Thinking routines for PYP classrooms work best when they reveal what learners notice, which evidence they use, what questions matter, and how their ideas change across an inquiry.
This is why visible thinking routines fit naturally within PYP practice. The IB describes the PYP as a transdisciplinary approach rooted in inquiry, conceptual understanding, reflection, agency and responsible action. You can explore that wider context in the official PYP curriculum framework.
Harvard Project Zero offers a large Thinking Routines Toolbox covering observation, questioning, reasoning, perspective, connection and synthesis. The goal, however, is not to use as many routines as possible. The goal is to choose the thinking move learners need at a particular point in the inquiry.
What Makes a Thinking Routine Different From an Activity?
A classroom activity is often completed once. A thinking routine is a short structure that students meet repeatedly until its thinking pattern becomes familiar.
When learners understand the structure, less attention is spent decoding instructions and more can go towards the content. Over time, students begin using the routine independently.
A useful routine should do three things. It should serve a clear thinking purpose, produce evidence of student thinking, and be simple enough to use across subjects and contexts.
Routines should not become decorative worksheets. A completed template has little value if the class never discusses or revisits it. The documentation should remain alive throughout the inquiry.
Before selecting a routine, ask:
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What kind of thinking do learners need to practise now?
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What will the routine reveal that ordinary questioning may not reveal?
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How will the responses influence planning, grouping, feedback or further inquiry?
The PYP Unit of Inquiry Planning guide can help connect that choice to the central idea, concepts, lines of inquiry and learning goals.
Choosing Thinking Routines for Each PYP Inquiry Stage
PYP schools may use different names for the stages of inquiry. It is therefore more useful to map routines by purpose than to attach them to one fixed cycle.
Connect and Provoke with See Think Wonder
The See Think Wonder PYP routine is often the best starting point for teachers and learners who are new to visible thinking.
Present an image, object, diagram, short video or unusual data set. Ask learners to separate observation from interpretation before forming questions. This distinction helps prevent the first confident explanation from controlling the whole discussion.
For a unit about access to water, students might examine two contrasting photographs. Their observations reveal what they notice. Their interpretations surface assumptions. Their questions show where curiosity may lead.
The stimulus should still be chosen carefully. A routine cannot rescue a provocation that is too obvious, overloaded or disconnected from the conceptual purpose.
Activate Prior Knowledge with Think Puzzle Explore
Think Puzzle Explore is useful when the teacher needs to uncover existing ideas before planning the next learning experience.
Students record what they currently think, what puzzles them, and how they might investigate those puzzles. The language matters because “think” leaves room for uncertainty. Learners do not have to present every initial idea as established fact.
This routine can also expose misconceptions without turning the opening of a unit into a correction session. Record the ideas, preserve them, and return to them after students have gathered evidence. The comparison becomes a meaningful form of reflection.
Investigate and Connect with Connect Extend Challenge
Connect Extend Challenge works well after learners encounter new information through reading, observation, an expert visit, fieldwork or a practical investigation.
Students identify links with prior understanding, explain how the new information stretches their thinking, and name what remains difficult or unresolved. This makes it especially useful in the middle of an inquiry, when students are gathering knowledge but still need support to organise it conceptually.
A class investigating ecosystems, for example, might use the routine after analysing a local food web. Their responses can reveal whether they are merely recalling vocabulary or beginning to understand interdependence, change and consequence.
Analyse Evidence with Claim Support Question
Claim Support Question helps move classroom talk beyond quick agreement and disagreement.
Learners form a claim, identify the evidence or reasoning that supports it, and raise a question about what remains uncertain. It can be used with a text, experiment, historical source, graph, artwork or proposed explanation.
In a unit about materials, one group might claim that a particular material is the most sustainable choice for packaging. The support stage requires evidence. The question stage opens space for missing information, competing priorities and further research.
This routine gives teachers useful formative evidence about reasoning. A student may have accurate knowledge but weak support, or strong evidence but an overgeneralised claim. Those are different learning needs.
Explore Perspectives with Step Inside and Circle of Viewpoints
Perspective routines are valuable when an inquiry involves people, communities, systems, stories or competing interests.
Step Inside asks learners to enter one viewpoint and consider what that person, object or part of a system might perceive, know and care about. Circle of Viewpoints expands the process by identifying several possible perspectives before exploring one in depth.
