test. Different from a performance. A routine — something you return to again and again, across subjects and topics, until the thinking patterns become habits. Until students don’t wait to be asked what do you notice? — they start noticing on their own.

As Project Zero describes it, thinking routines are sets of questions or a brief sequence of steps used to scaffold and support student thinking. They’re deliberately simple so they don’t get in the way of the thinking itself. The routine is the scaffold — what gets built on top is up to your students.

There are dozens of VTRs. So many in fact that I have yet to try them all. In this series, we’re going to explore the ones I use most in my own middle school classrooms: See Think Wonder, Zoom In, Compass Points, I Used to Think / Now I Think, Think Pair Share, Headlines, and See Wonder Connect. Each one opens a different kind of thinking. Each one has surprised or delighted me more than once.

Why They Work — The Research Behind the Magic

Project Zero’s Visible Thinking research rests on a foundational idea that I find both obvious and quietly radical:

Learning is a consequence of thinking.

When students genuinely think through ideas — when they observe, interpret, question, connect, and reflect — their understanding of content deepens. Their memory for it improves. And their relationship to learning itself shifts.

VTRs help make that thinking visible — to you and to them — which matters enormously. When thinking stays inside a student’s head, it’s hard for us to build on it, respond to it, or celebrate it. When it comes out — through words, questions, images, discussions — it becomes something we can all work with. Something real.

Why VTRs are Perfect for Learners — The Comprehensible Input Connection

Here’s where it gets especially exciting for those of us who teach languages and other subjects with Comprehensible Input.

Stephen Krashen’s theory of Comprehensible Input tells us that we acquire language most naturally when we encounter messages we can mostly understand — when meaning is clear from context, the stakes are low, and the focus is on ideas rather than grammar or perfection. When those conditions are met, learning flows in almost without effort.

VTRs create exactly those conditions. Let me show you what I mean.

When I use See Think Wonder with a picture of a girl listening to music — for a unit on the five senses — here’s what happens. In the See phase, students observe. A girl. Headphones. Eyes closed. The image carries the meaning. Even a student with very limited language can participate — pointing is valid, drawing is valid, a single word is valid.

Then in the Think phase, we build a bit more. I model the language I want them to use: “I think she is listening to something.” Sometimes we extend further: “I think she is listening to something she loves because she looks peaceful.” Students hear that structure — opinion + evidence — in context, anchored to something they can see. They reproduce it at their own level. Language is being used — which is how learning happens and how language is acquired.

Then the Wonder phase — and this is where something remarkable happens. Question formation is one of the hardest structures in almost any language and where the power of curiosity can take us even further. Here, rather than practising question forms in isolation, they’re genuinely wondering. At the start of the year, I often hear one-word responses: “Music?” I gently reframe: “I wonder if she is listening to music — or to a story?” That reframe is a little language lesson. Encouragement. Because questions grow from their own curiosity, it’s powerful. It’s also a way for me to build community with students. Often students are wondering the same thing; and when one voices it, others agree. I find myself saying, “That’s a great thing to wonder!” or ”I wonder that too!” Sometimes I ask if students WONDER why I chose this particular picture, which can lead us into the next discussion I want us to have. Sometimes the discussion goes in a different direction than I expect entirely, however the students are engaged so we roll with it.

The sentence frames of a VTR — I see… I think… (because… ) I wonder… — are more than thinking scaffolds. They are language scaffolds. Curiosity, discussion and discovery scaffolds! Used repeatedly, across units and subjects, they become acquired structures. More than memorised. Acquired.

And the low-stakes, playful atmosphere? That’s what Krashen calls a low affective filter — the emotional condition where learning is most possible. When students are laughing about whether that math room belongs to the teacher, or me, their guard is down and that is when learning comes in.

Why They Belong in Every Classroom

I use VTRs in our language classes. I use VTRs in our science classes. The same principles apply across subjects. The See phase maps directly onto scientific, mathematical or historical observation. The Think phase is inference. The Wonder phase generates the questions that drive inquiry. The routines move seamlessly across subjects. 

Every teacher, in every subject, is also a language teacher. Students are always acquiring the language of your discipline — the vocabulary, the structures, the ways of talking about ideas in your field. VTRs support that acquisition naturally, without adding a separate “language lesson” to your already full plate.

So What Makes VTRs Playful?

This is the question at the heart of this series, and I want to answer it honestly.

What makes a VTR playful is the spirit you bring. Play, as I understand it, is open-ended, low-stakes, curious, and collaborative. It invites agency — the sense that my contribution matters, my question is worth asking, my weird interpretation has a place here.

VTRs, done well, do all of that. Observation and curiosity are encouraged. When a student asks if the math room is my bedroom, my response is to laugh and lean in — because that question reveals the kind of thinking I am hoping for. Open, honest, humorous, maybe audacious, sometimes courageous, and often fun.

In this series, every VTR post will include what I call The Playful Twist — specific, practical ideas for bringing genuine play into each routine. 

What’s Next in This Series

Over the next several posts, we’re going to go deep on seven routines:

See, Think, Wonder — the one that started it all for me

Zoom In — building observation skills one crop at a time

Compass Points — navigating opinions and perspectives

I Used to Think / Now I Think — the most honest reflection tool I know

Think, Pair, Share — deceptively simple, endlessly powerful

Headlines — distilling big ideas into sharp language

See, Wonder, Connect — linking new thinking to what students already know

Each post will look at the routine itself, the thinking it builds, the CI connection, how it works across subjects — and the playful twist that makes it come alive in the room.

Want To Try For Yourself?

Put any image in front of your students — a photograph, an illustration, something from your current unit — and ask three questions. What do you see? What do you think? What do you wonder?

Listen to what comes out. 

Something may surprise you.

Come back soon — next up is a deeper dive into See, Think, Wonder and some playful ways to make it work in your classroom.

If something unexpected, funny or playful happens when you try it — I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Thanks for being here. I hope your day is full of play.

 

Maureen | Playful Pedagogy playfulpedagogy.com | YouTube