Using Switch-Its to Design Mini-Lessons that Enhance Student Thinking

Some of the best ideas in education don't start in a meeting. They start on a bench in a hallway. This is the story of how two curriculum leaders took a simple tool and used it to help teachers design mini-lessons around the thinking skills students need across every subject.

That's where Kim and Chelsie found themselves after watching Paul Andersen's session at NSTA. Chelsie and Kim both serve as curriculum coordinators within the same school district. While Chelsie manages specific subject areas for grades K-5, Kim oversees the science curriculum for grades 6-12. They walked into the conference with one goal: find something they could bring back across their whole K-12 public school system, not just a single grade band or a single subject. What they saw on stage wasn't really about the blocks. Paul was modeling a way of teaching thinking, and Switch-Its, magnetic dry-erase blocks, were part of how he did it. By the time they sat down on the nearest hallway bench they were already asking a bigger question: Could this help teachers build transferable thinking skills across the entire system?

What caught their attention

The hook wasn't only the product. It was the way the product made thinking visible.

"One of the first things we noticed was just the whole idea of the parts of learning," Kim said. "What students learn, how students think, how students learn, along with the mindsets." Separating those dimensions did something useful. It made visible the part that travels.

The content of a lesson changes from class to class. But how students think and how students learn carries across grade levels and across subjects. That was the spark. As Chelsie put it, "This type of learning doesn't just happen in science. It really does happen everywhere."

And the Switch-Its were an example of a tool that made it practical. A movable, erasable block gives a student a low-stakes way to put a thought down, look at it, and change it. For two leaders trying to find something that worked from kindergarten through twelfth grade, that combination was the whole game: a clear way to teach thinking, and a simple tool to practice it.

Getting their feet wet

They started with their Curriculum Design Council, a group that pulls one representative per grade, per building, across all 38 eligible sites: 34 elementary/K–8 schools and 4 choice sites serving elementary students. Each session runs about thirty teachers, grouped by grade level so colleagues learn alongside their peers.

The first round focused on two practices that show up in every subject: asking questions and constructing arguments from evidence. Chelsie led an asking-questions mini-lesson, having teachers generate questions from a deck of nature image cards. Kim ran the argument-from-evidence lesson around a simple, memorable phenomenon: are these two eggs raw or hard-boiled? She modeled the argument on the Switch-Its in front of the group, while teachers gathered their own evidence on a graphic organizer and voted on a conclusion.

They prepared hard for it. "We watched your videos many, many times and practiced," Kim said, "because we wanted to make sure that we were using the Switch-Its correctly." When they brought it to teachers, they ran it live.

Sorting the skills

One activity landed hardest, and it was deceptively simple.

Each table got a bag of paper slips. Each slip held a skill pulled from math, ELA, science, social studies, or health, gathered with help from the other curriculum coordinators. No categories. No instructions. Just sort them.

The open-endedness made some teachers uncomfortable, which was the point. They built their own categories and modeled what each one represented. Across the room, different groups produced different structures using the same underlying skills. That was the lesson inside the lesson: when teachers had to organize the skills themselves, they began to see the thinking beneath the subjects.

Then the reveal. Kim and Chelsie pulled up a chart showing which skills came from which subject, with the same practice, constructing and critiquing arguments, highlighted in every column. For many teachers, it was a genuine surprise. The thinking skills they assumed belonged to reading, or to math, showed up everywhere. The question stopped being "which subject owns this skill" and became "how do we build this skill so students can carry it anywhere." Later, they extended the same activity all the way to twelfth grade.

Seeing the skills was one thing. Giving students a way to practice them every day was another. That is where the Switch-Its earned their place.

Why Switch-Its worked: safety and movement

When Kim asked teachers what made the blocks click, one word came back: safety.

"I can erase, I can move, I can change," she said, relaying what teachers told her. "My thinking can change over time, and that's okay. My thinking can be different from my neighbor's thinking, and that's okay." A static drawing on paper doesn't invite revision. A movable, erasable block does.

That flexibility opened up new ways to work. A chemistry teacher keeps a set on hand and tells students to model what they think happened in a reaction. Teachers also dreamed up new approaches of their own, like having students write model components on individual Switch-Its, then bring them to their group and play them almost like a deck of cards. Each student places a piece and explains the relationship. Everyone contributes. No more one student drawing the whole model while the rest nod along.

At the elementary level, the same pattern held in whole-group and small-group settings, across phonics, math, and science. By their third Council session, teachers were generating their own uses faster than the facilitators could list them.

Advice for other leaders

Their guidance for anyone sitting where they once sat comes down to two ideas.

First, find a collaborator whose role is similar to yours but not identical. Kim, a secondary leader, called working with an elementary expert transformative to how she thinks about her own area. The stretch between perspectives is where the good ideas live.

Second, in Chelsie's words, just go for it. "Get them in front of teachers, make mistakes with them, let them see that you're using them and modeling with them." Then give teachers a chance to watch it work with real students. That, more than anything, drove adoption.

Curious whether Switch-Its could do the same for your teachers? Explore how they work and see them in action.