teaching critical thinking

• Call for Volunteers!
• Our Team of Presenters
• Fellows of the Foundation
• Dr. Richard Paul
• Dr. Linda Elder
• Dr. Gerald Nosich
• Contact Us - Office Information
• Permission to Use Our Work
• Create a CriticalThinking.Org Account
• Contributions to the Foundation for Critical Thinking
• Testimonials
• Center for Critical Thinking
• The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking
• International Center for the Assessment of Higher Order Thinking
• Library of Critical Thinking Resources
• Professional Development
• Inservice Information Request Form
• Certification Online Course
• The State of Critical Thinking Today
• Higher Education
• K-12 Instruction
• Customized Webinars and Online Courses for Faculty
• Business & Professional Groups
• The Center for Critical Thinking Community Online
• Certification in the Paul-Elder Approach to Critical Thinking
• Professional Development Model - College and University
• Professional Development Model for K-12
• Workshop Descriptions
• Online Courses in Critical Thinking
• Critical Thinking Training for Law Enforcement
• Consulting for Leaders and Key Personnel at Your Organization
• Critical Thinking Therapy
• Conferences & Events
• Upcoming Learning Opportunities
• 2024 Fall Academy on Critical Thinking
• Daily Schedule
• Transportation, Lodging, and Social Functions
• Critical Thinking Therapy Release & Book Signing
• Academy Presuppositions
• Save the Date: 45th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking
• Presuppositions of the Conference
• Call for Proposals
• Conference Archives
• 44th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking
• Focal Session Descriptions
• Guest Presentation Program
• Presuppositions of the 44th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking
• Recommended Reading
• 43rd Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking
• Register as an Ambassador
• Testimonials from Past Attendees
• Thank You to Our Donors
• 42nd Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking
• Overview of Sessions (Flyer)
• Presuppositions of the Annual International Conference
• Testimonials from Past Conferences
• 41st Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking
• Recommended Publications
• Dedication to Our Donors
• 40th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking
• Session Descriptions
• Testimonials from Prior Conferences
• International Critical Thinking Manifesto
• Scholarships Available
• 39th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking
• Travel and Lodging Info
• FAQ & General Announcements
• Focal and Plenary Session Descriptions
• Program and Proceedings of the 39th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking
• The Venue: KU Leuven
• Call for Critical Thinking Ambassadors
• Conference Background Information
• 38th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking
• Call for Ambassadors for Critical Thinking
• Conference Focal Session Descriptions
• Conference Concurrent Session Descriptions
• Conference Roundtable Discussions
• Conference Announcements and FAQ
• Conference Program and Proceedings
• Conference Daily Schedule
• Conference Hotel Information
• Conference Academic Credit
• Conference Presuppositions
• What Participants Have Said About the Conference
• 37th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking
• Registration & Fees
• FAQ and Announcements
• Conference Presenters
• 37th Conference Flyer
• Program and Proceedings of the 37th Conference
• 36th International Conference
• Conference Sessions
• Conference Flyer
• Program and Proceedings
• Academic Credit
• 35th International Conference
• Conference Session Descriptions
• Available Online Sessions
• Bertrand Russell Distinguished Scholar - Daniel Ellsberg
• 35th International Conference Program
• Concurrent Sessions
• Posthumous Bertrand Russell Scholar
• Hotel Information
• Conference FAQs
• Visiting UC Berkeley
• 34th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
• Bertrand Russell Distinguished Scholar - Ralph Nader
• Conference Concurrent Presenters
• Conference Program
• Conference Theme
• Roundtable Discussions
• Flyer for Bulletin Boards
• 33rd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
• 33rd International Conference Program
• 33rd International Conference Sessions
• 33rd International Conference Presenters
• The Bertrand Russell Distinguished Scholars Critical Thinking Conversations
• 33rd International Conference - Fees & Registration
• 33rd International Conference Concurrent Presenters
• 33rd International Conference - Hotel Information
• 33rd International Conference Flyer
• 32nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
• 32nd Annual Conference Sessions
• 32nd Annual Conference Presenter Information
• 32nd Conference Program
• The Bertrand Russell Distinguished Scholars Critical Thinking Lecture Series
• 32nd Annual Conference Concurrent Presenters
• 32nd Annual Conference Academic Credit
• 31st INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
• 31st Conference Sessions
• Comments about previous conferences
• Conference Hotel (2011)
• 31st Concurrent Presenters
• Registration Fees
• 31st International Conference
• 30th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CRITICAL THINKING
• 30th International Conference Theme
• 30th Conference Sessions
• PreConference Sessions
• 30th Concurrent Presenters
• 30th Conference Presuppositions
• Hilton Garden Inn
• 29th International Conference
• 29th Conference Theme
• 29th Conference Sessions
• 29th Preconference Sessions
• 29th Conference Concurrent Sessions
• 2008 International Conference on Critical Thinking
• 2008 Preconference Sessions (28th Intl. Conference)
• 2007 Conference on Critical Thinking (Main Page)
• 2007 Conference Theme and sessions
• 2007 Pre-Conference Workshops
• 2006 Annual International Conference (archived)
• 2006 International Conference Theme
• 2005 International Conference (archived)
• Prior Conference Programs (Pre 2000)
• Workshop Archives
• Spring 2022 Online Workshops
• 2021 Online Workshops for Winter & Spring
• 2019 Seminar for Military and Intelligence Trainers and Instructors
• Transportation, Lodging, and Recreation
• Seminar Flyer
• 2013 Spring Workshops
• Our Presenters
• 2013 Spring Workshops - Hotel Information
• 2013 Spring Workshops Flyer
• 2013 Spring Workshops - Schedule
• Spring Workshop 2012
• 2012 Spring Workshop Strands
• 2012 Spring Workshop Flier
• 2011 Spring Workshop
• Spring 2010 Workshop Strands
• 2009 Spring Workshops on Critical Thinking
• 2008 SPRING Workshops and Seminars on Critical Thinking
• 2008 Ethical Reasoning Workshop
• 2008 - On Richard Paul's Teaching Design
• 2008 Engineering Reasoning Workshop
• 2008 Academia sobre Formulando Preguntas Esenciales
• Fellows Academy Archives
• 2017 Fall International Fellows Academy
• 4th International Fellows Academy - 2016
• 3rd International Fellows Academy
• 2nd International Fellows Academy
• 1st International Fellows Academy
• Academy Archives
• October 2019 Critical Thinking Academy for Educators and Administrators
• Transportation, Lodging, and Leisure
• Advanced Seminar: Oxford Tutorial
• Recreational Group Activities
• Limited Scholarships Available
• September 2019 Critical Thinking Educators and Administrators Academy
• 2019 Critical Thinking Training for Trainers and Advanced Academy
• Academy Flyer
• Seattle, WA 2017 Spring Academy
• San Diego, CA 2017 Spring Academy
• 2016 Spring Academy -- Washington D.C.
• 2016 Spring Academy -- Houston, TX
• The 2nd International Academy on Critical Thinking (Oxford 2008)
• 2007 National Academy on Critical Thinking Testing and Assessment
• 2006 Cambridge Academy (archived)
• 2006 Cambridge Academy Theme
• 2006 Cambridge Academy Sessions
• Accommodations at St. John's College
• Assessment & Testing
• A Model for the National Assessment of Higher Order Thinking
• International Critical Thinking Essay Test
• Online Critical Thinking Basic Concepts Test
• Online Critical Thinking Basic Concepts Sample Test
• Consequential Validity: Using Assessment to Drive Instruction
• News & Announcements
• Newest Pages Added to CriticalThinking.Org
• Online Learning
• Critical Thinking Online Courses
• Critical Thinking Blog
• 2019 Blog Entries
• 2020 Blog Entries
• 2021 Blog Entries
• 2022 Blog Entries
• 2023 Blog Entries
• Online Courses for Your Students
• 2023 Webinar Archives
• 2022 Webinar Archives
• 2021 Webinar Archive
• 2020 Webinar Archive
• Guided Study Groups
• Critical Thinking Channel on YouTube
• CT800: Fall 2024

Translate this page from English...

*Machine translated pages not guaranteed for accuracy. Click Here for our professional translations.

Critical Thinking: Where to Begin

• For College and University Faculty
• For College and University Students
• For High School Teachers
• For Jr. High School Teachers
• For Elementary Teachers (Grades 4-6)
• For Elementary Teachers (Kindergarten - 3rd Grade)
• For Science and Engineering Instruction
• For Business and Professional Development
• For Nursing and Health Care
• For Home Schooling and Home Study

If you are new to critical thinking or wish to deepen your conception of it, we recommend you review the content below and bookmark this page for future reference.

Our Conception of Critical Thinking...

"Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness..."

"Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fairminded way. People who think critically attempt, with consistent and conscious effort, to live rationally, reasonably, and empathically. They are keenly aware of the inherently flawed nature of human thinking when left unchecked. They strive to diminish the power of their egocentric and sociocentric tendencies. They use the intellectual tools that critical thinking offers – concepts and principles that enable them to analyze, assess, and improve thinking. They work diligently to develop the intellectual virtues of intellectual integrity, intellectual humility, intellectual civility, intellectual empathy, intellectual sense of justice and confidence in reason. They realize that no matter how skilled they are as thinkers, they can always improve their reasoning abilities and they will at times fall prey to mistakes in reasoning, human irrationality, prejudices, biases, distortions, uncritically accepted social rules and taboos, self-interest, and vested interest.

They strive to improve the world in whatever ways they can and contribute to a more rational, civilized society. At the same time, they recognize the complexities often inherent in doing so. They strive never to think simplistically about complicated issues and always to consider the rights and needs of relevant others. They recognize the complexities in developing as thinkers, and commit themselves to life-long practice toward self-improvement. They embody the Socratic principle: The unexamined life is not worth living , because they realize that many unexamined lives together result in an uncritical, unjust, dangerous world."

Why Critical Thinking?

The Problem:

Everyone thinks; it is our nature to do so. But much of our thinking, left to itself, is biased, distorted, partial, uninformed, or down-right prejudiced. Yet the quality of our lives and that of what we produce, make, or build depends precisely on the quality of our thought. Shoddy thinking is costly, both in money and in quality of life. Excellence in thought, however, must be systematically cultivated.

A Brief Definition:

Critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it. The Result: 

  A well-cultivated critical thinker:

• raises vital questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely;
• gathers and assesses relevant information, using abstract ideas to interpret it effectively;
• comes to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria and standards;
• thinks openmindedly within alternative systems of thought, recognizing and assessing, as need be, their assumptions, implications, and practical consequences; and
• communicates effectively with others in figuring out solutions to complex problems.

Critical thinking is, in short, self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking. It requires rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command of their use. It entails effective communication and problem-solving abilities, and a commitment to overcoming our native egocentrism and sociocentrism. Read more about our concept of critical thinking .

The Essential Dimensions of Critical Thinking

Our conception of critical thinking is based on the substantive approach developed by Dr. Richard Paul and his colleagues at the Center and Foundation for Critical Thinking over multiple decades. It is relevant to every subject, discipline, and profession, and to reasoning through the problems of everyday life. It entails five essential dimensions of critical thinking:

At the left is an overview of the first three dimensions. In sum, the elements or structures of thought enable us to "take our thinking apart" and analyze it. The intellectual standards are used to assess and evaluate the elements. The intellectual traits are dispositions of mind embodied by the fairminded critical thinker. To cultivate the mind, we need command of these essential dimensions, and we need to consistently apply them as we think through the many problems and issues in our lives.

The Elements of Reasoning and Intellectual Standards

To learn more about the elements of thought and how to apply the intellectual standards, check out our interactive model. Simply click on the link below, scroll to the bottom of the page, and explore the model with your mouse.

Why the Analysis of Thinking Is Important If you want to think well, you must understand at least the rudiments of thought, the most basic structures out of which all thinking is made. You must learn how to take thinking apart. Analyzing the Logic of a Subject When we understand the elements of reasoning, we realize that all subjects, all disciplines, have a fundamental logic defined by the structures of thought embedded within them. Therefore, to lay bare a subject’s most fundamental logic, we should begin with these questions:

Going Deeper...

The Critical Thinking Bookstore  

Our online bookstore houses numerous books and teacher's manuals , Thinker's Guides , videos , and other educational materials .  

Learn From Our Fellows and Scholars

Watch our Event Calendar , which provides an overview of all upcoming conferences and academies hosted by the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Clicking an entry on the Event Calendar will bring up that event's details, and the option to register. For those interested in online learning, the Foundation offers accredited online courses in critical thinking for both educators and the general public, as well as an online test for evaluating basic comprehension of critical thinking concepts . We are in the process of developing more online learning tools and tests to offer the community.  

Utilizing this Website

This website contains large amounts research and an online library of articles , both of which are freely available to the public. We also invite you to become a member of the Critical Thinking Community , where you will gain access to more tools and materials.  If you cannot locate a resource on a specific topic or concept, try searching for it using our Search Tool . The Search Tool is at the upper-right of every page on the website.

The Will to Teach

Critical Thinking in the Classroom: A Guide for Teachers

In the ever-evolving landscape of education, teaching students the skill of critical thinking has become a priority. This powerful tool empowers students to evaluate information, make reasoned judgments, and approach problems from a fresh perspective. In this article, we’ll explore the significance of critical thinking and provide effective strategies to nurture this skill in your students.

Why is Fostering Critical Thinking Important?

Strategies to cultivate critical thinking, real-world example, concluding thoughts.

Critical thinking is a key skill that goes far beyond the four walls of a classroom. It equips students to better understand and interact with the world around them. Here are some reasons why fostering critical thinking is important:

• Making Informed Decisions:  Critical thinking enables students to evaluate the pros and cons of a situation, helping them make informed and rational decisions.
• Developing Analytical Skills:  Critical thinking involves analyzing information from different angles, which enhances analytical skills.
• Promoting Independence:  Critical thinking fosters independence by encouraging students to form their own opinions based on their analysis, rather than relying on others.

Creating an environment that encourages critical thinking can be accomplished in various ways. Here are some effective strategies:

• Socratic Questioning:  This method involves asking thought-provoking questions that encourage students to think deeply about a topic. For example, instead of asking, “What is the capital of France?” you might ask, “Why do you think Paris became the capital of France?”
• Debates and Discussions:  Debates and open-ended discussions allow students to explore different viewpoints and challenge their own beliefs. For example, a debate on a current event can engage students in critical analysis of the situation.
• Teaching Metacognition:  Teaching students to think about their own thinking can enhance their critical thinking skills. This can be achieved through activities such as reflective writing or journaling.
• Problem-Solving Activities:  As with developing problem-solving skills , activities that require students to find solutions to complex problems can also foster critical thinking.

As a school leader, I’ve seen the transformative power of critical thinking. During a school competition, I observed a team of students tasked with proposing a solution to reduce our school’s environmental impact. Instead of jumping to obvious solutions, they critically evaluated multiple options, considering the feasibility, cost, and potential impact of each. They ultimately proposed a comprehensive plan that involved water conservation, waste reduction, and energy efficiency measures. This demonstrated their ability to critically analyze a problem and develop an effective solution.

Critical thinking is an essential skill for students in the 21st century. It equips them to understand and navigate the world in a thoughtful and informed manner. As a teacher, incorporating strategies to foster critical thinking in your classroom can make a lasting impact on your students’ educational journey and life beyond school.

1. What is critical thinking? Critical thinking is the ability to analyze information objectively and make a reasoned judgment.

2. Why is critical thinking important for students? Critical thinking helps students make informed decisions, develop analytical skills, and promotes independence.

3. What are some strategies to cultivate critical thinking in students? Strategies can include Socratic questioning, debates and discussions, teaching metacognition, and problem-solving activities.

4. How can I assess my students’ critical thinking skills? You can assess critical thinking skills through essays, presentations, discussions, and problem-solving tasks that require thoughtful analysis.

5. Can critical thinking be taught? Yes, critical thinking can be taught and nurtured through specific teaching strategies and a supportive learning environment.

