The Minimalist Educator Podcast
The Minimalist Educator Podcast
Episode 048: Unlocking the Power of Thinking Maps with David Hyerle
How can eight simple visual tools revolutionize the way we think, learn, and teach? Join us as we sit down with David Hyerle, the visionary educational researcher behind the Thinking Maps model, to uncover the transformative power of these minimalist tools. From his formative years teaching in inner-city Oakland to his groundbreaking work with the Think Program and the Bay Area Writing Project, David shares his inspiring journey. We explore how Thinking Maps streamline the plethora of graphic organizers into eight essential cognitive tools, empowering students to better visualize and articulate their thoughts and fostering higher-order thinking across all grade levels and subjects.
In this episode, we navigate the evolving landscape of education, shaped by cognitive neuroscience, AI, and social media, and discuss the urgent need for independent and collaborative thinking skills. David sheds light on how integrating Art Costa's habits of mind and social-emotional learning with Thinking Maps can support continuous cognitive development from early childhood through adulthood. We also delve into his global work with Thinking Schools International, emphasizing the foundational role of thinking in driving whole school change and improving educational practices worldwide. Tune in for an enlightening conversation filled with actionable insights that can transform your approach to education.
David Hyerle started teaching in inner city Oakland, CA and then turned to focusing on work with the Bay Area/National Writing PROJECT and doctoral work at UC Berkeley and Harvard Schools of Ed. in the late 1980’s.
David is the Developer of the Thinking Maps model– a language of eight dynamic, interrelated visual tools each based, respectively, on eight cognitive processes. He has focused his professional development exclusively on whole school change from pre-K to 12, and for facilitating collaborative leadership.
He is the author of PD resources for implementing Thinking Maps– and authored and edited 6 professional books and dozens of other published works on the practice of visual tools, leadership and Thinking Maps. Most recently David published through Teachers College Press with lead author Shelly Counsell: “Drawing out Learning with Thinking Maps” presented practical Pre-k to grade 3 research. He is presently CEO of Thinking Schools International, having worked in schools and systems such as Ethiopia, South Africa, the UK, Pakistan, Malaysia, New Zealand, and across the US from LA to Mississippi to inner city New York City.
David’s Substack weekly journal
Thinking in Maps
Sites:
Research:
This episode is sponsored by Thinking Foundation: supports the transformation of early childhood through adult education by implementing, accrediting and disseminating the Thinking Schools approach worldwide.
Buy The Minimalist Teacher book on Amazon.
Follow on Instagram @PlanZPLS and @minimalist_ed_podcast
The Minimalist Educator Podcast is a Plan Z Professional Learning Services adventure.
Welcome to the Minimalist Educator Podcast, a podcast about paring down to refocus on the purpose and priorities in our roles with co-hosts and co-authors of the Minimalist Teacher Book, Tammy Musialski-Borneman and Christine Arnold.
Speaker 2:In this episode we talk with David about how his development of thinking maps as a language is at once minimalist while also facilitating ever more complex, higher order thinking across grade levels and content areas.
Speaker 2:David Hale started teaching in inner city Oakland, california, and then turned to focusing on work with the Bay Area National Writing Project and doctoral work at UC Berkeley and Harvard Schools of Education in the late 1980s. David is the developer of the Thinking Maps model, a language of eight dynamic, interrelated visual tools, each based respectively on eight cognitive processes. He has focused his professional development exclusively on whole school change, from pre-K to 12 and for facilitating collaborative leadership. He is the author of PD Resources for Implementing Thinking Maps and has authored and edited six professional books and dozens of other published works on the practice of visual tools, leadership and thinking maps. Most recently, david published through Teachers College Press with lead author Shelley Council, drawing Out Learning with Thinking Maps presented practical pre-K to grade three research. He is presently CEO of Thinking Schools International, having worked in schools and systems such as Ethiopia, south Africa, the UK, pakistan, malaysia, new Zealand and across the US, from LA to Mississippi to inner city, new York City.
Speaker 3:Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of the Minimalist Educator podcast to talk to David Hirely, who is a longtime educational researcher, especially on the area of thinking, which is one of the areas that I, christine and I, find very interesting. Welcome to the show, david.
Speaker 4:Hey, great to be here.
