How to teach Critical Thinking in the Classroom

last week nazar asked me a question he said how do we teach critical thinking in the class and yeah i was on the spot i'm like okay what can i say and i think i mentioned a few things i said okay well you know you've got to ask open-ended questions you you've got to give students the opportunity to ask questions you've got to relate it to their real life so that they can feel invested in it and also you should use project-based learning where you know you give them a problem to solve and they can

analyze and to do it today i want to talk a little bit uh more in detail about how we as teachers can teach critical thinking and i want to i want to start it with a quote from a boy benjamin franklin he said tell me and i'll forget teach me and i might remember involve me and i'll learn i thought well that's a great quote for critical thinking it makes us think right so as teachers standing in front and imparting wisdom on the students and i feel like i get into it sometimes with you guys

you can see you know you start sometimes it's good sometimes students need to hear that information but other times i feel like sometimes teachers just babble on to get you know because they've got something they want to say so we have to move away from that and you know we we could teach them we could say oh this is how you do it this is what you're doing and i think that is important i'm going to come to that now it's very important to give detailed instruction to your students but the best way we can

actually teach them critical thinking is to involve them and to make them part of something bigger that way you know they learn by doing you know and that's the best way to learn okay i was looking up some so some interesting information about what critical thinking is because critical thinking is one of the things that a lot of teachers talk about you know if you're in a meeting somewhere the principal says you know we have to improve critical thinking it's such an important part of teaching here's the big problem i was i was looking at

this information let me read to you so they did a study a major study among schools and they said the study showed that most faculty considered critical thinking to be of primary importance to be very important to instruction 90 however only 20 can actually explain what critical thinking is so i think that's the important place to start from let's first define what critical thinking is and then from there we can look at um how can we teach it in the classroom and some extra techniques we can use okay so what is critical thinking and there's

a quote here critical thinking refers to the ability to analyze information objectively and make a reasonable judgment it involves the evaluation of sources data facts observable phenomena and research finding good critical thinkers can draw reasonable conclusions from a set of information and discriminate between useful and less useful details to solve problems and articulate critical thinking there are basically five strategies to teach critical thinking if you have some kind of lesson that you're doing in class or you've got a project or some some type of work activity that you're doing with your students you can compare

what is compare you look at the similarities between things you can contrast that is between you look what the differences are analyze you break it into parts and you explain it categorize you put it into different parts and then evaluate and i think especially in today's milieu where you know there's so much fake news um for teachers i think the the most important thing is teaching our students how to use information and also to understand that information also comes from an angle you know someone can give you information from a certain viewpoint and there is

a reason for that so we have to understand that you know we have to take that into account and our students shouldn't believe everything they should actually um you know analyze it and then see what the value is and why