Related Posts

7 simple strategies for strong student-teacher relationships.

Getting to know your students on a personal level is the first step towards building strong relationships. Show genuine interest in their lives outside the classroom.

Connecting Learning to Real-World Contexts: Strategies for Teachers

When students see the relevance of their classroom lessons to their everyday lives, they are more likely to be motivated, engaged, and retain information.

Encouraging Active Involvement in Learning: Strategies for Teachers

Active learning benefits students by improving retention of information, enhancing critical thinking skills, and encouraging a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

Collaborative and Cooperative Learning: A Guide for Teachers

These methods encourage students to work together, share ideas, and actively participate in their education.

Experiential Teaching: Role-Play and Simulations in Teaching

These interactive techniques allow students to immerse themselves in practical, real-world scenarios, thereby deepening their understanding and retention of key concepts.

Project-Based Learning Activities: A Guide for Teachers

Project-Based Learning is a student-centered pedagogy that involves a dynamic approach to teaching, where students explore real-world problems or challenges.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Integrating Critical Thinking Into the Classroom

• Share article

(This is the second post in a three-part series. You can see Part One here .)

The new question-of-the-week is:

What is critical thinking and how can we integrate it into the classroom?

Part One ‘s guests were Dara Laws Savage, Patrick Brown, Meg Riordan, Ph.D., and Dr. PJ Caposey. Dara, Patrick, and Meg were also guests on my 10-minute BAM! Radio Show . You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

Today, Dr. Kulvarn Atwal, Elena Quagliarello, Dr. Donna Wilson, and Diane Dahl share their recommendations.

‘Learning Conversations’

Dr. Kulvarn Atwal is currently the executive head teacher of two large primary schools in the London borough of Redbridge. Dr. Atwal is the author of The Thinking School: Developing a Dynamic Learning Community , published by John Catt Educational. Follow him on Twitter @Thinkingschool2 :

In many classrooms I visit, students’ primary focus is on what they are expected to do and how it will be measured. It seems that we are becoming successful at producing students who are able to jump through hoops and pass tests. But are we producing children that are positive about teaching and learning and can think critically and creatively? Consider your classroom environment and the extent to which you employ strategies that develop students’ critical-thinking skills and their self-esteem as learners.

Development of self-esteem

One of the most significant factors that impacts students’ engagement and achievement in learning in your classroom is their self-esteem. In this context, self-esteem can be viewed to be the difference between how they perceive themselves as a learner (perceived self) and what they consider to be the ideal learner (ideal self). This ideal self may reflect the child that is associated or seen to be the smartest in the class. Your aim must be to raise students’ self-esteem. To do this, you have to demonstrate that effort, not ability, leads to success. Your language and interactions in the classroom, therefore, have to be aspirational—that if children persist with something, they will achieve.

Use of evaluative praise

Ensure that when you are praising students, you are making explicit links to a child’s critical thinking and/or development. This will enable them to build their understanding of what factors are supporting them in their learning. For example, often when we give feedback to students, we may simply say, “Well done” or “Good answer.” However, are the students actually aware of what they did well or what was good about their answer? Make sure you make explicit what the student has done well and where that links to prior learning. How do you value students’ critical thinking—do you praise their thinking and demonstrate how it helps them improve their learning?

Learning conversations to encourage deeper thinking

We often feel as teachers that we have to provide feedback to every students’ response, but this can limit children’s thinking. Encourage students in your class to engage in learning conversations with each other. Give as many opportunities as possible to students to build on the responses of others. Facilitate chains of dialogue by inviting students to give feedback to each other. The teacher’s role is, therefore, to facilitate this dialogue and select each individual student to give feedback to others. It may also mean that you do not always need to respond at all to a student’s answer.

Teacher modelling own thinking

We cannot expect students to develop critical-thinking skills if we aren’t modeling those thinking skills for them. Share your creativity, imagination, and thinking skills with the students and you will nurture creative, imaginative critical thinkers. Model the language you want students to learn and think about. Share what you feel about the learning activities your students are participating in as well as the thinking you are engaging in. Your own thinking and learning will add to the discussions in the classroom and encourage students to share their own thinking.

Metacognitive questioning

Consider the extent to which your questioning encourages students to think about their thinking, and therefore, learn about learning! Through asking metacognitive questions, you will enable your students to have a better understanding of the learning process, as well as their own self-reflections as learners. Example questions may include:

• Why did you choose to do it that way?
• When you find something tricky, what helps you?
• How do you know when you have really learned something?

‘Adventures of Discovery’

Elena Quagliarello is the senior editor of education for Scholastic News , a current events magazine for students in grades 3–6. She graduated from Rutgers University, where she studied English and earned her master’s degree in elementary education. She is a certified K–12 teacher and previously taught middle school English/language arts for five years:

Critical thinking blasts through the surface level of a topic. It reaches beyond the who and the what and launches students on a learning journey that ultimately unlocks a deeper level of understanding. Teaching students how to think critically helps them turn information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. In the classroom, critical thinking teaches students how to ask and answer the questions needed to read the world. Whether it’s a story, news article, photo, video, advertisement, or another form of media, students can use the following critical-thinking strategies to dig beyond the surface and uncover a wealth of knowledge.

A Layered Learning Approach

Begin by having students read a story, article, or analyze a piece of media. Then have them excavate and explore its various layers of meaning. First, ask students to think about the literal meaning of what they just read. For example, if students read an article about the desegregation of public schools during the 1950s, they should be able to answer questions such as: Who was involved? What happened? Where did it happen? Which details are important? This is the first layer of critical thinking: reading comprehension. Do students understand the passage at its most basic level?

Ask the Tough Questions

The next layer delves deeper and starts to uncover the author’s purpose and craft. Teach students to ask the tough questions: What information is included? What or who is left out? How does word choice influence the reader? What perspective is represented? What values or people are marginalized? These questions force students to critically analyze the choices behind the final product. In today’s age of fast-paced, easily accessible information, it is essential to teach students how to critically examine the information they consume. The goal is to equip students with the mindset to ask these questions on their own.

Strike Gold

The deepest layer of critical thinking comes from having students take a step back to think about the big picture. This level of thinking is no longer focused on the text itself but rather its real-world implications. Students explore questions such as: Why does this matter? What lesson have I learned? How can this lesson be applied to other situations? Students truly engage in critical thinking when they are able to reflect on their thinking and apply their knowledge to a new situation. This step has the power to transform knowledge into wisdom.

Adventures of Discovery

There are vast ways to spark critical thinking in the classroom. Here are a few other ideas:

• Critical Expressionism: In this expanded response to reading from a critical stance, students are encouraged to respond through forms of artistic interpretations, dramatizations, singing, sketching, designing projects, or other multimodal responses. For example, students might read an article and then create a podcast about it or read a story and then act it out.
• Transmediations: This activity requires students to take an article or story and transform it into something new. For example, they might turn a news article into a cartoon or turn a story into a poem. Alternatively, students may rewrite a story by changing some of its elements, such as the setting or time period.
• Words Into Action: In this type of activity, students are encouraged to take action and bring about change. Students might read an article about endangered orangutans and the effects of habitat loss caused by deforestation and be inspired to check the labels on products for palm oil. They might then write a letter asking companies how they make sure the palm oil they use doesn’t hurt rain forests.
• Socratic Seminars: In this student-led discussion strategy, students pose thought-provoking questions to each other about a topic. They listen closely to each other’s comments and think critically about different perspectives.
• Classroom Debates: Aside from sparking a lively conversation, classroom debates naturally embed critical-thinking skills by asking students to formulate and support their own opinions and consider and respond to opposing viewpoints.

Critical thinking has the power to launch students on unforgettable learning experiences while helping them develop new habits of thought, reflection, and inquiry. Developing these skills prepares students to examine issues of power and promote transformative change in the world around them.

‘Quote Analysis’

Dr. Donna Wilson is a psychologist and the author of 20 books, including Developing Growth Mindsets , Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains , and Five Big Ideas for Effective Teaching (2 nd Edition). She is an international speaker who has worked in Asia, the Middle East, Australia, Europe, Jamaica, and throughout the U.S. and Canada. Dr. Wilson can be reached at [email protected] ; visit her website at www.brainsmart.org .

Diane Dahl has been a teacher for 13 years, having taught grades 2-4 throughout her career. Mrs. Dahl currently teaches 3rd and 4th grade GT-ELAR/SS in Lovejoy ISD in Fairview, Texas. Follow her on Twitter at @DahlD, and visit her website at www.fortheloveofteaching.net :

A growing body of research over the past several decades indicates that teaching students how to be better thinkers is a great way to support them to be more successful at school and beyond. In the book, Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains , Dr. Wilson shares research and many motivational strategies, activities, and lesson ideas that assist students to think at higher levels. Five key strategies from the book are as follows:

• Facilitate conversation about why it is important to think critically at school and in other contexts of life. Ideally, every student will have a contribution to make to the discussion over time.
• Begin teaching thinking skills early in the school year and as a daily part of class.
• As this instruction begins, introduce students to the concept of brain plasticity and how their brilliant brains change during thinking and learning. This can be highly motivational for students who do not yet believe they are good thinkers!
• Explicitly teach students how to use the thinking skills.
• Facilitate student understanding of how the thinking skills they are learning relate to their lives at school and in other contexts.

Below are two lessons that support critical thinking, which can be defined as the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.

Mrs. Dahl prepares her 3rd and 4th grade classes for a year of critical thinking using quote analysis .

During Native American studies, her 4 th grade analyzes a Tuscarora quote: “Man has responsibility, not power.” Since students already know how the Native Americans’ land had been stolen, it doesn’t take much for them to make the logical leaps. Critical-thought prompts take their thinking even deeper, especially at the beginning of the year when many need scaffolding. Some prompts include:

• … from the point of view of the Native Americans?
• … from the point of view of the settlers?
• How do you think your life might change over time as a result?
• Can you relate this quote to anything else in history?

Analyzing a topic from occupational points of view is an incredibly powerful critical-thinking tool. After learning about the Mexican-American War, Mrs. Dahl’s students worked in groups to choose an occupation with which to analyze the war. The chosen occupations were: anthropologist, mathematician, historian, archaeologist, cartographer, and economist. Then each individual within each group chose a different critical-thinking skill to focus on. Finally, they worked together to decide how their occupation would view the war using each skill.

For example, here is what each student in the economist group wrote:

• When U.S.A. invaded Mexico for land and won, Mexico ended up losing income from the settlements of Jose de Escandon. The U.S.A. thought that they were gaining possible tradable land, while Mexico thought that they were losing precious land and resources.
• Whenever Texas joined the states, their GDP skyrocketed. Then they went to war and spent money on supplies. When the war was resolving, Texas sold some of their land to New Mexico for $10 million. This allowed Texas to pay off their debt to the U.S., improving their relationship.
• A detail that converged into the Mexican-American War was that Mexico and the U.S. disagreed on the Texas border. With the resulting treaty, Texas ended up gaining more land and economic resources.
• Texas gained land from Mexico since both countries disagreed on borders. Texas sold land to New Mexico, which made Texas more economically structured and allowed them to pay off their debt.

This was the first time that students had ever used the occupations technique. Mrs. Dahl was astonished at how many times the kids used these critical skills in other areas moving forward.

Thanks to Dr. Auwal, Elena, Dr. Wilson, and Diane for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It’s titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching .

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email (The RSS feed for this blog, and for all Ed Week articles, has been changed by the new redesign—new ones won’t be available until February). And if you missed any of the highlights from the first nine years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below.

• This Year’s Most Popular Q&A Posts
• Race & Racism in Schools
• School Closures & the Coronavirus Crisis
• Classroom-Management Advice
• Best Ways to Begin the School Year
• Best Ways to End the School Year
• Student Motivation & Social-Emotional Learning
• Implementing the Common Core
• Facing Gender Challenges in Education
• Teaching Social Studies
• Cooperative & Collaborative Learning
• Using Tech in the Classroom
• Student Voices
• Parent Engagement in Schools
• Teaching English-Language Learners
• Reading Instruction
• Writing Instruction
• Education Policy Issues
• Differentiating Instruction
• Math Instruction
• Science Instruction
• Advice for New Teachers
• Author Interviews
• Entering the Teaching Profession
• The Inclusive Classroom
• Learning & the Brain
• Administrator Leadership
• Teacher Leadership
• Relationships in Schools
• Professional Development
• Instructional Strategies
• Best of Classroom Q&A
• Professional Collaboration
• Classroom Organization
• Mistakes in Education
• Project-Based Learning

I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column .

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

Sign Up for EdWeek Update

Edweek top school jobs.

Sign Up & Sign In

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.

• Order Tracking
• Create an Account

200+ Award-Winning Educational Textbooks, Activity Books, & Printable eBooks!

• Compare Products

Reading, Writing, Math, Science, Social Studies

• Search by Book Series
• Algebra I & II  Gr. 7-12+
• Algebra Magic Tricks  Gr. 2-12+
• Algebra Word Problems  Gr. 7-12+
• Balance Benders  Gr. 2-12+
• Balance Math & More!  Gr. 2-12+
• Basics of Critical Thinking  Gr. 4-7
• Brain Stretchers  Gr. 5-12+
• Building Thinking Skills  Gr. Toddler-12+
• Building Writing Skills  Gr. 3-7
• Bundles - Critical Thinking  Gr. PreK-9
• Bundles - Language Arts  Gr. K-8
• Bundles - Mathematics  Gr. PreK-9
• Bundles - Multi-Subject Curriculum  Gr. PreK-12+
• Bundles - Test Prep  Gr. Toddler-12+
• Can You Find Me?  Gr. PreK-1
• Complete the Picture Math  Gr. 1-3
• Cornell Critical Thinking Tests  Gr. 5-12+
• Cranium Crackers  Gr. 3-12+
• Creative Problem Solving  Gr. PreK-2
• Critical Thinking Activities to Improve Writing  Gr. 4-12+
• Critical Thinking Coloring  Gr. PreK-2
• Critical Thinking Detective  Gr. 3-12+
• Critical Thinking Tests  Gr. PreK-6
• Critical Thinking for Reading Comprehension  Gr. 1-5
• Critical Thinking in United States History  Gr. 6-12+
• CrossNumber Math Puzzles  Gr. 4-10
• Crypt-O-Words  Gr. 2-7
• Crypto Mind Benders  Gr. 3-12+
• Daily Mind Builders  Gr. 5-12+
• Dare to Compare Math  Gr. 2-7
• Developing Critical Thinking through Science  Gr. 1-8
• Dr. DooRiddles  Gr. PreK-12+
• Dr. Funster's  Gr. 2-12+
• Editor in Chief  Gr. 2-12+
• Fun-Time Phonics!  Gr. PreK-2
• Half 'n Half Animals  Gr. K-4
• Hands-On Thinking Skills  Gr. K-1
• Inference Jones  Gr. 1-6
• James Madison  Gr. 10-12+
• Jumbles  Gr. 3-5
• Language Mechanic  Gr. 4-7
• Language Smarts  Gr. 1-4
• Mastering Logic & Math Problem Solving  Gr. 6-9
• Math Analogies  Gr. K-9
• Math Detective  Gr. 3-8
• Math Games  Gr. 3-8
• Math Mind Benders  Gr. 5-12+
• Math Ties  Gr. 4-8
• Math Word Problems  Gr. 4-10
• Mathematical Reasoning  Gr. Toddler-11
• Middle School Science  Gr. 6-8
• Mind Benders  Gr. PreK-12+
• Mind Building Math  Gr. K-1
• Mind Building Reading  Gr. K-1
• Novel Thinking  Gr. 3-6
• OLSAT® Test Prep  Gr. PreK-K
• Organizing Thinking  Gr. 2-8
• Pattern Explorer  Gr. 3-9
• Practical Critical Thinking  Gr. 8-12+
• Punctuation Puzzler  Gr. 3-8
• Reading Detective  Gr. 3-12+
• Red Herring Mysteries  Gr. 4-12+
• Red Herrings Science Mysteries  Gr. 4-9
• Science Detective  Gr. 3-6
• Science Mind Benders  Gr. PreK-3
• Science Vocabulary Crossword Puzzles  Gr. 4-6
• Sciencewise  Gr. 4-12+
• Scratch Your Brain  Gr. 2-12+
• Sentence Diagramming  Gr. 3-12+
• Smarty Pants Puzzles  Gr. 3-12+
• Snailopolis  Gr. K-4
• Something's Fishy at Lake Iwannafisha  Gr. 5-9
• Teaching Technology  Gr. 3-12+
• Tell Me a Story  Gr. PreK-1
• Think Analogies  Gr. 3-12+
• Think and Write  Gr. 3-8
• Think-A-Grams  Gr. 4-12+
• Thinking About Time  Gr. 3-6
• Thinking Connections  Gr. 4-12+
• Thinking Directionally  Gr. 2-6
• Thinking Skills & Key Concepts  Gr. PreK-2
• Thinking Skills for Tests  Gr. PreK-5
• U.S. History Detective  Gr. 8-12+
• Understanding Fractions  Gr. 2-6
• Visual Perceptual Skill Building  Gr. PreK-3
• Vocabulary Riddles  Gr. 4-8
• Vocabulary Smarts  Gr. 2-5
• Vocabulary Virtuoso  Gr. 2-12+
• What Would You Do?  Gr. 2-12+
• Who Is This Kid? Colleges Want to Know!  Gr. 9-12+
• Word Explorer  Gr. 4-8
• Word Roots  Gr. 3-12+
• World History Detective  Gr. 6-12+
• Writing Detective  Gr. 3-6
• You Decide!  Gr. 6-12+