Speaker 3:So there's a lot of things that we could discuss. I wanted to ask first. I always like to know and I think it's interesting for our listeners to know how people got into the areas that they chose. So you've been a long time into you developed thinking maps and did a lot of research on thinking, so where did that interest come for you?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it was. It was very just came to me in a moment. I was teaching in Oakland, california, and I was teaching it was primarily African-American youth in an inner city environment and I was piloting a program called, of all things, the Think Program, and this was back in the early 80s, so you know, you can test my age there and it was just an eye-opening experience because this program had sort of the traditional reading comprehension selections, the vocabulary development, and then it had a section focused strictly on the development of thinking but it was related to the reading comprehension and the vocabulary. So it was this sort of integrated approach and I was realizing all of a sudden my students, as I was piloting this, were just like moving forward with their reading comprehension, their capacity to verbalize their thinking, their writing improved. I was with the Bay Area Writing Project at that time process writing, and I just realized what is going on here because traditionally and even to this day, most schools don't focus explicitly on the development of thinking processes. It's sort of integrated within what we do. So that was really the starting point and also I mean, now that I think about it, I mean there's so much history. I mean we all have histories as teachers, as educators, and what has influenced us.
Speaker 4:But the other big piece was with the Bay Area Writing Project. There was mind mapping. That was one of the pre-writing activities back then. Now it's sort of you know, a common place where you sketch out your ideas. Back then there wasn't much pre-writing. So I got involved really in this idea of Tony Buzan's work with mind mapping and I realized the visual representation of ideas and thinking is very powerful. I mean, I can see, I can reflect on my own thinking, I can look at it, I can share it with somebody else, I can see. You know, when we asked students to show their work it was basically hey, show your thinking here it is in a visual way. So I started to connect together the whole idea of fundamental thinking processes such as sequencing, cause and effect, categorizing. These are things we do every day with kids, with visuals.
Speaker 4:And you know, also at this time, you know, oftentimes we don't look back at the history of things. But back then there was what I call when thinking became popular. All of a sudden there was a thinking skills movement that popped up and it was international, it wasn't just in the United States, and I just I fell in at that moment. It's sometimes it's you know time and place where you are as a person. For me it was then and all of a sudden, there, everybody was focused on that. There were conferences, ascd, where you published your book, was full on with the thinking skills movement and led by my mentor at that time, art Costa. So all of those things. Nothing happens just with one thing happening. It's usually a cluster of events and I was really fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to really be able to open my eyes to what was going on and develop work.
Speaker 2:Talking about your work with the thinking maps. I think it appeals to Tammy and I a lot. You know as minimalists. You know that when you think about graphic organisers there's so many different variations and different types of different PDFs you can download and edit and all the rest of it. With Thinking Maps it's a lot more minimal. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how you ended up with those particular ones?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean simultaneous with doing that teacher, my teaching credential program and master's work. I was really. I was going through the sort of the classic Psych 101 Piaget, developmental, cognitive developmental work and Piaget developed what he called basically mental operations. It sounds really darn boring, but these are the fundamental cognitive processes that are the foundation for psychology. So to what degree are students sequencing? How well do they do it? How do they predict or cause and effect reasoning? How do they group things, things like that.
Speaker 4:And it came to me at one moment what would happen if we link together some fundamental graphics, some of them very traditional, with these fundamental cognitive processes, and Piaget only identified six or eight of them. I mean it wasn't like there are 10,000 fundamental cognitive processes and that's where the thinking maps are really born out of those two things, the idea of these mental operations that are fundamental and graphics that meet them. So I mean some of these are quite traditional. It isn't like I made up something anew Sequencing, we've used flow charts or flow maps, classification, we use tree diagrams. I mean think of a family tree. We do cause and effect reasoning, where we look at ripple effects and things like that. We do. You know basically what traditionally was done with a venn diagram, we we do with a double bubble map. And so what? What came to me is this idea of can we really focus on the fundamentals? And then Piaget, the brilliance of it is. He said hey, these mental operations, we're basically born with them.
Speaker 4:And your previous guest, julia Skolnick, was talking about fundamental cognitive neuroscience. I mean, this is what we're born with. We have the capacity to do these processes. So it was really unveiling for students. Here they are, here are these? We're going to be quite direct. We know this about the human mind and brain. Now we're going to connect them to visuals. So it's very much. I sort of.