In a unit about rivers, students could consider the viewpoints of a farmer, a city resident, a fish, a local business, an engineer and the river itself. The purpose is not imaginative performance alone. Students should connect each viewpoint to evidence and acknowledge where they are making an inference.
Synthesize and Reflect with Headlines and I Used to Think, Now I Think
Headlines asks learners to capture the heart of current understanding in one concise statement. It is useful after discussion, research or collaborative meaning making because it forces students to decide what is most significant.
The headline can be revisited later. A changed headline often reveals conceptual growth more clearly than a long summary.
I Used to Think, Now I Think makes that change explicit. It works best when students explain why their thinking shifted and identify the experience, evidence or discussion that influenced them.
These routines can close one phase of inquiry without suggesting that learning is finished. A strong reflection often generates the next question.
For a fuller comparison, 3, 2, 1 Bridge asks students to record three ideas, two questions and one metaphor before and after a learning experience, then explain how both sets connect.
Evaluate Possible Action with Compass Points
When students are considering an action, solution or proposal, Compass Points helps them slow down before deciding.
Learners examine what excites them, what concerns them, what they still need to know, and what stance or next step they currently support. This is useful for evaluating class action ideas because enthusiasm is balanced with questions, possible consequences and practical information.
For younger learners, the teacher can collect oral responses around a large compass on the floor. Older learners can research the “need to know” section before returning to their stance.
A Practical Rollout Sequence for Your Classroom
The strongest guidance across PYP Teaching Tools and the IB classroom presentation on making thinking visible points towards gradual introduction rather than a large menu of routines at once.
Begin with a Safe Thinking Culture
Students need to know that early ideas can be incomplete and that changing an opinion is a sign of learning. Establish listening norms and respond to tentative contributions with curiosity rather than immediate evaluation.
Introduce One Routine
Start with See Think Wonder or Think Puzzle Explore. Use the same visual structure and language several times. Familiarity is more valuable than novelty during the first stage.
Model the Thinking Move
Think aloud briefly as a learner. Show the difference between an observation and an interpretation, or between a claim and its support. Do not model a perfect answer that leaves students with nothing to contribute.
Repeat Across Contexts
Use the routine in science, literacy, mathematics, the arts and social inquiry where it genuinely fits. Repetition across disciplines helps students recognise the thinking move rather than associating it with one topic.
Transfer Ownership
Gradually ask students to document responses, facilitate partner discussion, select a suitable routine or explain why a routine fits the task. Add a second routine only when the first can be used with growing independence.
Simple Technology Twists That Preserve the Thinking
Technology should make thinking easier to capture, compare or revisit. It should not turn a three step routine into a complicated production task.
A shared digital board can collect See Think Wonder responses from the whole class. Audio notes can help early years learners or students who communicate more fully through speech. Shared slides can preserve Connect Extend Challenge responses at several points in a unit.
For perspective work, the Edutopia adaptation of Step Inside shows how a collaborative board can hold responses from different viewpoints. Students can then reply from another perspective, provided their reasoning remains connected to evidence.
Give learners private thinking time before displaying everyone’s responses. Otherwise, the earliest posts may shape what the rest of the class says. Keep earlier versions visible so that students can compare how their ideas developed.
Using Routine Responses as Formative Evidence
Visible thinking routines are useful sources of formative evidence, but they should not become tests of polished language. Practical PYP classroom examples also show how routines can support collaboration, metacognition and varied forms of response.
Look for changes in observation, questioning, evidence, connections, perspective and the willingness to revise an idea.
Return to the documentation. Ask students what changed, what remains uncertain and what deserves further investigation. Use their responses to adjust provocations, group learners, plan conferences and decide whether the inquiry needs more knowledge, deeper analysis or a new perspective.
The value is not the completed sheet. The value is the decision that becomes possible because student thinking is now visible.
Make the Routine Serve the Inquiry
The best thinking routine is not the most creative one on the wall. It is the one that helps learners perform the thinking the inquiry requires.
Begin with one routine, use it repeatedly, document what emerges and revisit the evidence. Once students understand that routines are tools for their own thinking, not tasks designed to satisfy the teacher, independence begins to grow.
Schools building a more consistent approach to inquiry planning can explore Inquiry Studio to connect shared planning, classroom practice and reflection across the learning community.