• Special of the Month
• Sign Up for our Best Offers
• Bundles = Greatest Savings!
• Sign Up for Free Puzzles
• Sign Up for Free Activities
• Toddler (Ages 0-3)
• PreK (Ages 3-5)
• Kindergarten (Ages 5-6)
• 1st Grade (Ages 6-7)
• 2nd Grade (Ages 7-8)
• 3rd Grade (Ages 8-9)
• 4th Grade (Ages 9-10)
• 5th Grade (Ages 10-11)
• 6th Grade (Ages 11-12)
• 7th Grade (Ages 12-13)
• 8th Grade (Ages 13-14)
• 9th Grade (Ages 14-15)
• 10th Grade (Ages 15-16)
• 11th Grade (Ages 16-17)
• 12th Grade (Ages 17-18)
• 12th+ Grade (Ages 18+)
• Test Prep Directory
• Test Prep Bundles
• Test Prep Guides
• Preschool Academics
• Store Locator
• Submit Feedback/Request
• Sales Alerts Sign-Up
• Technical Support
• Mission & History
• Articles & Advice
• Testimonials
• Our Guarantee
• New Products
• Free Activities
• Libros en Español

How To Promote Critical Thinking In Your Classroom

Promoting Thinking

November 25, 2006, by The Critical Thinking Co. Staff

Modeling of critical thinking skills by instructors is crucial for teaching critical thinking successfully. By making your own thought processes explicit in class - explaining your reasoning, evaluating evidence for a claim, probing the credibility of a source, or even describing what has puzzled or confused you - you provide a powerful example to students, particularly if you invite them to join in; e.g., "Can you see where we're headed with this?" "I can't think of other explanations; can you?" "This idea/principle struck me as difficult or confusing at first, but here's how I figured it out." You can encourage students to emulate this by using them in demonstrations, asking them to "think out loud" in order for classmates to observe how they reason through a problem.

Develop the habit of asking questions that require students to think critically, and tell students that you really expect them to give answers! In particular, Socratic questioning encourages students to develop and clarify their thinking: e.g., "Would your answer hold in all cases?" "How would you respond to a counter-example or counter-argument?" "Explain how you arrived at that answer?"

This is another skill that students can learn from your example, and can use in working with each other. Providing regular opportunities for pair or small group discussions after major points or demonstrations during lectures is also important: this allows students to process the new material, connect it to previously learned topics, and practice asking questions that promote further critical thinking. Obviously, conveying genuine respect for student input is essential. Communicating the message that you value and support student contributions and efforts to think critically increases confidence, and motivates students to continue building their thinking skills. An essential component of this process is the creation of a climate where students feel comfortable with exploring the process of reasoning through a problem without being "punished" for getting the wrong answer.

Researchers have found consistently that interaction among students, in the form of well-structured group discussions plays a central role in stimulating critical thinking. Discussing course material and its applications allows students to formulate and test hypotheses, practice asking thought-provoking questions, hear other perspectives, analyze claims, evaluate evidence, and explain and justify their reasoning. As they become more sophisticated and fluent in thinking critically, students can observe and critique each others' reasoning skills.

Want a daily email of lesson plans that span all subjects and age groups?

Subjects all subjects all subjects the arts all the arts visual arts performing arts value of the arts back business & economics all business & economics global economics macroeconomics microeconomics personal finance business back design, engineering & technology all design, engineering & technology design engineering technology back health all health growth & development medical conditions consumer health public health nutrition physical fitness emotional health sex education back literature & language all literature & language literature linguistics writing/composition speaking back mathematics all mathematics algebra data analysis & probability geometry measurement numbers & operations back philosophy & religion all philosophy & religion philosophy religion back psychology all psychology history, approaches and methods biological bases of behavior consciousness, sensation and perception cognition and learning motivation and emotion developmental psychology personality psychological disorders and treatment social psychology back science & technology all science & technology earth and space science life sciences physical science environmental science nature of science back social studies all social studies anthropology area studies civics geography history media and journalism sociology back teaching & education all teaching & education education leadership education policy structure and function of schools teaching strategies back thinking & learning all thinking & learning attention and engagement memory critical thinking problem solving creativity collaboration information literacy organization and time management back, filter by none.

• Elementary/Primary
• Middle School/Lower Secondary
• High School/Upper Secondary
• College/University
• TED-Ed Animations
• TED Talk Lessons
• TED-Ed Best of Web
• Under 3 minutes
• Under 6 minutes
• Under 9 minutes
• Under 12 minutes
• Under 18 minutes
• Over 18 minutes
• Algerian Arabic
• Azerbaijani
• Cantonese (Hong Kong)
• Chinese (Hong Kong)
• Chinese (Singapore)
• Chinese (Taiwan)
• Chinese Simplified
• Chinese Traditional
• Chinese Traditional (Taiwan)
• Dutch (Belgium)
• Dutch (Netherlands)
• French (Canada)
• French (France)
• French (Switzerland)
• Kurdish (Central)
• Luxembourgish
• Persian (Afghanistan)
• Persian (Iran)
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Spanish (Argentina)
• Spanish (Latin America)
• Spanish (Mexico)
• Spanish (Spain)
• Spanish (United States)
• Western Frisian

sort by none

• Longest video
• Shortest video
• Most video views
• Least video views
• Most questions answered
• Least questions answered

How could so many people support Hitler?

Lesson duration 05:10

715,858 Views

Can you solve the magical maze riddle?

Lesson duration 04:51

492,625 Views

How to make smart decisions more easily

Lesson duration 05:16

1,366,087 Views

Can you solve a mystery before Sherlock Holmes?

Lesson duration 05:17

536,318 Views

Can you solve the secret assassin society riddle?

Lesson duration 05:01

927,486 Views

How to overcome your mistakes

Lesson duration 04:52

1,069,850 Views

Can you solve the cursed dice riddle?

Lesson duration 04:31

811,061 Views

Why some people don't have an inner monologue

Lesson duration 12:03

2,925,099 Views

Science vs. Pseudoscience

Lesson duration 05:48

374,652 Views

Can you solve the time traveling car riddle?

Lesson duration 05:18

706,976 Views

This one weird trick will get you infinite gold

Lesson duration 05:08

1,183,844 Views

How to quit your job — without ruining your career - Gala Jackson

Lesson duration 06:13

118,780 Views

What if you experienced every human life in history?

Lesson duration 05:21

3,012,311 Views

How to design climate-resilient buildings - Alyssa-Amor Gibbons

Lesson duration 14:12

46,602 Views

The case for free, universal basic services - Aaron Bastani

Lesson duration 19:09

82,564 Views

Can you steal the most powerful wand in the wizarding world?

Lesson duration 05:20

841,971 Views

History vs. Thomas Jefferson

499,098 Views

The best way to apologize (according to science)

Lesson duration 05:06

1,596,080 Views

How do we determine the value of a life?

Lesson duration 06:06

848,812 Views

What’s the smartest age?

Lesson duration 04:53

1,739,934 Views

The Boltzmann brain paradox

Lesson duration 05:40

1,239,998 Views

The 4 greatest threats to the survival of humanity

Lesson duration 05:24

497,806 Views

Can you outsmart the college admissions fallacy?

Lesson duration 06:17

841,241 Views

Can you solve the fortress riddle?

Lesson duration 05:23

1,318,948 Views

• PRO Courses Guides New Tech Help Pro Expert Videos About wikiHow Pro Upgrade Sign In
• EDIT Edit this Article
• EXPLORE Tech Help Pro About Us Random Article Quizzes Request a New Article Community Dashboard This Or That Game Happiness Hub Popular Categories Arts and Entertainment Artwork Books Movies Computers and Electronics Computers Phone Skills Technology Hacks Health Men's Health Mental Health Women's Health Relationships Dating Love Relationship Issues Hobbies and Crafts Crafts Drawing Games Education & Communication Communication Skills Personal Development Studying Personal Care and Style Fashion Hair Care Personal Hygiene Youth Personal Care School Stuff Dating All Categories Arts and Entertainment Finance and Business Home and Garden Relationship Quizzes Cars & Other Vehicles Food and Entertaining Personal Care and Style Sports and Fitness Computers and Electronics Health Pets and Animals Travel Education & Communication Hobbies and Crafts Philosophy and Religion Work World Family Life Holidays and Traditions Relationships Youth
• Browse Articles
• Learn Something New
• Quizzes Hot
• Happiness Hub
• This Or That Game
• Train Your Brain
• Explore More
• Support wikiHow
• About wikiHow
• Log in / Sign up
• Family Life
• Teaching Children Skills

How to Teach Critical Thinking

Last Updated: September 28, 2023 Approved

This article was co-authored by Jai Flicker . Jai Flicker is an Academic Tutor and the CEO and Founder of Lifeworks Learning Center, a San Francisco Bay Area-based business focused on providing tutoring, parental support, test preparation, college essay writing help, and psychoeducational evaluations to help students transform their attitude toward learning. Jai has over 20 years of experience in the education management industry. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. This article received 11 testimonials and 100% of readers who voted found it helpful, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 297,095 times.

If you want to teach your students critical thinking, give them opportunities to brainstorm and analyze things. Classroom discussions are a great way to encourage open-mindedness and creativity. Teach students to ask "why?" as much as possible and recognize patterns. An important part of critical thinking is also recognizing good and bad sources of information.

Encouraging Students to Have an Open Mind

• For example, ask students an open-ended question like, "What would be a good way to get more people to recycle in the school?"
• Whether or not it's realistic, offer praise for an inventive answer like, "we could start to make a giant sculpture out of recyclable things in the middle of the school. Everyone will want to add to it, and at the end of the year we can take pictures and then break it down to bring to the recycling plant."

• Try including a brief creative exercise in the beginning of class to help get their minds working. For example, you could ask students to identify 5 uses for a shoe besides wearing it.

• For instance, make columns to name the good things about both a camping trip and a city excursion, then have students think about a happy medium between the two.

Helping Students Make Connections

• For instance, environmental themes may come up in science, history, literature, and art lessons.
• If you are teaching geometry, then you might ask if they have ever seen a building that resembles the shapes you are teaching about. You could even show them some images yourself.

• Explain to your students how the clues and their own personal influences form their final conclusions about the picture.
• For instance, show students a picture of a man and woman shaking hands in front of a home with a "For Sale" sign in front of it. Have students explain what they think is happening in the picture, and slowly break down the things that made them reach that conclusion.

• "To take a train."
• "To get to the city."
• "To meet his friend."
• "Because he missed him."
• "Because he was lonely."
• On a more advanced level, students will benefit from interrogating their research and work to determine its relevance.

Teaching Students About Reliable Information

• For instance, if a student says that there are fewer libraries than there used to be, have them provide some actual statistics about libraries to support their statement.

• Encourage students to ask the simple question, "Who is sharing this information, and why?"
• For instance, an advertisement for a low calorie food product may be disguised as a special interest television segment about how to lose weight on a budget.

• The date it was published, whether or not it has been updated, and how current the information is. Tell students where to find this information on the website.
• What the author's qualifications are. For instance, a medical article should be written by a doctor or other medical professional.
• If there is supporting evidence to back up what the writer says. Sources should always have information to back them up, especially when the source is something your students find on the internet.

• For example, if your students are reviewing the political viewpoint of a senator in the USA, ask your students to look up donations provided to that senator from any special interest groups. This may provide your students with insight into the reasons for the senator’s views.

How Do You Improve Critical Thinking Skills?

Expert Q&A

You Might Also Like

• ↑ http://www.scholastic.com/parents/resources/article/thinking-skills-learning-styles/think-about-it-critical-thinking
• ↑ Jai Flicker. Academic Tutor. Expert Interview. 20 May 2020.
• ↑ https://www.weareteachers.com/10-tips-for-teaching-kids-to-be-awesome-critical-thinkers/
• ↑ https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/11/06/three-tools-for-teaching-critical-thinking-and-problem-solving-skills/
• ↑ http://www.pbs.org/now/classroom/lessonplan-07.html
• ↑ http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/23/503129818/study-finds-students-have-dismaying-inability-to-tell-fake-news-from-real
• ↑ http://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/ptn/2017/05/fake-news.aspx

About This Article

To teach critical thinking, start class discussions by asking open-ended questions, like "What does the author mean?" Alternatively, have your students make lists of pros and cons so they can see that two conflicting ideas can both have merit. You can also encourage your students to think more deeply about their own reasoning by asking them “Why?” 5 times as they explain an answer to you. Finally, teach students to figure out whether information, especially from online sources, is reliable by checking to see if it comes from a trusted source and is backed by evidence. For more from our reviewer on how to help students make connections that lead to more critical thinking, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

• Send fan mail to authors

Reader Success Stories

Linda Mercado de Martell

Jul 24, 2017

Did this article help you?

Saeful Basri

Dec 21, 2016

Jan 23, 2017

Liebe Brand

Jul 23, 2016

Dec 14, 2016

Featured Articles

Trending Articles

Watch Articles

• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Do Not Sell or Share My Info
• Not Selling Info

Don’t miss out! Sign up for

wikiHow’s newsletter

CTL Guide to the Critical Thinking Hub Area

Guidance for designing or teaching a Critical Thinking (CRT) course, including assignment resources and examples.

From the BU Hub Curriculum Guide

“The ability to think critically is the fundamental characteristic of an educated person. It is required for just, civil society and governance, prized by employers, and essential for the growth of wisdom. Critical thinking is what most people name first when asked about the essential components of a college education. From identifying and questioning assumptions, to weighing evidence before accepting an opinion or drawing a conclusion—all BU students will actively learn the habits of mind that characterize critical thinking, develop the self-discipline it requires, and practice it often, in varied contexts, across their education.” For more context around this Hub area, see this  Hub page .

Learning Outcomes

Courses and cocurricular activities in this area must have all outcomes.

• Students will both gain critical thinking skills and be able to specify the components of critical thinking appropriate to a discipline or family of disciplines. These may include habits of distinguishing deductive from inductive modes of inference, methods of adjudicating disputes, recognizing common logical fallacies and cognitive biases, translating ordinary language into formal argument, distinguishing empirical claims about matters of fact from normative or evaluative judgments, and/or recognizing the ways in which emotional responses or cultural assumptions can affect reasoning processes.
• Drawing on skills developed in class, students will be able to critically evaluate, analyze, and generate arguments, bodies of evidence, and/or claims, including their own.

