Critical thinking skills need to be provided for all children if we want to stir their curiosity and create life-long, curious learners in the process.
What are the 4 main/best approaches to critical thinking with young children? How to they ‘look’ in classrooms?
1. Inquiry – allowing students to explore materials and ideas to build their background knowledge, develop questions and search for answers
2. Questioning – allowing students to ask open-ended question about what they read and observe with the goal of developing their understanding ofthe task at hand
3. Problem-Solving – allowing students the time to work with ideas, develop questions and pursue answers
4. Collaboration – allowing students to work in flexible groups that share information and ideas
All this ‘allowing’ means providing longer than normal amounts of time to explore topics and concepts. Most will require added pre-training by the teacher to insure students know the steps in each of these skills. Most will not fit into a traditional 30 or 60 minute scheduling box. Most will require additional down time to discuss and research concepts. All will produce in-depth results, many of which will last a lifetime.
(Ideas synthesized from my reading and from Stacey Lange’s article presented in Partnership for 21st Century Skills 6-13-14)