A Greater Understanding of Critical Thinking

The Greater Educator

Our recent conversations have been exploring the 4Cs of 21st century learning. I don’t know if it’s been as apparent to you as it has been to me, but the closer we look at the skills and talk beyond the buzzwords to figure out what they actually mean, the more I realize how interconnected and interdependent they really are. Today’s topic, skill number 3 on our list, is critical thinking, and in my opinion, it is no less dependent on its predecessors than the other two were. LIke many of the other learning traits and skills that teachers are groomed to value, critical thinking is complex and dynamic in its definition and abstract in our attempts to teach it. I fear that in my own practice, it was something I expected of kids without teaching to kids - another difficult admission that came to me after some self-evaluation. Thinking back to the turning point in my career, one of the reasons I knew that I needed to reimagine teaching and learning in my classroom was because critical thinking and the higher-order thinking skills that I was hoping my students would obtain seemed to be happening in spite of my teaching habits. I recognized the need to push learners to the more demanding rigors of the common core standards, but I think I did most of my “pushing” by revising the verbs in the questions that I asked. I don’t think I changed much about the way that I guided students to explore the curriculum, and that truly is one way that I characterize critical thinking - as a process of exploration. Whether we refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge, critical thinking skills are the strategies that students use when they cross over from comprehension of information that they’ve received into formation of their own individual meaning of and use for the information. I think of the process like a ladder, where learners begin with a basic understanding and perhaps can even apply what they’ve learned across multiple, similar scenarios. Critical thinking happens at the rung where they begin to evaluate their learning through the questioning nature of analysis, and come out on top with the ability to synthesize, or we might say CREATE, new information or understanding because of our exploration. So to answer your question about what the difference might be between creativity and critical thinking, my answer might be that the critical thinking is the hard labor that has to take place before the big idea comes to us. Neither attribute is whole without the other, but when we unpack the meaning behind these attributes and their implications for our classrooms, that is my perspective. In my own practice, defining examples of critical thinking was key to intentionally unlocking the ability in my students. Some of the pedagogical practices that emerged naturally were things like embracing and highlighting the productive struggle in my learners, helping them to identify their own personal biases and those in all of the people around them, developing criteria for evaluating information in a variety of forms, teaching them to be truly active listeners, and to articulate similarities, contrasts, and contradictions. These might seem like really advanced skills for middle school students, but when I implemented best practices in actually teaching these things, they became tangible, achievable goals, and I saw critical thinking strategies emerge from all of my learners in one form or another. One of the byproducts of living in a society where so much information is so easily accessible is that human beings can only internalize so much in a day. New research and theory gains traction so quickly that by the time the message is transferred from expert to scholar to superintendent to school-level leader to teacher, it tends to be delivered in a manner that is honestly just scratching the surface... --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-greater-educator/support