If you are proposing a CRT course or if you want to learn more about these outcomes, please see this  Interpretive Document . Interpretive Documents, written by the   General Education Committee , are designed to answer questions faculty have raised about Hub policies, practices, and learning outcomes as a part of the course approval process. To learn more about the proposal process,  start here .

Area Specific Resources

• Richard Paul , Center for Critical Thinking ( criticalthinking.org ).  Includes sample lessons, syllabi, teaching suggestions, and interdisciplinary resources and examples.
• John Bean ’s Engaging Ideas – The Professor’s Guide to integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active learning in the Classroom  is an invaluable resource for developing classroom activities and assignments that promote critical thinking and the scaffolding of writing.

Assignment Ideas

Weekly writing assignments.

These assignments are question-driven, thematic, and require students to integrate disciplinary and critical thinking literature to evaluate the validity of arguments in case studies, as well as the connections among method, theory, and practice in the case studies. Here, students are asked to utilize a chosen critical thinking framework throughout their written responses. These assignments can evolve during the semester by prompting students to address increasing complex case studies and arguments while also evaluating their own opinions using evidence from the readings. Along the way, students have ample opportunities for self-reflection, peer feedback, and coaching by the instructor.

Argument Mapping

A visual technique that allows students to analyze persuasive prose. This technique allows students to evaluate arguments–that is, distinguish valid from invalid arguments, and evaluate the soundness of different arguments. Advanced usage can help students organize and navigate complex information, encourage clearly articulated reasoning, and promote quick and effective communication. To learn more, please explore the following resources:

• Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative course on this topic provides an excellent i ntroduction to exploring and understanding arguments. The course explains what the parts of an argument are, how to break arguments into their component parts, and how to create diagrams to show how those parts relate to each other.
• Philmaps.com provides a handout  that introduces the concept of argument mapping to students, and also includes a number of sample activities that faculty can use to introduce students to argument mapping.
• Mindmup’s Argument Visualization platform is an online mind map tool easily leveraged for creating argument maps.

Research Proposal and Final Research Paper

Demonstrates students’ ability to identify, distinguish, and assess ideological and evaluative claims and judgments about the selected research topic. Throughout the semester, students have the opportunity to practice their ability to evaluate the validity of arguments, including their own beliefs about the topic. Formative and summative assessments are provided to students at regular intervals and during each stage of the project.

Facilitating discussion that Presses Students for Accuracy and Expanded Reasoning . This resource is part of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education “Instructional Moves” video series.

Additional sample assignments and assessments can be found throughout the selected Resources section located above.

Course Design Questions

As you are integrating critical thinking into your course, here are a few questions that you might consider:

• What framework/vocabulary/process do you use to teach the key elements of critical thinking in your course?
• What assigned readings or other materials do you use to teach critical thinking specifically?
• Do students have opportunities throughout the semester to apply and practice these skills and receive feedback?
• What graded assignments evaluate how well students can both identify the key elements of critical thinking and demonstrate their ability to evaluate the validity of arguments (including their own)?

You may also be interested in:

Thinking critically in college workshop, ctl guide to the teamwork/collaboration hub area, ctl guide to writing-intensive hub courses, ctl guide to the individual in community hub area, ctl guide to digital/multimedia expression, oral & signed communication hub guide, creativity/innovation hub guide, research and information literacy hub guide.

• Grades 6-12
• School Leaders

Get our mega Halloween worksheets bundle! 👻

10 Tips for Teaching Kids To Be Awesome Critical Thinkers

Help students dig deeper!

For more tips, check out Mentoring Minds’  Critical Thinking Strategies Guide —a flip chart packed with question stems and lesson ideas to help teach kids to become better critical and creative thinkers. 

Getting students to dig deeper and answer questions using higher-level thinking can be a challenge. Here are our favorite tips for teaching critical thinking skills, adapted from Mentoring Minds’ Critical Thinking Strategies Guide,  that help kids solve problems by going beyond the obvious response.

1. Slow down the pace.

It’s easy to fall into a routine of calling on one of the first kids who raises a hand. But if you wait even just 3 to 5 seconds after asking a question, you’ll probably find the pool of students willing to give an answer grows significantly. Plus, it helps the speedy kids learn that the first answer that pops into their head isn’t always the best. There are times you may even want to wait up to a minute or longer if the question is particularly complex or time-consuming. To avoid an awkward pause, you can let kids know that they have 10 seconds to think before answering the question or that you need to see 10 hands raised from volunteers before you hear a response.

2. Pose a Question of the Day.

Put a new spin on bell ringers by asking a Question of the Day. Use a questioning stem (e.g., create a riddle that uses the mathematics term “multiply” in one of the clues or write a letter to a classmate recommending this book) and put it on the board. Students can write answers in their critical-thinking journals. Then have a class discussion at the end of the day.

3. Make a response box.

Write a random critical-thinking question on the board, (e.g., Is there a better way to work out this problem? Explain your thinking.). Give students a specified amount of time to provide a written response and put it in the response box. Pull out entries one by one and read them aloud to the class. Alternatively, you can give a prize—like a homework pass or free time—to the student with the first appropriate response whose name is drawn from the box or to everyone who submitted appropriate answers.

4. Take a side.

First, read a statement that has two opposing views (e.g., Do you agree or disagree with the author? Why?). Ask kids who agree to stand on one side of the room and those who disagree to stand on the other side. Then have kids talk about why they chose each side. They can switch sides if they change their minds during the discussion.

5. Ask “why?” five times.

When you encounter a problem in class, you can help the class come up with a solution by using the Why? Five Times strategy. Ask the first why question (e.g., Why didn’t the class do well on the spelling test?), and after a response is given, ask why four more times (e.g., Why didn’t students study for the test?, Why didn’t students have time to study for the test?, etc.). The idea is that after the fifth question is asked, the problem will be solved.

6. Role-play.

Come up with an imaginary scenario and have kids work through the steps to solve a problem as a class. First, identify the problem and write it as a question (e.g., Why didn’t the science experiment work as planned?). Then brainstorm ideas to solve it and choose the best one to write as a solution statement. Finally, create an action plan to carry out the solution.

7. Go “hitchhiking.”

Practice creative thinking by collaborating on a storyboard. Write a problem on an index card and pin it on the top of a bulletin board. Then put different headings on index cards and pin them below the main card. Have kids brainstorm ideas that develop each of the heading cards and let kids pin them on the board. Encourage kids to “go hitchhiking” by building onto their classmates’ ideas.

8. Turn around.

A great way to focus on the positive in not-so-positive situations is the Turn Around thinking strategy. If a student forgets to bring his homework to school, you can ask, “What good can come of this?” The student can answer with ideas like, “I will change my routine before I go to bed.”

9. Put your pocket chart to good use.

Choose six completed questioning stems from different levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and put them in a pocket chart. Choose some strips as mandatory and let kids pick two from the higher levels to answer aloud or in a journal.

10. Hold a Q&A session.

One way you can figure out how well kids are grasping critical-thinking skills is by holding question-and-answer sessions. Ask a variety of questions one-on-one or in small groups and take note of the levels of thought individual students use regularly and avoid over time. You can review your notes to help build more higher-order-thinking questions into your lessons.

FREE E-BOOK! How to Build a 36-Week Character Education Program . S upport  social-emotional learning through a critical thinking lens with  36 projects and activities plus tips, research, and more!

You Might Also Like

5 Critical Thinking Skills Every Kid Needs To Learn (And How To Teach Them)

Teach them to thoughtfully question the world around them. Continue Reading

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. 5335 Gate Parkway, Jacksonville, FL 32256

Critical Thinking for Teachers

• First Online: 02 January 2023

Cite this chapter

• Diler Oner 3 &
• Yeliz Gunal Aggul 3  

Part of the book series: Integrated Science ((IS,volume 13))

1005 Accesses

3 Citations

Developing critical thinking is an important educational goal for all grade levels today. To foster their students’ critical thinking, future teachers themselves must become critical thinkers first. Thus, critical thinking should be an essential aspect of teacher training. However, despite its importance, critical thinking is not systematically incorporated into teacher education programs. There exist several conceptualizations of critical thinking in the literature, and these have different entailments regarding the guidelines and instructional strategies to teach critical thinking. In this paper, after examining the critical thinking literature, we suggested that critical thinking could be conceptualized in two distinct but complementary ways—as the acquisition of cognitive skills (instrumental perspective) and as identity development (situated perspective). We discussed the implications of these perspectives in teacher education. While the instrumental perspective allowed us to consider what to teach regarding critical thinking, the situated perspective enabled us to emphasize the broader social context where critical thinking skills and dispositions could be means of active participation in the culture of teaching.

Graphical Abstract/Art Performance

Critical thinking.

Everything we teach should be different from machines. If we do not change the way we teach, 30 years from now, we will be in trouble . Jack Ma

Jack Ma Co-founder of the Alibaba Group.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Teaching Critical Thinking: An Operational Framework

Transformative Critique: What Confucianism Can Contribute to Contemporary Education

Teaching critical thinking for lifelong learning.

Burbules N-C, Berk R (1999) Critical thinking and critical pedagogy: relations, differences, and limits. In: Popkewitz T-S, Fendler L (eds) Critical theories in education. Routledge, New York, pp 45–65

Google Scholar  

Hitchcock D (2018) Critical thinking. In: Zalta E-N (ed) The Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/critical-thinking . Accessed 8 Aug 2020

Costa A-L (1985) Developing minds: preface to the revised edition. In: Costa A-L (ed) Developing minds: a resource book for teaching thinking. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Virginia, pp ix–x

National Education Association (2012) Preparing 21st-century students for a global society: an educator’s guide to “the four Cs.” http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/A-Guide-to-Four-Cs.pdf . Accessed 08 Aug 2020

Oner D (2019) Education 4.0: the skills needed for the future. In: Paper presented at the 5th Turkish-German frontiers of social science symposium (TUGFOSS) by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Stiftung Mercator, and Koç University, Leipzig, Germany, 24–27 Oct 2019

Elder L, Paul R (1994) Critical thinking: why we must transform our teaching. J Dev Educ 18(1):34–35

Williams R-L (2005) Targeting critical thinking within teacher education: the potential impact on society. Teach Educ Q 40(3):163–187

Holder J-J (1994) An epistemological foundation for thinking: a Deweyan approach. Stud Philos Educ 13:175–192

Article   Google Scholar  

Dewey J (1910) How we think. D.C. Heath and Company, Lexington

Bruner J (1966) Toward a theory of instruction. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

Laanemets U, Kalamees-Ruubel K (2013) The Taba-Tyler rationales. J Am Assoc Advance Curriculum Stud 9:1–12

McTighe J, Schollenberger J (1985) Why teach thinking? A statement of rationale. In: Costa A-L (ed) Developing minds: a resource book for teaching thinking. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, pp 2–5

Taba H (1962) The teaching of thinking. Element English 42(5):534–542

Pressesien B-Z (1985) Thinking skills: meanings and models revisited. In: Costa A-L (ed) Developing minds: a resource book for teaching thinking Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, pp 56–62

Cohen J (1971) Thinking. Rand McNally, Chicago

Iowa Department of Education (1989) A guide to developing higher-order thinking across the curriculum. Department of Education, Des Moines (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED-306-550)

Jonassen D (1996) Computers as mindtools for schools: engaging critical thinking. Prentice Hall, New Jersey

Ennis R-H (1996) Critical thinking dispositions: their nature and accessibility. Informal Logic 18:165–182

Facione P (1990) Critical thinking: a statement of expert consensus for purposes of educational assessment and instruction. California Academic Press, Millbrae

Paul R-W (1985) Goals for a critical thinking curriculum. In: Costa A-L (ed) Developing minds: a resource book for teaching thinking. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, pp 77–84

Ennis R-H (1964) A definition of critical thinking. Read Teach 17(8):599–612

Ennis R-H (1985) Goals for a critical thinking curriculum. In: Costa A-L (ed) Developing minds: a resource book for teaching thinking. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, pp 68–71

Ennis R-H (2015) Critical thinking: a streamlined conception. In: Davies M, Barnett R (eds) The Palgrave handbook of critical thinking in higher education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp 31–47

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Davies M (2015) A model of critical thinking in higher education. In: Paulsen M (ed) Higher education: handbook of theory and research, vol 30. Springer, Cham, pp 41–92

Walters K-S (1994) Introduction: beyond logicism in critical thinking. In: Walters K-S (ed) Re-thinking reason: new perspectives in critical thinking. SUNY Press, Albany, pp 1–22

Barnett R (1997) Higher education: a critical business. Open University Press, Buckingham

Phelan A-M, Garrison J-W (1994) Toward a gender-sensitive ideal of critical thinking: a feminist poetic. Curric Inq 24(3):255–268

Kaplan L-D (1991) Teaching intellectual autonomy: the failure of the critical thinking movement. Educ Theory 41(4):361–370

McLaren P (1994) Critical pedagogy and predatory culture. Routledge, London

Giroux H-A (2010) Lessons from Paulo Freire. https://www.chronicle.com/article/lessons-from-paulo-freire/ . Accessed 8 Aug 2020

Freire P (2000) Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum, New York

Giroux H-A (2011) On critical pedagogy. The Continuum International Publishing Group, Auckland

Volman M, ten Dam G (2015) Critical thinking for educated citizenship. In: Davies M, Barnett R (eds) The Palgrave handbook of critical thinking in higher education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp 593–603

Belenky M-F, Clinchy B-M, Goldberger N-R, Tarule J-M (1997) Women’s ways of knowing: the development of self, voice, and mind. Basic Books, New York

Warren K-J (1994) Critical thinking and feminism. In: Walters K-S (ed) Re-thinking reason: new perspectives in critical thinking. SUNY Press, Albany, pp 199–204

Thayer-Bacon B (2000) Transforming critical thinking. Teachers College Press, New York

Atkinson D (1997) A critical approach to critical thinking in TESOL. TESOL Q 31(1):71–94

ten Dam G, Volman M (2004) Critical thinking as a citizenship competence: teaching strategies. Learn Instr 14:359–379

Sfard A (1998) On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educ Res 27:4–13

Tsui L (1999) Courses and instruction affecting critical thinking. Res High Educ 40(2):185–200

Abrami P-C, Bernard R-M, Borokhovski E, Waddington D-I, Anne Wade C, Persson T (2015) Strategies for teaching students to think critically: a meta-analysis. Rev Educ Res 85(2):275–314

Mpofu N, Maphalala M-C (2017) Fostering critical thinking in initial teacher education curriculums: a comprehensive literature review. Gender Behav 15(2):9226–9236

Ennis R-H (1989) Critical thinking and subject specificity: clarification and needed research. Educ Res 18(3):4–10

Norris S-P (1985) The choice of standard conditions in defining critical thinking competence. Educ Theory 35(1):97–107

Paul R-W (1985) McPeck’s mistakes. Informal Logic 7(1):35–43

Siegel H (1991) The generalizability of critical thinking. Educ Philos Theory 23(1):18–30

McPeck J-E (1981) Critical thinking and education. St Martin’s Press, New York

McPeck J-E (1984) Stalking beasts, but swatting flies: the teaching of critical thinking. Can J Educ 9(1):28–44

McPeck J-E (1990) Critical thinking and subject-specificity: a reply to Ennis. Educ Res 19(4):10–12

Adler M (1986) Why critical thinking programs won’t work. Educ Week 6(2):28

Brown A (1997) Transforming schools into communities of thinking and learning about serious matters. Am Psychol 52(4):399–413

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Oner D (2010) Öğretmenin bilgisi özel bir bilgi midir? Öğretmek için gereken bilgiye kuramsal bir bakış. Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Eğitim Dergisi 27(2):23–32

Shulman L-S (1987) Knowledge and teaching: foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educ Rev 57(1):61–77. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.57.1.j463w79r56455411

Oner D, Adadan E (2011) Use of web-based portfolios as tools for reflection in preservice teacher education. J Teach Educ 62(5):477–492

Oner D, Adadan E (2016) Are integrated portfolio systems the answer? An evaluation of a web-based portfolio system to improve preservice teachers’ reflective thinking skills. J Comput High Educ 28(2):236–260

Lave J, Wenger E (1991) Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Book   Google Scholar  

Brookfield S (2012) Teaching for critical thinking: tools and techniques to help students question their assumptions. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco

Korthagen F-A-J (2010) Situated learning theory and the pedagogy of teacher education: towards an integrative view of teacher behavior and teacher learning. Teach Teach Educ 26(1):98–106

Putnam R-T, Borko H (2000) What do new views of knowledge and thinking have to say about research on teacher learning? Educ Res 29(1):4–15

Brown J-S, Collins A, Duguid P (1989) Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educ Res 18(1):32–42

Scardamalia M, Bereiter C (1991) Higher levels of agency for children in knowledge building: a challenge for the design of new knowledge media. J Learn Sci 1(1):37–68

Shaffer D-W (2005) Epistemic games. Innovate J Online Educ 1(6):Article 2

Oner D (2020) A virtual internship for developing technological pedagogical content knowledge. Australas J Educ Technol 36(2):27–42

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey

Diler Oner & Yeliz Gunal Aggul

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Diler Oner .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Universal Scientific Education and Research Network (USERN), Stockholm, Sweden

Nima Rezaei

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Oner, D., Aggul, Y.G. (2022). Critical Thinking for Teachers. In: Rezaei, N. (eds) Integrated Education and Learning. Integrated Science, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15963-3_18

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15963-3_18

Published : 02 January 2023

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-031-15962-6

Online ISBN : 978-3-031-15963-3

eBook Packages : Education Education (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Daring Leadership Institute: a groundbreaking partnership that amplifies Brené Brown's empirically based, courage-building curriculum with BetterUp’s human transformation platform.

