New Article: Teaching Critical Thinking in Schools

Posted by on January 21, 2005

[posted from Public Education Network newsblast]

TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING IN SCHOOLS

“Critical thinking is the heart of our curriculum,” an elementary school principal told Susan Black, so she expected to see kids deeply engaged in high-level thinking. Instead she found a few feeble attempts to add “thinking skills” to lessons. And she discovered that, with few exceptions, teachers had muddled notions about critical thinking and little training in developing their students’ thinking skills. Students should be taught to “reason their way” into school subjects, instead of being spoon-fed information that they memorize and then forget. Schools should see to it that students become progressively “more disciplined in their reasoning, and more self-critical and self-directed in the process and products of their thinking” as they advance through the grades.

http://www.asbj.com/current/research.html