Speaker 4:You know, make the analogy to, in English, the eight parts of speech, you know just a minute, aren't there. You know 108 parts of speech, or 1,000, or 10,000? No, there's some real fundamentals to it. So, in that way, though, if you and that's what I like about the minimalist idea what you know, that theme that you have is that what are the fundamentals, and then how do they work together to get to greater, deeper, complex ideas? So, the eight maps, it's just like the eight parts of speech, fundamental cognitive processes, but when they're used together, that's where the richness comes from, let's say a four-year-old or five-year-old, up through adult learning and even leadership training.
Speaker 4:So that's a long-winded way of saying there's got to be some fundamental cognitive process. How do they work together? And can we just, you know, can we, you know, pull back the veil for students? So if they're in, let's say, in a classroom and you know, I taught elementary school, I also taught middle and high school at any time, in any discipline, they can draw on these processes. So one of the concerns I have is that we have all these skill sets across all these disciplines. How do kids make sense of it? I mean, as teachers we have a hard time making sense of all of these skill sets. But guess what? Sequencing goes across those disciplines, grouping ideas or categorizing cause and effect. They go through every single discipline. So the students have a way of in their own mind saying, oh, I see that the kind of skill that's being used here I can use, let's say, a flow map for sequencing or a double bubble map for comparing two characters or two particles or two historic figures, or whatever it is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's one of the things that we often talk about. Is that transferability, right? We don't really need to make things more complicated or complex than they need to be, especially when it comes to using some kind of visual to help us understand what we're thinking or to share thinking. So how would you, Christine and I have talked about cognitive overload and cognitive dissonance and things like that. How do thinking maps help with that?
Speaker 4:we should just see that as for what it is and think about, as teachers, as teacher leaders, as students in the classroom, how much information, especially now with social media, with access to so much information and disinformation. So one of the big concerns I know that we all have as educators and as parents, by the way is just the sheer amount of information that students are looking at on their own, but also then in the classroom and then with testing regimens. All these things we have to feel like we have to cover the content. So one of the things that I think that's key about the maps, the thinking maps, is that it's a language for learning, in that the students are empowered when they have a plethora of information, all this information coming at them. Maybe they're in the text, you know, with a book in hand, maybe they're, you know, investigating something on the web. They have a way of first perceiving what are the patterns there. I mean, that's what the thinking maps do is really show patterns of information. They can generate the patterns on their own. Then they can organize the information because they have this language. It isn't really a set of tools. It's more like how a language works together, they're integrated and then they can go.
Speaker 4:Let's say they're asked to do a writing assignment or oral presentation or whatever form you know, a performance task or research, or move them to a piece of writing. I mean that was my background with writing process. I mean one of the big things with writing for those of us who do a lot of writing, it's you have to chuck things out right. I mean you can have a whole lot of ideas. It's more like how do you synthesize it? I mean like your 3P model with you know paring it down. How do you pare it down?
Speaker 4:So the maps really help students focus, prioritize information, pare it down and then be able to go to a product which you know. That's what we're really looking for. You know there's an over-reliance on testing, but day-to-day, in classrooms, we as teachers are asking them to do performance tasks. So I think the cognitive load issue is students also. I mean there's a tremendous relief knowing that you have the tools that enable you to work with information in any discipline. I mean if you were a chef in a kitchen or myself I love to cook at home If I didn't have those fundamental utensils for cooking, where would I be? Same sort of thing, you know very much so.
Speaker 2:Just to build off some of those ideas that you've mentioned there. You know you've been immersed in this world of how important it is to develop these thinking skills and transfer and application everything with a long history of education as well, from what I can tell. So what's your take on how education is going at the moment? You've mentioned there a little bit about testing and that is a reality for a lot of people in a lot of different countries and contexts that emphasis on standardized tests, test scores, grades, that sort of thing. But, being someone who is so experienced and passionate about those thinking skills, what's your take on where we're sitting at the moment and where we're heading? Possibly?
