New Perspectives in Science Education

How can we teach our students to make their logical reasonings? to make claims and support them with evidence, proofs, deductions? to address problems by comprehending thoroughly their dilemma first, without reducing the math to just acting on meaningless symbols by a collection of rules? without train our students as perfect solutors unable to build meanings?
In this sense, the Visible Thinking framework created by Project Zero, a research group at Harvard Graduate School of Education, turned out to be a tool full of promises.
The thinking routines contained within the framework help teachers to guide class discussion and group work and are also useful from a mathematical point of view to develop our students' reasoning and argumentative ability.
Italian teachers, not used to this type of work, will argue that the use of TRs takes time to the topics to be completed in the curriculum. This problem can be faced by emptying the lesson of the time needed for explanation, using a methodological approach which has been very popular in Italy in recent years: the flipped lesson.
This paper illustrates the first encouraging attempts to mix the thinking routines and flipped learning for math education, made by the author who is taking part as a researcher in the newly launched collaboration between the Indire Institute and Project Zero- Harvard, to test and adapt their frameworks to the Italian Upper Secondary School.

Keywords: mathematics, thinking routines, flipped classroom, critical thinking;