CRITICAL THINKING
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I have added this page because I was inspired by a Critical Thinking conference held in Vancouver in February, 2018. While I cannot hope to capture the depth of the ideas presented at the conference, I will try to capture some of the essence of the work.
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The general idea is that while we continue to push for critical thinking, we have to actual teach the concepts to students rather than assume it is built in to what we do. As well, we should remember that critical thinking is not necessarily a process but rather a term we use when students do all those things we want them to do in our classrooms.
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To begin, the main presenter was Peter Ellerton from Queensland University. He is a scientist turned philosopher, and the focus of his work revolves around critical thinking:
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On this site you will find three useful sections: A Critical Thinking Matrix, a Diagram of Pedagogical Principles: a model for understanding critical thinking, and Questions Relating to Inquiry Values.
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Critical Thinking Matrix: This matrix integrates a range of cognitive skills and values of inquiry to demonstrate how a non-discispline based suite of thinking capabiities can be realised in the classroom.
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Diagram of pedagogical principles: An illustration of how the key concepts of the critical thinking pedagogies can be understood to relate to one another.
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Questions relating to inquiry values: Some key questions of inquiry are presented here to help develop student and teacher understanding of the nature of these values. They are designed to provide students with a language of feedback on how well they are applying their cognitive skills.
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Of the three illustrations, I feel that the third would be most useful to me and my students. It could serve as either a rubric or a checklist of sorts for students as they work through an assignment. The second illustration, the diagram of principles, was the actual presentation-it works a lot better when someone explains it in real time. But hopefully you can pull the general ideas from it.
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Another idea introduced at the workshops I attended was the Q Matrix. It was certainly new to me, and I am looking forward to using one of these in my class. A copy of what it can look like can be found here. The idea is to have students create questions about the topic being studied. As they go from the top left to the bottom right, the questions become more complex and require deeper thinking. There are several examples online, but Ellerton's example includes an ethical component, which fits well with the curricular competencies in Socials. Ellerton also said that he has students create the questions-they normally are not asked to actually answer the questions. Creation of the questions IS the critical thinking exercise.
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In researching the topic online, I found some sites that can be helpful.
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Ted-Ed has a series of videos that ask students to solve puzzles focusing on critical thinking. They are a good way of having students expand and deepen their thinking. While a lot of them are not "English" or "Socials", I have never had students complain about doing them in class.
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Global Citizens has some suggestions to get started.
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TeachThought has a set of 25 resources that can be used to teach critical thinking. They even let you know which ones have a cost associated with them (with free alternatives for most of them).
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Edutopia, at last count, has 969 resources devoted to critical thinking
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The Foundation for Critical Thinking has some useful ideas-lesson plans, approaches, comparisons with "standard methods" of teaching certain topics.
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