- Start with a stimulating topic
- Critical thinking starts with curiosity.
- A relevant and engaging topic motivates pupils to ask questions and think beyond the superficial.
- They learn that learning starts with wonder and daring to ask questions.
- Let children come up with questions
- Formulating questions themselves = practising critical thinking.
- Students learn:
- What makes a good question (open, investigable, relevant)
- How to guide their own thought process
- This promotes self-reflection, analysis and problem-oriented thinking.
- Formulate hypotheses
- Predicting and substantiating stimulates logical reasoning.
- Pupils must:
- Make an assessment
- Substantiate that assessment with arguments
- This requires conscious thinking, reasoning and evaluation of knowledge.
- Planning and conducting research
- Independent research strengthens critical thinking because pupils:
- Collect data
- Make observations
- Interpret results
- They learn to look critically: What do I really see? What does that mean?
- Reflecting during and after the research
- Reflection is at the heart of critical thinking.
- By discussing together:
- What have we discovered?
- How do we know that?
- What does this mean for our hypothesis?
Pupils learn to evaluate their own thought processes and draw conclusions based on evidence.