Speaker 4:Well, this might sound obvious, but I'll say well, I think that I think we're in a movement towards. You know, things come back right. I mean, as I said earlier, there was I call it you know when thinking became popular. I think with the new cognitive neuroscience, even with AI, with all the things that are going on with social media, there's an understanding that one students have to be able to. I believe one of the foremost outcomes of education is be able to think for themselves in a variety of ways. It isn't just sort of plopping here's thinking maps. This is the answer. It's having a range of different approaches that are not overwhelming. You can go to philosophers, you can go to the cognitive science. They can name you hundreds of processes and skills. Cognitive science, they can name you hundreds of processes and skills. But can we consolidate for students some fundamentals that then they can manage and generate? I mean, a big part of information is students being able to generate their own ideas, present them. So we are in a bit of a trough right now. I think we're in sort of a you know a down, you know sort of a low, not a low point necessarily, but this between paradigms. You know we've gone through the whole testing paradigm and it's breaking down. I mean, it's slow. It might be, you know, it might be a ways away. I don't want to be sort of simplistic about it because those systems are in place for you know a lot of different reasons, but the capacity for any individual student at any time now it used to be, oh, when they get out of high school they should be able to. I think now we have to really look at elementary school. How do we facilitate their thinking abilities as independent thinkers? But then, collaboratively, how do they work with others, share information, be open-minded, a lot of those things. What Art Costa's model of habits of mind I think is a good reference point for this and framing it with social-emotional learning, all of those pieces fit in there. But if they don't have some fundamentals about how to really work with information as they're holding, you know, not every child has a smartphone, but probably in five years around the world every child, if not every village, will have cell phones available, if not right now. That, with all that information coming through, how are they able to sort through it? How are they able to make sense of it on their own, share it, be open-minded, but also have.
Speaker 4:One of the things I didn't mention about the thinking maps is we also use a frame. We have students draw a frame around any map that they create, or multiple maps linked together, and this is the frame of reference and it's really a metacognitive frame. So it isn't just can I use these tools or this language. In a certain way it's also metacognitive. It's how am I thinking about it? Do I need to go in another direction? What is influencing my thinking? It really goes back to sort of that whole field of executive functioning and metacognition. We ask students all the time, by the way, where did you get that idea? So let's make that more explicit for them and then actually provide ways for them to find their way back to what they were thinking about where they got it, who influenced them, things like that.
Speaker 3:I'm thinking about, you know, skill development here, obviously, and how, as kids get older, certain tools are removed from their tool belt for whatever reason. And so I often think that, you know, in elementary and maybe into middle school, teachers rely on tools like these to help their students. But then as students get older, into high school, it seems like some of these things are removed or taken away because it's very content heavy and you know it. Just, teachers often expect their older students to just have these skills. You've been taught this, you should know how to think, you should know this. You should know this. But how can we get a shift in thinking for some of those teachers who do have to really teach a lot of content, that these maps or any kind of thinking tool has so much value?
Speaker 4:That's a tough one and I think that you know, especially as we move up into the secondary level and I would suggest into whether the workplace or in the college, that that becomes key. I mean, I think one of the things I and I will go to technology here in the sense of the thinking maps. We have a software program there are a lot of graphics programs out there, but they're fundamental thinking map software. So students are independently able to use that and take it with them as well as just learning how to draw things by hand and sketch out ideas, as well as just learning how to draw things by hand and sketch out ideas. So I think that that's one of the keys. The other is, I think it's also around leadership. We've done a lot of.
Speaker 4:Actually, one of the areas that I started with in leadership was coaching, with Art Costa and Bob Garmston's work on cognitive coaching, and it was really about asking those facilitative questions that elicit the thinking of whoever's being coached.
Speaker 4:I think those are the kind of links that a teacher at the secondary level can make and that students make very quickly as well, and I believe that technologies will be one of the vehicles not the answer, but one of the vehicles for students to hold on to, not the skills themselves and the processes, but the graphic representation of them. And most of our work well, all of our work, really as a consulting group has been on whole school change, so that I know we don't have a lot of time to go into this, but the idea is that we it isn't this just a few teachers get trained or get professional development with follow-up, but the whole school. So, as a student goes through the grade levels and across different disciplines that are getting reinforced in their thinking abilities with the thinking maps and other approaches as well. So that's the kind of thing where integrated and showing the direct link to content learning needs to happen also at the secondary level.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that technology piece is really a good connection here, because, with all of the developments in AI and everything that are happening, we need to be very clear in what we're asking of the AI tools, but also being able to think critically about what it's spitting back out to us. And is this actually what I want? Does this make sense, or do I need to change what I'm inputting to get a better result? So I think that's definitely evidence of why this sort of work is so important for us.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I think you know I mean it's very interesting About. Well, it was about a dozen years ago. I was reading a book how to Create a Mind by one of the leaders in the AI field. I was reading a book how to Create a Mind by one of the leaders in the AI field and he was challenging the field, saying hey, just a minute, we have too much of a mechanistic view of how the brain works and we don't have a really good theory of mind. And he said there are fundamental processes that are actually physically happening in the brain. And he named five fundamentals that are the foundation for the thinking maps.