What is Coaching?

Types of Coaching

Discover your perfect match : Take our 5-minute assessment and let us pair you with one of our top Coaches tailored just for you.

Find your coach

We're on a mission to help everyone live with clarity, purpose, and passion.

Join us and create impactful change.

Read the buzz about BetterUp.

Meet the leadership that's passionate about empowering your workforce.

For Business

For Individuals

How to develop critical thinking skills

Jump to section

What are critical thinking skills?

How to develop critical thinking skills: 12 tips, how to practice critical thinking skills at work, become your own best critic.

A client requests a tight deadline on an intense project. Your childcare provider calls in sick on a day full of meetings. Payment from a contract gig is a month behind. 

Your day-to-day will always have challenges, big and small. And no matter the size and urgency, they all ask you to use critical thinking to analyze the situation and arrive at the right solution. 

Critical thinking includes a wide set of soft skills that encourage continuous learning, resilience , and self-reflection. The more you add to your professional toolbelt, the more equipped you’ll be to tackle whatever challenge presents itself. Here’s how to develop critical thinking, with examples explaining how to use it.

Critical thinking skills are the skills you use to analyze information, imagine scenarios holistically, and create rational solutions. It’s a type of emotional intelligence that stimulates effective problem-solving and decision-making . 

When you fine-tune your critical thinking skills, you seek beyond face-value observations and knee-jerk reactions. Instead, you harvest deeper insights and string together ideas and concepts in logical, sometimes out-of-the-box , ways. 

Imagine a team working on a marketing strategy for a new set of services. That team might use critical thinking to balance goals and key performance indicators , like new customer acquisition costs, average monthly sales, and net profit margins. They understand the connections between overlapping factors to build a strategy that stays within budget and attracts new sales. 

Looking for ways to improve critical thinking skills? Start by brushing up on the following soft skills that fall under this umbrella: 

• Analytical thinking: Approaching problems with an analytical eye includes breaking down complex issues into small chunks and examining their significance. An example could be organizing customer feedback to identify trends and improve your product offerings. 
• Open-mindedness: Push past cognitive biases and be receptive to different points of view and constructive feedback . Managers and team members who keep an open mind position themselves to hear new ideas that foster innovation . 
• Creative thinking: With creative thinking , you can develop several ideas to address a single problem, like brainstorming more efficient workflow best practices to boost productivity and employee morale . 
• Self-reflection: Self-reflection lets you examine your thinking and assumptions to stimulate healthier collaboration and thought processes. Maybe a bad first impression created a negative anchoring bias with a new coworker. Reflecting on your own behavior stirs up empathy and improves the relationship. 
• Evaluation: With evaluation skills, you tackle the pros and cons of a situation based on logic rather than emotion. When prioritizing tasks , you might be tempted to do the fun or easy ones first, but evaluating their urgency and importance can help you make better decisions. 

There’s no magic method to change your thinking processes. Improvement happens with small, intentional changes to your everyday habits until a more critical approach to thinking is automatic. 

Here are 12 tips for building stronger self-awareness and learning how to improve critical thinking: 

1. Be cautious

There’s nothing wrong with a little bit of skepticism. One of the core principles of critical thinking is asking questions and dissecting the available information. You might surprise yourself at what you find when you stop to think before taking action. 

Before making a decision, use evidence, logic, and deductive reasoning to support your own opinions or challenge ideas. It helps you and your team avoid falling prey to bad information or resistance to change .

2. Ask open-ended questions

“Yes” or “no” questions invite agreement rather than reflection. Instead, ask open-ended questions that force you to engage in analysis and rumination. Digging deeper can help you identify potential biases, uncover assumptions, and arrive at new hypotheses and possible solutions. 

3. Do your research

No matter your proficiency, you can always learn more. Turning to different points of view and information is a great way to develop a comprehensive understanding of a topic and make informed decisions. You’ll prioritize reliable information rather than fall into emotional or automatic decision-making. 

4. Consider several opinions

You might spend so much time on your work that it’s easy to get stuck in your own perspective, especially if you work independently on a remote team . Make an effort to reach out to colleagues to hear different ideas and thought patterns. Their input might surprise you.

If or when you disagree, remember that you and your team share a common goal. Divergent opinions are constructive, so shift the focus to finding solutions rather than defending disagreements. 

5. Learn to be quiet

Active listening is the intentional practice of concentrating on a conversation partner instead of your own thoughts. It’s about paying attention to detail and letting people know you value their opinions, which can open your mind to new perspectives and thought processes.

If you’re brainstorming with your team or having a 1:1 with a coworker , listen, ask clarifying questions, and work to understand other peoples’ viewpoints. Listening to your team will help you find fallacies in arguments to improve possible solutions.

6. Schedule reflection

Whether waking up at 5 am or using a procrastination hack, scheduling time to think puts you in a growth mindset . Your mind has natural cognitive biases to help you simplify decision-making, but squashing them is key to thinking critically and finding new solutions besides the ones you might gravitate toward. Creating time and calm space in your day gives you the chance to step back and visualize the biases that impact your decision-making. 

7. Cultivate curiosity

With so many demands and job responsibilities, it’s easy to seek solace in routine. But getting out of your comfort zone helps spark critical thinking and find more solutions than you usually might.

If curiosity doesn’t come naturally to you, cultivate a thirst for knowledge by reskilling and upskilling . Not only will you add a new skill to your resume , but expanding the limits of your professional knowledge might motivate you to ask more questions. 

You don’t have to develop critical thinking skills exclusively in the office. Whether on your break or finding a hobby to do after work, playing strategic games or filling out crosswords can prime your brain for problem-solving. 

9. Write it down

Recording your thoughts with pen and paper can lead to stronger brain activity than typing them out on a keyboard. If you’re stuck and want to think more critically about a problem, writing your ideas can help you process information more deeply.

The act of recording ideas on paper can also improve your memory . Ideas are more likely to linger in the background of your mind, leading to deeper thinking that informs your decision-making process. 

10. Speak up

Take opportunities to share your opinion, even if it intimidates you. Whether at a networking event with new people or a meeting with close colleagues, try to engage with people who challenge or help you develop your ideas. Having conversations that force you to support your position encourages you to refine your argument and think critically. 

11. Stay humble

Ideas and concepts aren’t the same as real-life actions. There may be such a thing as negative outcomes, but there’s no such thing as a bad idea. At the brainstorming stage , don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Sometimes the best solutions come from off-the-wall, unorthodox decisions. Sit in your creativity , let ideas flow, and don’t be afraid to share them with your colleagues. Putting yourself in a creative mindset helps you see situations from new perspectives and arrive at innovative conclusions. 

12. Embrace discomfort

Get comfortable feeling uncomfortable . It isn’t easy when others challenge your ideas, but sometimes, it’s the only way to see new perspectives and think critically.

By willingly stepping into unfamiliar territory, you foster the resilience and flexibility you need to become a better thinker. You’ll learn how to pick yourself up from failure and approach problems from fresh angles. 

Thinking critically is easier said than done. To help you understand its impact (and how to use it), here are two scenarios that require critical thinking skills and provide teachable moments. 

Scenario #1: Unexpected delays and budget

Imagine your team is working on producing an event. Unexpectedly, a vendor explains they’ll be a week behind on delivering materials. Then another vendor sends a quote that’s more than you can afford. Unless you develop a creative solution, the team will have to push back deadlines and go over budget, potentially costing the client’s trust. 

Here’s how you could approach the situation with creative thinking:

• Analyze the situation holistically: Determine how the delayed materials and over-budget quote will impact the rest of your timeline and financial resources . That way, you can identify whether you need to build an entirely new plan with new vendors, or if it’s worth it to readjust time and resources. 
• Identify your alternative options: With careful assessment, your team decides that another vendor can’t provide the same materials in a quicker time frame. You’ll need to rearrange assignment schedules to complete everything on time. 
• Collaborate and adapt: Your team has an emergency meeting to rearrange your project schedule. You write down each deliverable and determine which ones you can and can’t complete by the deadline. To compensate for lost time, you rearrange your task schedule to complete everything that doesn’t need the delayed materials first, then advance as far as you can on the tasks that do. 
• Check different resources: In the meantime, you scour through your contact sheet to find alternative vendors that fit your budget. Accounting helps by providing old invoices to determine which vendors have quoted less for previous jobs. After pulling all your sources, you find a vendor that fits your budget. 
• Maintain open communication: You create a special Slack channel to keep everyone up to date on changes, challenges, and additional delays. Keeping an open line encourages transparency on the team’s progress and boosts everyone’s confidence. 

Scenario #2: Differing opinions 

A conflict arises between two team members on the best approach for a new strategy for a gaming app. One believes that small tweaks to the current content are necessary to maintain user engagement and stay within budget. The other believes a bold revamp is needed to encourage new followers and stronger sales revenue. 

Here’s how critical thinking could help this conflict:

• Listen actively: Give both team members the opportunity to present their ideas free of interruption. Encourage the entire team to ask open-ended questions to more fully understand and develop each argument. 
• Flex your analytical skills: After learning more about both ideas, everyone should objectively assess the benefits and drawbacks of each approach. Analyze each idea's risk, merits, and feasibility based on available data and the app’s goals and objectives. 
• Identify common ground: The team discusses similarities between each approach and brainstorms ways to integrate both idea s, like making small but eye-catching modifications to existing content or using the same visual design in new media formats. 
• Test new strategy: To test out the potential of a bolder strategy, the team decides to A/B test both approaches. You create a set of criteria to evenly distribute users by different demographics to analyze engagement, revenue, and customer turnover. 
• Monitor and adapt: After implementing the A/B test, the team closely monitors the results of each strategy. You regroup and optimize the changes that provide stronger results after the testing. That way, all team members understand why you’re making the changes you decide to make.

You can’t think your problems away. But you can equip yourself with skills that help you move through your biggest challenges and find innovative solutions. Learning how to develop critical thinking is the start of honing an adaptable growth mindset. 

Now that you have resources to increase critical thinking skills in your professional development, you can identify whether you embrace change or routine, are open or resistant to feedback, or turn to research or emotion will build self-awareness. From there, tweak and incorporate techniques to be a critical thinker when life presents you with a problem.

Understand Yourself Better:

Big 5 Personality Test

Elizabeth Perry, ACC

Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

How divergent thinking can drive your creativity

What’s convergent thinking how to be a better problem-solver, 8 creative solutions to your most challenging problems, critical thinking is the one skillset you can't afford not to master, 17 memorization techniques to sharpen your memory & recall, can dreams help you solve problems 6 ways to try, how emotions affect learning: the impact of emotions, what is lateral thinking 7 techniques to encourage creative ideas, how different learning styles make a difference at work, betterup named a 2019 “cool vendor” in human capital management: enhancing employee experience by gartnerup your game: a new model for leadership, 7 critical teamwork skills and how to develop them, what is creative thinking and how can i improve, 6 big picture thinking strategies that you'll actually use, what are analytical skills examples and how to level up, stay connected with betterup, get our newsletter, event invites, plus product insights and research..

3100 E 5th Street, Suite 350 Austin, TX 78702

• Platform overview
• Integrations
• Powered by AI
• BetterUp Lead™
• BetterUp Manage™
• BetterUp Care®
• Sales Performance
• Diversity & Inclusion
• Case studies
• ROI of BetterUp
• What is coaching?
• About Coaching
• Find your Coach
• Career Coaching
• Communication Coaching
• Personal Coaching
• News and Press
• Leadership Team
• Become a BetterUp Coach
• BetterUp Briefing
• Center for Purpose & Performance
• Leadership Training
• Business Coaching
• Contact Support
• Contact Sales
• Privacy Policy
• Acceptable Use Policy
• Trust & Security
• Cookie Preferences

Ask the Cognitive Scientist: How Can Educators Teach Critical Thinking?

How does the mind work—and especially how does it learn? Teachers’ instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such knowledge often serves us well, but is there anything sturdier to rely on?

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology who seek to understand the mind. In this regular American Educator column, we consider findings from this field that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application.

I ndividuals vary in their views of what students should be taught, but there is little disagreement on the importance of critical thinking skills. In free societies, the ability to think critically is viewed as a cornerstone of individual civic engagement and economic success.

Despite this consensus, it’s not always clear what’s meant by “critical thinking.” I will offer a commonsensical view. 1 You are thinking critically if (1) your thinking is novel—that is, you aren’t simply drawing a conclusion from a memory of a previous situation; (2) your thinking is self-directed—that is, you are not merely executing instructions given by someone else; and (3) your thinking is effective—that is, you respect certain conventions that make thinking more likely to yield useful conclusions. These would be conventions like “consider both sides of an issue,” “offer evidence for claims made,” and “don’t let emotion interfere with reason.” This third characteristic will be our main concern, and as we’ll see, what constitutes effective thinking varies from domain to domain.

Critical Thinking Can Be Taught

Planning how to teach students to think critically should perhaps be our second task. Our first should be to ask whether evidence shows that explicitly teaching critical thinking brings any benefit.

There are many examples of critical thinking skills that are open to instruction. 2 For example, in one experiment, researchers taught college students principles for evaluating evidence in psychology studies—principles like the difference between correlational research and true experiments, and the difference between anecdote and formal research. 3 These principles were incorporated into regular instruction in a psychology class, and their application was practiced in that context. Compared to a control group that learned principles of memory, students who learned the critical thinking principles performed better on a test that required evaluation of psychology evidence.

But perhaps we should not find this result terribly surprising. You tell students, “This is a good strategy for this type of problem,” and you have them practice that strategy, so later they use that strategy when they encounter the problem.

When we think of critical thinking, we think of something bigger than its domain of training. When I teach students how to evaluate the argument in a set of newspaper editorials, I’m hoping that they will learn to evaluate arguments generally, not just the ones they read. The research literature on successful transfer of learning * to new problems is less encouraging.

