Learn To Teach Critical Thinking Skills alongside History!

Critical Thinking Teaching Strategies

What is Critical Thinking?

According to Robert Ennis, critical thinking is the “reasonable assessment of statements.” We are engaging in critical thinking when we are evaluating information we are getting from articles, books, the internet, television, movies, radio, friends and relatives. Critical thinking is what we are using when we are deciding what to believe.

Targeting Critical Thinking Skills:

There are specific critical thinking skills that are targeted in these lessons:

• Evaluating sources of information (evidence)

• Analyzing cause and effect arguments

• Forecasting

• Evaluating analogies

• Identifying our own biases, including misinformation, confirmation bias, and conspiracy theories

Teaching Strategies

There are a number of teaching strategies possible for these lessons, depending on the mix of students, time constraints and other factors. The strategy I tend to use most often is:

1. Critical thinking problems/questions are selected for content that the class was going to learn anyway. For example, one of the units in the U.S. History course is the Revolutionary War. In teaching that unit, I might select the problem/questions evaluating the reliability of the painting of Washington’s army crossing the Delaware River. Critical thinking instruction is meant to be a natural part of the content units.

2. Students are confronted with a problem or questions, as set up in each handout, and they respond in writing to the problem. In this way, every student has to deal with the problem/questions before hearing what other students think.

3. Students pair up to discuss their responses to the problem/questions. I have found that pairs work better than larger groups. Pairing tends to generate the highest participation rates, since there is only one other student in each group. You can ensure more participation by setting a time after which the speaker switches from student A to student B. The trade off with this switching strategy is it may disrupt the flow of the conversations.

4. Students reconvene as a whole class to discuss the problem/questions. These discussions may take from 2 to 20 minutes. It is painful to have to cut the discussion off in order to move on to the rest of the lesson, but sometimes it can’t be helped!

5. Students may be required to respond to the critical thinking lesson, usually explaining how the skill has applied or could apply to their own lives, or how the skill applies to events today in general.