Speaker 4:We describe things, we look at context, we group things according to how we see them and their spatial relationships. He says, actually physically, that's happening in the brain. So one of the things is also being congruent with and with a really understanding of the research. What we're trying to develop here with the thinking is congruent with physically and biologically, what's happening in the brain. Very interesting stuff. And I think the implications for that are how do we create, you know, because AI is here how do we facilitate AI that really supports all of us as learners and thinkers, to be reflective and not just on some sort of, you know, mechanistic view of the brain and mind. So there's a lot ahead. Still keeps me going.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's so true, how you know. I know there's that fear with teachers about okay, well, now the kids can just like go on chat GBT and write a paper, but also it's not going to be exactly what you need it to be. So you do have to have use your thinking skills when that spits out, to read through it and make sure it's matches what like Christina has to match your prompt and and that kind of thing. So there, it's not just willy nilly, put it in and it spits it out and you use it. You know it's, it's helpful for a lot of reasons, but also it's not perfect either. So we do have to.
Speaker 4:Let me let me jump in there, because this is something I've been working on recently is, well, you know, just previously I was talking about the idea of when we ask students to show their thinking. Let's say it's a math problem, show your thinking, or with the pre-writing. Well, what we're really looking at is the thinking maps being show your thinking, so you can't just punch in a topic. A student can't punch in a topic and say spit out an essay on, you know whatever, whatever the topic is, and boom, there it is. Oh no, what we're really asking for is your thinking ahead of time and show that, reveal that, so then we can see it in the essay you just wrote, rather than punching in.
Speaker 4:So I think there's a real opening here, with thinking maps and other kinds of visual representations, for students to really show what they know and be able to go to whatever we're asking for in a performance. And to me that's really key and I think it's a foundation for teaching at the middle and secondary level, where we're saying we're asking for ever more complex tasks. Well, the thinking maps, when they're used together as a language, like the eight parts of speech, you get a different kind of learner and thinker and more self-assessing Students can look down, see how they're thinking and be more reflective on it as well. I mean, if anything, what we want right is students to get out of high school and be self-assessing because guess what? There's nobody there saying this way. That way is the right way they need to be, you know, on their own game.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. As we wrap up the episode today, we do want to ask you a pare-down pointer, if you've got one, so any sort of tip or strategy that you have. It could be connected to what we talked about or something completely separate, just to give our listeners something to think about.
Speaker 4:If I were to say there was one representation that was key in the work that I've done and I think we've seen it in classrooms and in the US and around the world. We've seen it in classrooms in the US and around the world is that what I mentioned earlier, the frame which we just I mean it's so simple. You draw a frame around any map or it could be around anything that you've created, a drawing or an idea or some prewriting, and that frame, that simple rectangle, is like the picture we look through. The picture frame it's and our own peripheral vision and our own perception. And the question, basically is what's influencing how you're thinking about this? What's your frame of reference? Where'd you get these ideas?
Speaker 4:And I think in these sort of politically charged times, even that simple frame can be a metacognitive frame, that sort of rethink. Just a minute, where did this come from? Are these really my ideas? What are the values that are influencing how I'm perceiving? So, a simple rectangle, and just, you know, think of the rectangle which is our computer screen or our handheld screen. That is a frame that is framing our perception. So I would, I would just go with that. That's about as pared down as you can get a rectangle right.
Speaker 3:It is, yes, but it's also very profound. You know it's very. It gets right to the point, like what are we thinking when? Where did we get our thoughts about this? Thank you so much for being with us today, david.
Speaker 4:I loved it. You know, anytime there's a conversation about you know this kind of work and also the work that you do in the sense of really focusing. I mean, I often perceive myself as a cognitive radical. You know, radical being root. What's the root here? Yeah, and that's what you're about too. So it's a real pleasure to be on.
Speaker 2:Thank you. This episode was brought to you by Thinking Foundation. Thinking Foundation supports the transformation of early childhood through adult education by implementing, accrediting and disseminating the thinking schools approach worldwide. Find out more at wwwthinkingfoundationorg.
Speaker 1:Find out more at wwwthinkingfoundationorg. The music for the podcast has been written and performed by Gaia Moretti.