Teaching Critical Thinking for General Transfer

It’s a perennial idea—teach something that requires critical thinking, and such thinking will become habitual. In the 19th century, educators suggested that Latin and geometry demanded logical thinking, which would prompt students to think logically in other contexts. 4 The idea was challenged by psychologist Edward Thorndike, who compared scores from standardized tests that high school students took in autumn and spring as a function of the coursework they had taken during the year. If Latin, for example, makes you smart, students who take it should score better in the spring. They didn’t. 5

In the 1960s, computer programming replaced Latin as the discipline that would lead to logical thinking. 6 Studies through the 1980s showed mixed results, 7 but a recent meta-analysis offered some apparently encouraging results about the general trainability of computational thinking. 8 The researchers reported that learning to program a computer yielded modest positive transfer to measures of creative thinking, mathematics, metacognition, spatial skills, and reasoning. It’s sensible to think that this transfer was a consequence of conceptual overlap between programming and these skills, as no benefit was observed in measures of literacy.

Hopeful adults have tried still other activities as potential all-purpose enhancers of intelligence—for example, exposure to classical music (the so-called Mozart effect), 9 learning to play a musical instrument, 10 or learning to play chess. 11 None have succeeded as hoped.

It’s no surprise then that programs in school meant to teach general critical thinking skills have had limited success. Unfortunately, the evaluations of these programs seldom offer a good test of transfer; the measure of success tends to feature the same sort of task that was used during training. 12 When investigators have tested for transfer in such curricular programs, positive results have been absent or modest and quick to fade. 13

Transfer and the Nature of Critical Thinking

We probably should have anticipated these results. Wanting students to be able to “analyze, synthesize, and evaluate” information sounds like a reasonable goal, but those terms mean different things in different disciplines. Literary criticism has its own internal logic, its norms for what constitutes good evidence and a valid argument. These norms differ from those found in mathematics, for example. Thus, our goals for student critical thinking must be domain-specific.

But wait. Surely there are some principles of thinking that apply across fields of study. Affirming the consequent is always wrong, straw-person arguments are always weak, and having a conflict of interest always makes your argument suspect. 14 There are indeed principles that carry across domains of study. The problem is that people who learn these broadly applicable principles in one situation often fail to apply them in a new situation.

The law of large numbers provides an example. It states that a large sample will probably be closer to a “true” estimate than a small sample—if you want to know whether a set of dice is loaded, you’re better off seeing the results of 20 throws rather than two throws. People readily understand this idea in the context of evaluating randomness, but a small sample doesn’t bother them when judging academic performance; if someone receives poor grades on two math tests, observers judge they are simply bad at math. 15

In another classic experiment, researchers administered a tricky problem: a malignant tumor could be treated with a particular ray, but the ray caused a lot of collateral damage to healthy tissue. How, subjects were asked, could the ray be used to destroy the tumor? Other subjects got the same problem, but first read a story describing a military situation analogous to the medical problem. Instead of rays attacking a tumor, rebels were to attack a fortress. The military story offered a perfect analogy to the medical problem, but despite reading it moments before, subjects still couldn’t solve the medical problem. Merely mentioning that the story might help solve the problem boosted solution rates to nearly 100 percent. Thus, using the analogy was not hard; the problem was thinking to use it in the first place. 16

These results offer a new perspective on critical thinking. The problem in transfer is not just that different domains have different norms for critical thinking. The problem is that previous critical thinking successes seem encapsulated in memory. We know that a student has understood an idea like the law of large numbers. But understanding it offers no guarantee that the student will recognize new situations in which that idea will be useful.

Critical Thinking as Problem Recognition

Happily, this difficulty in recognizing problems you’ve solved before disappears in the face of significant practice. If I solve a lot of problems in which the law of large numbers is relevant, I no longer focus on the particulars of the problem—that is, whether it seems to be about cars, or ratings of happiness, or savings bonds. I immediately see that the law of large numbers is relevant. 17 Lots of practice is OK if you’re not in a hurry, but is there a faster way to help students “just see” that they have solved a problem before?

One technique is problem comparison; show students two solved problems that have the same structure but appear to be about different things, and ask students to compare them. 18 In one experiment testing this method, business school students were asked to compare two stories, one involving international companies coping with a shipping problem, and the other concerning two college students planning a spring break trip. In each, a difficult negotiation problem was resolved through the use of a particular type of contract. Two weeks later, students were more likely to use the solution on a novel problem if they had contrasted the stories compared to other students who simply read them. 19 Richard Catrambone developed a different technique to address a slightly different transfer problem. He noted that in math and science classes, students often learned to solve standard problems via a series of fixed, lockstep procedures. That meant students were stumped when confronted with a problem requiring a slight revision of the steps, even if the goal of the steps was the same. For example, a student might learn a method for solving word problems involving work like “Nicola can paint a house in 14 hours, and Carole can do it in 8. How long would it take them to paint one house, working together?” A student who learns a sequence of steps to solve that sort of problem is often thrown by a small change—the homeowner had already painted one-fourth of the house before hiring Nicola and Carole.

Catrambone 20 showed that student knowledge will be more flexible if students are taught to label the substeps of the solution with the goal it serves. For example, work problems are typically solved by calculating how much of the job each worker can do in an hour. If, during learning, that step were labeled so students understood that that calculation was part of deriving the solution, they would know how to solve the problem when a fraction of the house is to be painted.

Open-Ended Problems and Knowledge

Students encounter standard problems that are best solved in a particular way, but many critical thinking situations are unique. There are no routine, reusable solutions for problems like designing a product or planning a strategy for a field hockey match. Nevertheless, critical thinking for open-ended problems is enabled by extensive stores of knowledge about the domain. 21

First, the recognition process described above (“oh, this is that sort of problem”) can still apply to subparts of a complex, open-ended problem. Complex critical thinking may entail multiple simpler solutions from memory that can be “snapped together” when solving complex problems. 22 For example, arithmetic is needed for calculating the best value among several vacation packages.

Second, knowledge impacts working memory. Working memory refers, colloquially, to the place in the mind where thinking happens—it’s where you hold information and manipulate it to carry out cognitive tasks. So, for example, if I said “How is a scarecrow like a blueberry?,” you would retrieve information about scarecrows (not alive, protect crops, found in fields, birds think they are alive) and blueberries (purple, used in pies, small, featured in Blueberries for Sal ) from your memory, and then you’d start comparing these features, looking for overlap. But working memory has limited space; if I added three more words, you’d struggle to keep all five and their associations in mind at once.

With experience, often-associated bits of knowledge clump together and thus take up less room in working memory. In chess, a king, a castle, and three pawns in a corner of the board relate to one another in the defensive position, so the expert will treat them as a single unit. An experienced dancer similarly chunks dance moves allowing him to think about more subtle aspects of movement, rather than crowding working memory with “what I’m to do next.”

Third, knowledge is sometimes necessary to deploy thinking strategies. As noted above, sometimes you have an effective thinking strategy in your memory (for example, apply the law of large numbers) but fail to see that it’s relevant. In other situations, the proper thinking is easily recognized. We can tell students that they should evaluate the logic of the author’s argument when they read an op-ed, and we can tell them the right method to use when conducting a scientific experiment. Students should have no trouble recognizing “Oh, this is that sort of problem,” and they may have committed to memory the right thinking strategy. They know what to do, but they may not be able to use the strategy without the right domain knowledge.

For example, principles of scientific reasoning seem to be content free: for example, “a control group should be identical to the experimental group, except for the treatment.” In practice, however, content knowledge is needed to use the principle. For example, in an experiment on learning, you’d want to be sure that the experimental and control groups were comparable, so you’d make sure that proportions of men and women in each group were the same. What characteristics besides sex should you be sure are equivalent in the experimental and control groups? Ability to concentrate? Intelligence? You can’t measure every characteristic of your subjects, so you’d focus on characteristics that you know are relevant to learning. But knowing which characteristics are “relevant to learning” means knowing the research literature in learning and memory.

Experimental evidence shows that an expert doesn’t think as well outside her area of expertise, even in a closely related domain. She’s still better than a novice, but her skills don’t transfer completely. For example, knowledge of medicine transfers poorly among subspecialties (neurologists do not diagnose cardiac cases well), 23 technical writers can’t write newspaper articles, 24 and even professional philosophers are swayed by irrelevant features of problems like question order or wording. 25

How to Teach Students to Think Critically

So what does all this mean? Is there really no such thing as a “critical thinking skill” if by “skill” we mean something generalizable? Maybe, but it’s hard to be sure. We do know that students who go to school longer score better on intelligence tests, and certainly we think of intelligence as all-purpose. 26 Still, it may be that schooling boosts a collection of fairly specific thinking skills. If it increases general thinking skills, researchers have been unable to identify them.

Although existing data favor the specific skills account, 27 researchers would still say it’s uncertain whether a good critical thinker is someone who has mastered lots of specific skills, or someone with a smaller set of yet-to-be-identified general skills. But educators aren’t researchers, and for educators, one fact ought to be salient. We’re not even sure the general skills exist, but we’re quite sure there’s no proven way to teach them directly. In contrast, we have a pretty good idea of how to teach students the more specific critical thinking skills. I suggest we do so. Here’s a four-step plan.

First, identify what’s meant by critical thinking in each domain. Be specific by focusing on tasks that tap skills, not skills themselves. What tasks showing critical thinking should a high school graduate be able to do in mathematics, history, and other subjects? For example, educators might decide that an important aspect of understanding history is the ability to source historical documents; that is, to interpret them in light of their source—who wrote it, for what purpose, and for what intended audience. Educators might decide that a key critical thinking skill for science is understanding the relationship between a theory and a hypothesis. These skills should be explicitly taught and practiced—there is evidence that simple exposure to this sort of work without explicit instruction is less effective. 28

Second, identify the domain content that students must know. We’ve seen that domain knowledge is a crucial driver of thinking skill. What knowledge is essential to the type of thinking you want your students to be able to do? For example, if students are to source documents, they need knowledge of the relevant source; in other words, knowing that they are reading a 1779 letter from General George Clinton written to George Washington with a request for supplies won’t mean much if they don’t have some background knowledge about the American Revolutionary War—that will enable them to make sense of what they read when they look up Clinton and his activities at the time.

The prospect of someone deciding which knowledge students ought to learn—and what they won’t learn—sometimes makes people uneasy because this decision depends on one’s goals for schooling, and goals depend on values. Selection of content is a critical way that values are expressed. 29 Making that choice will lead to uncomfortable tradeoffs. But not choosing is still making a choice. It’s choosing not to plan.

Third, educators must select the best sequence for students to learn the skills. It’s obvious that skills and knowledge build on one another in mathematics and history, and it’s equally true of other domains of skill and knowledge; we interpret new information in light of what we already know.

Fourth, educators must decide which skills should be revisited across years. Studies show that even if content is learned quite well over the course of half of a school year, about half will be forgotten in three years. 30 That doesn’t mean there’s no value in exposing students to content just once; most students will forget much, but they’ll remember something, and for some students, an interest may be kindled. But when considering skills we hope will stick with students for the long term, we should plan on at least three to five years of practice. 31

Some Practical Matters of Teaching Critical Thinking

I’ve outlined a broad, four-step plan. Let’s consider some of the pragmatic decisions educators face as they contemplate the teaching of critical thinking.

Is it all or none ? I’ve suggested that critical thinking be taught in the context of a comprehensive curriculum. Does that mean an individual teacher cannot do anything on his or her own? Is there just no point in trying if the cooperation of the entire school system is not assured?

Obviously that’s not the case; a teacher can still include critical thinking content in his or her courses and students will learn, but it’s quite likely they will learn more, and learn more quickly, if their learning is coordinated across years. It has long been recognized among psychologists that an important factor influencing learning, perhaps the most important factor, is what the student already knows. 32 Teaching will be more effective if the instructor is confident about what his or her students already know.

Student age : When should critical thinking instruction start? There’s not a firm, research-based answer to this question. Researchers interested in thinking skills like problem solving or evidence evaluation in young children (preschool through early elementary ages) have studied how children think in the absence of explicit instruction. They have not studied whether or how young children can be made to think more critically. Still, research over the last 30 years or so has led to an important conclusion: children are more capable than we thought.

The great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget proposed a highly influential theory that suggested children’s cognition moves through a series of four stages, characterized by more and more abstract thought, and better ability to take multiple perspectives. In stage theories, the basic architecture of thought is unchanged for long periods of time, and then rapidly reorganizes as the child moves from one developmental stage to another. 33 A key educational implication is that it’s at least pointless and possibly damaging to ask the child to do cognitive work that is appropriate for a later developmental stage. The last 30 years has shown that, contrary to Piaget’s theory, development is gradual, and does not change abruptly. It has also shown that what children can and cannot do varies depending on the content.

For example, in some circumstances, even toddlers can understand principles of conditional reasoning. For instance, conditional reasoning is required when the relationship of two things is contingent on a third thing. A child may understand that when she visits a friend’s house, she may get a treat like cake or cookies for a snack or she may not. But if her friend is celebrating a birthday, the relation between those two things (a visit and getting cake) becomes very consistent. Yet when conditional reasoning problems are framed in unfamiliar contexts, they confuse even adult physicians. Much depends on the content of the problem. 34

Thus, research tells us that including critical thinking in the schooling of young children is likely to be perfectly appropriate. It does not, however, provide guidance into what types of critical thinking skills to start with. That is a matter to take up with experienced educators, coordinating with colleagues who teach older children in the interests of making the curriculum seamless.

Types of students : Should everyone learn critical thinking skills? The question sounds like a setup, like an excuse for a resounding endorsement of critical thinking for all. But the truth is that, in many systems, less capable students are steered into less challenging coursework, with the hope that by reducing expectations, they will at least achieve “mastery of the basics.” These lower expectations often pervade entire schools that serve students from low-income families. 35

It is worth highlighting that access to challenging content and continuing to postsecondary education is, in nearly every country, associated with socioeconomic status. 36 Children from high socioeconomic status families also have more opportunities to learn at home. If school is the chief or only venue through which low socioeconomic status students are exposed to advanced vocabulary, rich content knowledge, and demands for high-level thinking, it is absolutely vital that those opportunities be enhanced, not reduced.

Assessment : Assessment of critical thinking is, needless to say, a challenge. One difficulty is expense. Claims to the contrary, multiple-choice items do not necessarily require critical thinking, even when items are carefully constructed and vetted, as on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). One researcher 37 administered items from the history NAEP for 12th-graders to college students who had done well on other standardized history exams. Students were asked to think aloud as they chose their answers, and the researchers observed little critical thinking, but a lot of “gaming” of the questions. Assessing critical thinking requires that students answer open-form questions, and that means humans must score the response, an expensive proposition.

On the bright side, the plan for teaching critical thinking that I’ve recommended makes some aspects of assessment more straightforward. If the skills that constitute “critical thinking” in, say, 10th-grade chemistry class are fully defined, then there is no question as to what content ought to appear on the assessment. The predictability ought to make teachers more confident that they can prepare their students for standardized assessments.

A s much as teaching students to think critically is a universal goal of schooling, one might be surprised that student difficulty in this area is such a common complaint. Educators are often frustrated that student thinking seems shallow. This review should offer insight into why that is. The way the mind works, shallow is what you get first. Deep, critical thinking is hard-won.

That means that designers and administrators of a program to improve critical thinking among students must take the long view, both in the time frame over which the program operates and especially in the speed with which one expects to see results. Patience will be a key ingredient in any program that succeeds.

Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of When Can You Trust the Experts? How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education and Why Don’t Students Like School? His most recent book is The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads . This article is adapted with permission from his report for the government of New South Wales, “How to Teach Critical Thinking.” Copyright 2019 by Willingham. Readers can pose questions to “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” by sending an email to [email protected] . Future columns will try to address readers’ questions. *For more on the research behind transfer of learning, see “If You Learn A, Will You Be Better Able to Learn B?” in the Spring 2020 issue of American Educator , available here . ( return to article )

1. D. T. Willingham, “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach,” American Educator 31, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 8–19. 2. P. C. Abrami et al., “Instructional Interventions Affecting Critical Thinking Skills and Dispositions: A Stage 1 Meta-Analysis,” Review of Educational Research 78, no. 4 (2008): 1102–1134; and R. L. Bangert-Drowns and E. Bankert, “Meta-Analysis of Effects of Explicit Instruction for Critical Thinking,” in Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (Boston: 1990), 56–79. 3. D. A. Bensley and R. A. Spero, “Improving Critical Thinking Skills and Metacognitive Monitoring through Direct Infusion,” Thinking Skills and Creativity 12 (2014): 55–68. 4. C. F. Lewis, “A Study in Formal Discipline,” The School Review 13, no. 4 (1905): 281–292. 5. E. L. Thorndike, “The Influence of First-Year Latin upon Ability to Read English,” School and Society 17 (1923): 165–168; and C. R. Broyler, E. L. Thorndike, and E. Woodward, “A Second Study of Mental Discipline in High School Studies,” Journal of Educational Psychology 18, no. 6 (1924): 377–404. 6. S. Papert, “Teaching Children to Be Mathematicians versus Teaching about Mathematics,” International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology 3, no. 3 (1972): 249–262; and S. Papert, Mindstorms (New York: Basic Books, 1980); see also D. H. Clements and D. F. Gullo, “Effects of Computer Programming on Young Children’s Cognition,” Journal of Educational Psychology 76, no. 6 (1984): 1051–1058; and M. C. Linn, “The Cognitive Consequences of Programming Instruction in Classrooms,” Educational Researcher 14, no. 5 (1985): 14–29. 7. Y.-K. C. Liao and G. W. Bright, “Effects of Computer Programming on Cognitive Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Educational Computing Research 7, no. 3 (1991): 251–268. 8. R. Scherer, F. Siddiq, and B. S. Viveros, “The Cognitive Benefits of Learning Computer Programming: A Meta-Analysis of Transfer Effects,” Journal of Educational Psychology 111, no. 5 (2019): 764–792. 9. J. Pietschnig, M. Voracek, and A. K. Formann, “Mozart Effect-Schmozart Effect: A Meta-Analysis,” Intelligence 38, no. 3 (2010): 314–323. 10. G. Sala and F. Gobet, “When the Music’s Over: Does Music Skill Transfer to Children’s and Young Adolescents’ Cognitive and Academic Skills? A Meta-Analysis,” Educational Research Review 20 (2017): 55–67. 11. G. Sala and F. Gobet, “Do the Benefits of Chess Instruction Transfer to Academic and Cognitive Skills? A Meta-Analysis,” Educational Research Review 18 (2016): 46–57. 12. For example, A. Kozulin et al., “Cognitive Modifiability of Children with Developmental Disabilities: A Multicentre Study Using Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment-Basic Program,” Research in Developmental Disabilities 31, no. 2 (2010): 551–559; D. Kuhn and A. Crowell, “Dialogic Argumentation as a Vehicle for Developing Young Adolescents’ Thinking,” Psychological Science 22, no. 4 (2011): 545–552; and A. Reznitskaya et al., “Examining Transfer Effects from Dialogic Discussions to New Tasks and Contexts,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 37, no. 4 (2012): 288–306. 13. R. Ritchart and D. N. Perkins, “Learning to Think: The Challenges of Teaching Thinking,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning , ed. K. J. Holyoak and R. G. Morrison (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2005), 775–802. 14. R. H. Ennis, “Critical Thinking and the Curriculum,” in Thinking Skills Instruction: Concepts and Techniques , ed. M. Heiman and J. Slomianko (West Haven, CT: NEA Professional Library, 1987), 40–48. 15. C. Jepson, D. H. Krantz, and R. E. Nisbett, “Inductive Reasoning: Competence or Skill?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6, no. 3 (1983): 494–501. 16. M. Gick and K. Holyoak, “Analogical Problem Solving,” Cognitive Psychology 12, no. 3 (1980): 306–355; and M. Gick and K. Holyoak, “Schema Induction and Analogical Transfer,” Cognitive Psychology 15, no. 1 (1983): 1–38. 17. For example, Z. Chen and L. Mo, “Schema Induction in Problem Solving: A Multidimensional Analysis,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition 30, no. 3 (2004): 583–600. 18. K. J. Kurtz, O. Boukrina, and D. Gentner, “Comparison Promotes Learning and Transfer of Relational Categories,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition 39, no. 4 (2013): 1303–1310. 19. J. Loewenstein, L. Thompson, and D. Gentner, “Analogical Encoding Facilitates Knowledge Transfer in Negotiation,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 6, no. 4 (1999): 586–597. 20. R. Catrambone, “Aiding Subgoal Learning: Effects on Transfer,” Journal of Educational Psychology 87, no. 1 (1995): 5–17; R. Catrambone, “The Subgoal Learning Model: Creating Better Examples to Improve Transfer to Novel Problems,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 127, no. 4 (1998): 355–376; R. Catrambone and K. Holyoak, “Learning Subgoals and Methods for Solving Probability Problems,” Memory & Cognition 18, no. 6 (1990): 593–603; and L. E. Margulieux and R. Catrambone, “Improving Problem Solving with Subgoal Labels in Expository Text and Worked Examples,” Learning and Instruction 42 (2016): 58–71. 21. J. S. North et al., “Mechanisms Underlying Skills Anticipation and Recognition in a Dynamic and Temporally Constrained Domain,” Memory 19, no. 2 (2011): 155–168. 22. K. Koedinger, A. Corbett, and C. Perfetti, “The Knowledge-Learning-Instruction Framework: Bridging the Science-Practice Chasm to Enhance Robust Student Learning,” Cognitive Science 36, no. 5 (2012): 757–798; and N. A. Taatgen, “The Nature and Transfer of Cognitive Skills,” Psychological Review 120, no. 3 (2013): 439–471. 23. R. Rikers, H. Schmidt, and H. Boshuizen, “On the Constraints of Encapsulated Knowledge: Clinical Case Representations by Medical Experts and Subexperts,” Cognition and Instruction 20, no. 1 (2002): 27–45. 24. R. T. Kellogg, “Professional Writing Expertise,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performances , ed. A. Ericsson et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2018). 25. E. Schwitzgebel and F. Cushman, “Philosophers’ Biased Judgments Persist Despite Training, Expertise, and Reflection,” Cognition 141 (2015): 127–137. 26. M. Carlsson et al., “The Effect of Schooling on Cognitive Skills,” Review of Economics and Statistics 97, no. 3 (2015): 533–547; S. Ritchie and E. Tucker-Drob, “How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Science 29, no. 8 (2018): 1358–1369; and T. Strenze, “Intelligence and Socioeconomic Success: A Meta-Analytic Review of Longitudinal Research,” Intelligence 35, no. 5 (2007): 401–426. 27. S. Ritchie, T. C. Bates, and I. J. Deary, “Is Education Associated with Improvements in General Cognitive Ability, or in Specific Skills?,” Developmental Psychology 51, no. 5 (2015): 573–582. 28. Abrami et al., “Instructional Interventions”; D. F. Halpern, “Teaching Critical Thinking for Transfer across Domains: Disposition, Skills, Structure Training, and Metacognitive Monitoring,” American Psychologist 53, no. 4 (1998): 449–455; A. Heijltjes, T. Van Gog, and F. Paas, “Improving Students’ Critical Thinking: Empirical Support for Explicit Instructions Combined with Practice,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 28, no. 4 (2014): 518–530. 29. D. T. Willingham, When Can You Trust the Experts? How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012). 30. A. Pawl et al., “What Do Seniors Remember from Freshman Physics?,” Physical Review Special Topics—Physics Education Research 8, no. 2 (2012): 020118. 31. H. P. Bahrick, “Semantic Memory Content in Permastore: Fifty Years of Memory for Spanish Learned in School,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113, no. 1 (1984): 1–29; and H. P. Bahrick and L. K. Hall, “Lifetime Maintenance of High School Mathematics Content,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 120, no. 1 (1991): 20–33. 32. D. Ausubel, Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968). 33. J. Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children (New York: International Universities Press, 1952). 34. D. T. Willingham, “What Is Developmentally Appropriate Practice?,” American Educator 32, no. 2 (2008): 34–39. 35. P. D. Parker et al., “A Multination Study of Socioeconomic Inequality in Expectations for Progression to Higher Education: The Role of Between-School Tracking and Ability Stratification,” American Educational Research Journal 53, no. 1 (2016): 6–32. 36. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Education at a Glance: 2018: OECD Indicators (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2018). 37. M. D. Smith, “Cognitive Validity: Can Multi-Choice Items Tap Historical Thinking Processes?,” American Educational Research Journal 54 (2017): 1256–1287.

[Illustrations by James Yang]

1. Teaching Critical Thinking: How to Inspire Better Reasoning

Teaching critical thinking, as most teachers know, is a challenge. Classroom time is always at a premium and teaching thinking and reasoning can fall by the wayside, especially when testing goals and state requirements take precedence. But for a growing number of educators, critical thinking has become a priority. 

This is because, for many reasons, young people simply need critical thinking instruction:

• They are faced with myriad crises — many real and some imagined or exaggerated by unreliable news sources and overstimulated social media users. 
• They spend more and more of their time in internet-connected environments where advertisers and interest groups hold previously unimaginable powers of manipulation over them. 
• Technology, politics, and society in general all seem to be changing faster than ever before, and the future seems more uncertain than ever.

These changes don’t only complicate the world itself; they affect our powers of understanding at the same time. There’s evidence suggesting social media use can damage attention spans , have an outsized impact on emotions and mental health, and even affect memory . Psychologically addictive reward systems are built into many of these platforms. 

Even generally reliable news sources, which increasingly orient themselves to their own fragmented segment of the journalism market, can overwhelm our powers of judgment with sensationalistic headlines, misleading framing, and the sheer volume of information at our fingertips.

The kind of thinking and attention required to engage with complicated issues becomes harder to foster and harder to maintain than it might be in a less saturated information ecosystem. Under these conditions, critical thinking, which has long been a buzzword in education, takes on a new and more urgent significance. New opportunities and methods for teaching critical thinking are needed.

Being able to think critically — with rigor, depth, patience, emotional intelligence, and humility — can have wide-ranging impacts on every aspect of students’ lives: their contributions to civic life, their professional success, their ability to build and maintain healthy relationships, their mental health, and even their physical well-being. 

What are the key strategies for teaching critical thinking skills? In many ways, we are still at square one when it comes to teaching our students how to think critically. There are a number of obstacles here:

• Teachers are not given the time, freedom, materials, or professional development tools to teach their students how to think critically.
• Mainstream education priorities — too focused on test results and narrowly defined skills — don’t leave room for critical thinking.
• The best education research, which strongly suggests that critical thinking instruction must be embedded in specific domain instruction, is not well-known or widely put into practice.
• Traditional curricula have not evolved quickly enough to adapt to the new challenges students face in analyzing information and media. 

What Is Critical Thinking?

For all the talk about critical thinking, there remains a lot of confusion about what exactly it is. So what does critical thinking mean? This is key to teaching critical thinking, of course. 

The Reboot Foundation defines critical thinking quite simply as high-level skills in reasoning, coming to judgments, and making decisions. Even more simply: critical thinking is thinking well. 

To get a little more specific, critical thinkers are regularly reflective, objective, and analytical in their thinking:

• They step back to reflect on their own thinking, taking time to plan, strategize, and reform their thinking when necessary. 
• They do their best to overcome subjective biases. While they know that pure objectivity is an ideal we can never reach, they draw on the perspectives of others, especially those with opposing views, in order to expand their own horizons.
• They use the analytical tools of logic and effective argumentation to evaluate evidence, make judgments, and discuss issues with others. 

For more about Reboot’s definition of critical thinking please see this post: “What Is Critical Thinking?”

How to Teach Critical Thinking

The importance of domain knowledge in teaching critical thinking.

Despite a great deal of rhetoric about critical thinking, not enough time is actually spent teaching critical thinking. One major reason is a misconception about its nature. Critical thinking is not a single skill that can be taught, like playing the cello, or content that can be memorized, like the history of the French Revolution.  What critical thinking entails often depends on the content and discipline. 

What critical thinking entails often depends on the content and discipline.

Although there is overlap, good thinking habits and strategies in physics don’t look the same as those in literary interpretation. We must keep this in mind when we seek to teach thinking. As cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham  puts it , “Thought processes are intertwined with what is being thought about.”

What does that mean for teaching critical thinking? There is good and bad news. The bad news is that critical thinking, as a generic skill, is challenging to teach. Critical thinking skills learned in one area aren’t guaranteed to transfer to other areas.  The good news is that specific critical thinking instruction can, in many cases, be integrated into existing classroom practices. The key is to understand what constitutes deeper thinking in particular domains and implement classroom practices that leads students toward that kind of thinking. That’s what we’ve set out to do in this guide.

How to teach Critical Thinking Habits

That said, there are some habits and virtues that cut across domains when it comes to how to teach critical thinking. Teachers can make an impact by modeling these intellectual virtues, when possible, for their students.

How to Teach Critical Thinking: Sparking Curiosity. 

Young students are eager to know about the world and ask questions tirelessly. Why is the grass green? Why do zebras have stripes? Even adolescents are prone to constant questioning — though their questions sometimes have a more cynical slant.

In the classroom, it’s not always possible to indulge every last question, and some of these questions can be disruptive. But it is still absolutely vital that educators make time to indulge and encourage the curiosity of students. Curiosity, if it’s developed and refined, is crucial to being an informed and engaged citizen of the world.

Open-ended discussions are an excellent way to spark curiosity. We model this kind of discussion in our article on critical thinking and reading .  There you’ll find tips on how to prompt students to ask deeper moral and philosophical texts about literary texts. With practice in refining their curiosity, students will begin to develop what’s called “metacognition,” or thinking about thinking. This is a foundational part of critical thinking, in which students turn their curiosity on themselves, and begin to ask why they think and believe what they do.

How to Teach Critical Thinking: Managing Emotions. 

Emotions may seem far afield from the ability to reason but critical thinking is emotionally difficult. Critical thinkers have to exhibit the humility to admit that they don’t know everything and they may be wrong. At the same time, they have to be confident enough to ask tough questions and challenge authority when appropriate. And, perhaps most crucially, they have to be able to consider and analyze arguments on their merits, instead of judging the person making them.

When emotions run high in the classroom, for example in a discussion of a controversial topic, it’s a great time for teachers to model these virtues. We offer tips on how to do so in our article on civics education . The goal is to give students civic competence and confidence, ultimately, contribute positively to their communities and society as a whole.

How to Teach Critical Thinking: Checking for Bias. 

Emotional arguments can make it especially difficult to recognize and overcome biases. When we’re emotional, we usually fail to step back and look for misinterpretations, hasty conclusions, and assumptions we may have made about the people we’re arguing against.

Instruction in logic and philosophy can help students recognize biased thinking in themselves and, especially, in some of the weak reasoning they all inevitably come across online. Too often, especially in the United States, we’ve considered these topics too advanced for K-12 learners.

Check out our articles on media literacy and philosophy for more on how to help students navigate emotional appeals and understand biases, and for more tips on how to teach critical thinking.

( please click here )

Free Critical Thinking Resources​

Subscribe to get updates and news about critical thinking, and links to free resources.

Reboot Foundation, 88 Rue De Courcelles, Paris, France 75008

[email protected], ⓒ 2024 - all rights are reserved, privacy overview.

Our mission is to develop tools and resources to help people cultivate a capacity for critical thinking, media literacy, and reflective thought.

Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.

Teaching Critical Thinking

DOI link for Teaching Critical Thinking

Get Citation

In Teaching Critical Thinking , renowned cultural critic and progressive educator bell hooks addresses some of the most compelling issues facing teachers in and out of the classroom today.

In a series of short, accessible, and enlightening essays, hooks explores the confounding and sometimes controversial topics that teachers and students have urged her to address since the publication of the previous best-selling volumes in her Teaching series, Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community. The issues are varied and broad, from whether meaningful teaching can take place in a large classroom setting to confronting issues of self-esteem. One professor, for example, asked how black female professors can maintain positive authority in a classroom without being seen through the lens of negative racist, sexist stereotypes. One teacher asked how to handle tears in the classroom, while another wanted to know how to use humor as a tool for learning.

Addressing questions of race, gender, and class in this work, hooks discusses the complex balance that allows us to teach, value, and learn from works written by racist and sexist authors. Highlighting the importance of reading, she insists on the primacy of free speech, a democratic education of literacy. Throughout these essays, she celebrates the transformative power of critical thinking. This is provocative, powerful, and joyful intellectual work. It is a must read for anyone who is at all interested in education today.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter | 5  pages, teaching: introduction, chapter teaching 1 | 5  pages, critical thinking, chapter teaching 2 | 6  pages, democratic education, chapter teaching 3 | 4  pages, engaged pedagogy, chapter teaching 4 | 6  pages, decolonization, chapter teaching 5 | 4  pages, chapter teaching 6 | 3  pages, chapter teaching 7 | 5  pages, collaboration, chapter teaching 8 | 5  pages, conversation, chapter teaching 9 | 5  pages, telling the story, chapter teaching 10 | 4  pages, sharing the story, chapter teaching 11 | 4  pages, imagination, chapter teaching 12 | 6  pages, to lecture or not, chapter teaching 13 | 7  pages, humor in the classroom, chapter teaching 14 | 7  pages, crying time, chapter teaching 15 | 5  pages, chapter teaching 16 | 4  pages, feminist revolution, chapter teaching 17 | 8  pages, black, female, and academic, chapter teaching 18 | 8  pages, learning past the hate, chapter teaching 19 | 5  pages, honoring teachers, chapter teaching 20 | 4  pages, teachers against teaching, chapter teaching 21 | 6  pages, self-esteem, chapter teaching 22 | 7  pages, the joy of reading, chapter teaching 23 | 5  pages, intellectual life, chapter teaching 24 | 5  pages, writing books for children, chapter teaching 25 | 5  pages, spirituality, chapter teaching 26 | 5  pages, chapter teaching 27 | 5  pages, to love again, chapter teaching 28 | 4  pages, feminist change, chapter teaching 29 | 8  pages, moving past race and gender, chapter teaching 30 | 4  pages, talking sex, chapter teaching 31 | 3  pages, teaching as prophetic vocation, chapter teaching 32 | 4  pages, practical wisdom.

• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Cookie Policy
• Taylor & Francis Online
• Taylor & Francis Group
• Students/Researchers
• Librarians/Institutions

Connect with us

Registered in England & Wales No. 3099067 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG © 2024 Informa UK Limited

Critical thinking definition

Critical thinking, as described by Oxford Languages, is the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement.

Active and skillful approach, evaluation, assessment, synthesis, and/or evaluation of information obtained from, or made by, observation, knowledge, reflection, acumen or conversation, as a guide to belief and action, requires the critical thinking process, which is why it's often used in education and academics.

Some even may view it as a backbone of modern thought.

However, it's a skill, and skills must be trained and encouraged to be used at its full potential.

People turn up to various approaches in improving their critical thinking, like:

• Developing technical and problem-solving skills
• Engaging in more active listening
• Actively questioning their assumptions and beliefs
• Seeking out more diversity of thought
• Opening up their curiosity in an intellectual way etc.

Is critical thinking useful in writing?

Critical thinking can help in planning your paper and making it more concise, but it's not obvious at first. We carefully pinpointed some the questions you should ask yourself when boosting critical thinking in writing:

• What information should be included?
• Which information resources should the author look to?
• What degree of technical knowledge should the report assume its audience has?
• What is the most effective way to show information?
• How should the report be organized?
• How should it be designed?
• What tone and level of language difficulty should the document have?

Usage of critical thinking comes down not only to the outline of your paper, it also begs the question: How can we use critical thinking solving problems in our writing's topic?

Let's say, you have a Powerpoint on how critical thinking can reduce poverty in the United States. You'll primarily have to define critical thinking for the viewers, as well as use a lot of critical thinking questions and synonyms to get them to be familiar with your methods and start the thinking process behind it.

Are there any services that can help me use more critical thinking?

We understand that it's difficult to learn how to use critical thinking more effectively in just one article, but our service is here to help.

We are a team specializing in writing essays and other assignments for college students and all other types of customers who need a helping hand in its making. We cover a great range of topics, offer perfect quality work, always deliver on time and aim to leave our customers completely satisfied with what they ordered.

The ordering process is fully online, and it goes as follows:

• Select the topic and the deadline of your essay.
• Provide us with any details, requirements, statements that should be emphasized or particular parts of the essay writing process you struggle with.
• Leave the email address, where your completed order will be sent to.
• Select your prefered payment type, sit back and relax!

With lots of experience on the market, professionally degreed essay writers , online 24/7 customer support and incredibly low prices, you won't find a service offering a better deal than ours.

Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Matters

Defining critical thinking dispositions and why they’re crucial..

Posted September 23, 2024 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

• Another way to think about and measure critical thinking is to include aspects of motivational dispositions.
• Dispositions include open-mindedness and a willingness to be reflective when evaluating information.
• People scoring low in critical thinking dispositions tend to “keep it simple” when something is complex.
• Critical thinking dispositions help individuals avoid oversimplification and can facilitate awareness of bias.

Critical thinking springs from the notion of reflective thought proposed by Dewey (1933), who borrowed from the work of philosophers such as William James and Charles Peirce. Reflective thought was defined as the process of suspending judgment, remaining open-minded, maintaining a healthy skepticism, and taking responsibility for one’s own development (Gerber et al., 2005; Stoyanov & Kirshner, 2007).

Kurland (1995) suggested, “Critical thinking is concerned with reason, intellectual honesty, and open-mindedness, as opposed to emotionalism, intellectual laziness, and closed-mindedness. Thus, critical thinking involves… considering all possibilities… being precise; considering a variety of possible viewpoints and explanations; weighing the effects of motives and biases; being concerned more with finding the truth than with being right…being aware of one’s own prejudices and biases” (p. 3). Thus, being able to perspective-take and becoming conscious of one’s own biases are potential benefits of critical thinking capacities.

Reviews of the critical thinking literature (e.g., Bensley, 2023) suggest that the assessment of this construct ought to include aspects of motivational dispositions. Numerous frameworks of critical thinking dispositions have been proposed (e.g., Bensley, 2018; Butler & Halpern, 2019; Dwyer, 2017); some commonly identified dispositions are open-mindedness, intellectual engagement, and a proclivity to take a reflective stance or approach to evaluating information and the views and beliefs of both oneself and others. Demir (2022) posited that critical thinking dispositions reflect persons’ attitudes toward and routine ways of responding to new information and diverging ideas, willingness to engage in nuanced and complex rather than either/or reductionistic thinking, and perseverance in attempts to understand and resolve complex problems.

Other examples of dispositions are inquisitiveness, open-mindedness, tolerance for ambiguity, thinking about thinking, honesty in assessing or evaluating biases, and willingness to reconsider one’s own views and ways of doing things (Facione et al., 2001). Individual personality attributes associated with these proclivities include a need for cognition (a desire for intellectual stimulation), which is positively associated with critical thinking, and the need for closure (a motivated cognitive style in which individuals prefer predictability, firm answers, and rapid decision making ) and anti-intellectualism (a resentment of “the life of the mind” and those who represent it), both negatively associated with critical thinking.

Further, an ideological component that can impede critical thinking is dogmatism . In addition, rigid, dichotomous thinking impedes critical thinking in that it oversimplifies the complexity of social life in a pluralistic society (Bensley, 2023; Cheung et al., 2002; Halpern & Dunn, 2021) and tries to reduce complicated phenomena and resolve complex problems via “either/or” formulations and simplistic solutions.

In other words, folks with low critical thinking dispositions would tend to “keep it simple” when something is really quite complicated, and think it absolute terms and categories rather than seeing “the gray” in between the black and white extremes.

In sum, critical thinking dispositions are vitally important because they may help individuals avoid oversimplifying reality; they also permit perspective-taking and can facilitate their awareness of diversity and systematic biases, such as racial or gender bias . Some research has indicated that critical thinking dispositions uniquely contribute to academic performance beyond general cognition (Ren et al., 2020), and may help to reduce unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy beliefs (Bensley, 2023; Lantian et al., 2021).

But before we can study the potential impact of critical thinking dispositions, it is necessary to have a reliable, valid, and hopefully brief measure for this construct. I will discuss the development and validation of a measure of critical thinking dispositions in another post.

Bensley, D.A. ( 2023.) Critical thinking, intelligence, and unsubstantiated beliefs: An integrative review. Journal of Intelligence, 1 , 207. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence11110207

Bensley, D.A. (2018). Critical thinking in psychology and everyday life: A guide to effective thinking . New York: Worth Publishers.

Butler, H.A., & Halpern, D.F. (2019). Is critical thinking a better model of intelligence? In Robert J. Sternberg (Ed.) The Nature of Intelligence (pp. 183–96). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cheung, C.-K, Rudowicz. E., Kwan, A., & Yue, X.. (2002). Assessing university students’ general and specific criticalthinking. College Student Journal, 36 , 504 – 25.

Demir, E. (2022). An examination of high school students’ critical thinking dispositions and analytical thinking skills. Journal of Pedagogical Research, 6 , 190–200. https://doi.org/10.33902/JPR.202217357

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process . Lexington: Heath and Company.

Dwyer, C. P. (2017). Critical thinking: Conceptual perspectives and practical guidelines . Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Facione, P., Facione, N,C,, & Giancarlo, C.A.F. (2001(. California Critical Disposition Inventory . Millbrae: California Academic Press.

Gerber, S., Scott, L., Clements, D.H., & Sarama, J. (2005). Instructor influence on reasoned argument in discussion boards. Educational Technology, Research & Development, 53 , 25–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02504864

Halpern, D. F., & Dunn, D.S. (2021). Critical thinking: A model of intelligence for solving real-world problems. Journal of Intelligence, 9 , 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9020022

Kurland, D. (1995). I know what it says… What does it mean? Critical skills for critical reading . Belmont: Wadsworth.

Lantian, A., Bagneux, V., Delouvee, S., & Gauvrit, N. (2021). Maybe a free thinker but not a critical one: High conspiracybelief is associated with low critical thinking ability. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 35 , 674 – 84. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3790

Ren, X., Tong, Y., Peng, P. & Wang, T. (2020). Critical thinking predicts academic performance beyond general cognitiveability: Evidence from adults and children. Intelligence, 82 , 101487. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101487

Stoyanov, S., & Kirschner, P. ( 2007). Effect of problem solving support and cognitive styles on idea generation:Implications for technology-enhanced learning. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 40 , 49–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2007.10782496

Kyle D. Killian, Ph.D., LMFT is the author of Interracial Couples, Intimacy and Therapy: Crossing Racial Borders.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

It’s increasingly common for someone to be diagnosed with a condition such as ADHD or autism as an adult. A diagnosis often brings relief, but it can also come with as many questions as answers.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

How ‘Would You Rather’ Questions Can Support Higher-Order Thinking

Teachers can move ‘Would You Rather’ questions beyond brain breaks, using them to boost engagement during all stages of instruction.

Your content has been saved!

Most people are familiar with the game “Would You Rather” (WYR), sometimes called “This or That.” In it, you’re given two options and must choose one—for example, “Would you rather eat pizza or tacos every day for dinner?” It’s fun and fairly simple, often used in classrooms as a brain break. But it can also serve a purpose for learning. By playing this game with upper elementary students and requesting an explanation for their answers, you can move basic questions up the Bloom’s Taxonomy ladder, supporting higher-order thinking. Making your questions pertinent to classroom content further raises the bar, in any subject area, offering an engaging way to introduce concepts, check in during a lesson, or assess students’ understanding at the end of a unit.  

A math class often begins with a warm-up or bell ringer. You can use WYR at this time to determine students’ prior knowledge of the content. When beginning a unit on the metric system, asking, “Would you rather run 10 meters or 10 yards?” can help you determine which students have experience with this system. During class, you can pose a question to an individual or small group of students, such as, “Would you rather use multiplication or repeated addition to solve this problem?” 

Higher-level thinking comes with the follow-up question, “Why?” At the end of a unit, say, “Beth is asked to babysit for four hours. She is being offered $12 an hour to babysit two children or $25 per child for the entire time. If you were Beth, which would you rather?” Next, add, “Be sure to explain your choice and show your work,” requiring students to mathematically defend their choice. For ready-made prompts, I visit the website Would You Rather Math helpful.

LANGUAGE ARTS

WYR is effective in language arts. You can use it before reading, to gather information about the reader or their background knowledge (e.g., “Would you rather read a book digitally or a traditional physical book? Tell us more,” or, prior to Charlotte’s Web , “Would you rather care for a pig or a spider? Why?”).  

Throughout reading instruction, you can use WYR to help students compare characters and their motivations or other story elements. “Would you rather be friends with Ron or Hermione?  Be sure to use text evidence when explaining your choice.” This question requires higher-level thinking, asking students to evaluate what makes a good friend, then match friendship traits that are important to them with one of the characters. In order to provide evidence, students must analyze the text to find examples of words or actions that support their idea about friendship. 

You can also use WYR as a post-reading assessment. For example, “Would you rather change the setting of this novel or the solution? Give two or three reasons to support your choice, and discuss how the change would affect the story.” 

Even writing instruction pairs with WYR, adding a fun social element to writing and revising. Students struggling to come up with an idea can poll each other: “Would you rather read about soccer or pandas? Why?” And it can help reluctant revisers and editors. I encourage my students to use WYR during peer revision: “Would you rather I had my main character say _____ or _____ at this part of my piece? Would you rather this ending or that ending? Would you rather a period or an ellipsis at the end of this sentence?” 

When students use WYR questions accompanied by a follow-up question, they get suggestions and more meaningful feedback. When it comes from a peer, they value that feedback even more.

SCIENCE and SOCIAL STUDIES

Those who teach science or social studies can incorporate WYR. Prior to an experiment or unit, you might ask, “Would you rather be able to camouflage yourself to your surroundings or run 15 mph? Would your answer change if we added ‘on the savannah’ to the end of the question, or ‘in the forest’?” 

During research, you can use WYR to demonstrate what information students have learned (e.g., “Would you rather live in an area prone to hurricanes or tornadoes? Create bullet points and be ready to discuss.”). And again, you can use WYR as an assessment: “Would you rather witness the Boston Tea Party or Paul Revere’s ride? Explain your choice. Be sure to give at least one reason why you did not choose the other option.”

ELECTIVES and SUPPORT STAFF

In art, students can compare mediums, artists’ work, or artistic styles using WYR. In music, they can compare instruments, composers, sounds, or genres. And in physical education, positions played (first base or outfield), rules (delay of game or play on), or nutrition (Gatorade or soda).  

Even school counselors can use WYR to help students choose a preferred coping strategy (e.g., “When feeling stressed, would you rather listen to music or take a walk?”) or become self-aware (e.g., “Would you rather take a written test or give a speech in front of the class?” or “Would you rather a handshake or a no-contact verbal greeting?”). 

ADAPTATIONS

You can vary the way you extend WYR questions. To improve conversational skills, group students with peers who selected the same answer, and ask them to provide evidence and support their opinions. Meeting with others who choose the same response can validate students’ thinking. Have students listen to the “other side” and defend their choice based on those students’ contributions. Doing so helps students build arguments and learn debating skills as they propose rebuttals. 

Allow students to change their opinions, as doing so invites them to practice comparing and evaluating evidence. When used with intention, this technique gives students some control, as either option is acceptable as long as they can defend their opinion.  

Providing reasons, evidence, and explanations for a preference takes WYR beyond its often simplistic form, involving deeper thinking and evidence-based responses . I’ve found WYR an easy way to incorporate higher-level skills into any subject and any part of a lesson.