The Importance Of Teaching Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking is described as unbiased, clear and factual thought process that helps any student with any decision-making process. Critical thinking is an essential tool that every student will need to master to continue academic success. There are multiple phases of critical thinking as described by Benjamin Bloom which include remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating. The critical thinking process starts by remembering. If we can remember what we read and apply key facts we will be able to move forward to understand what decisions we need to make. From there we can then apply the facts to the decision we have to make and innovate, or create, as needed.

Another way I plan to develop students’ critical thinking skills is by including more information-based texts in my curriculum. An article in the Early Childhood Education Journal discusses how two second grade teachers incorporate this into their classrooms (Calo, 2011). My favorite way that the teachers used informational texts was by choosing readings related to what was going on in the students’ lives. In one classroom, they had weekly visits from service dogs, so the teacher chose texts about dogs. For elementary students, this is a great way to get them engaged, ask deeper questions, and promote critical thinking.

Teaching higher order thinking skills is not a recent need. It is apparent that students, at all levels of education, are lagging in problem-solving and thinking skills. Fragmentation of thinking skills, however, may be the result of critical thinking courses and texts. Every course, especially in content subjects, students should be taught to think logically, analyze and compare, question and evaluate.

This article focused on the constant debate concerning the conditions in which students develop the skill of thinking critically. Being able to use critical thinking requires knowledge of facts and concepts about the subject matter. I found this article interesting because I think it is important that students develop critical thinking skills. Most scholarly articles tend to have an abstract that summarizes the papers entirety. Due to this this article is considered scholarly.

       Public schools have discovered the importance of critical thinking, many people are trying to teach children how to do it. The problem is that very few teachers know how to do. Robert Sternberg, an early advocate of critical thinking in teaching,

Critical thinking is something that should be taking place during every lesson. I engage my students in this higher level order thinking by asking multi-level questions that may have more than one answer. I also foster thoughtful discussions during out social learning lessons, such as encouraging healthy debate. Being able to communicate and elaborate their thinking is important. Because I teach at the primary level so sometimes in order to get students to engage in critical thinking, I have to model it through discussion or through work. In the discussion, I use various questioning strategies and use various introductory phrases in order get students to open up and reveal that they are

A key component in teaching students critical thinking is being able to engage students in the active process of learning, and one can accomplish this through teaching the class by involving relevant topics that students can relate to. This is a main aspect of Acosta’s critical pedagogy curriculum which involves having the student participate in the academic experience. Acosta shows

Critical thinking is a complex sector of education and how to apply it to teaching students. It is a difficult term to define and teach to a student, it has been a mystery to most teachers to teach students to think critically. Just as Brookfield, explains in chapter one of his book that outlines

High School students are not being adequately educated about these skills in classrooms. Be as it may, many students do not engage in enough higher thinking. Notwithstanding the importance many educators have stressed, it continues to be an educational concern. In our education system instructors are not advocating enough critical thinking in High School classrooms as the curriculums intended there to be. The challenge of polishing critical thinking in classrooms is that teachers must learn how to interpolate these skills into the academic curriculum. These skills are not only important in Reading, English and Writing but in all subjects including History and Social Science. In need, High School classrooms do not provide enough opportunities for students to develop critical thinking skills. The opportunities

In today’s current school systems, the question of whether or not schools are correctly teaching students the right curriculum is coming up for debate. In the Article,"Teaching Critical Thinking by Marcia Clemmitt, she goes into extensive research of the U.S. Department of Education’s crisis of standardized testing. Most learning activities include standardized testing which lacks many students to express creative and critical thinking. Critical thinking is defined as the examination and evaluation of ideas, events and arguments in their contexts which introduces students to interrogate assumptions and identifying biases (Clemmitt)Pure critical thinking involves investigating a text more than just memorizing, but to apply theirself in other ways of techniques, meaning schools should stimulate more analytical methods of teaching. This would not only free students from a sheltered test culture,but will allow students to think in a deeper,more passionate way than before.

Having those strong critical thinking skills is very vital to this career. Critical thinking means that you have to make decisions based upon treatments, symptoms and changes that occur in a child’s state of health (educationcareerarticles.com, pg.2). You have to know what specific type of care each patient needs so you can diagnose any problems that may happen. Having patience is another strong quality at the top of the list. Dealing with kids can give someone a lot of stress just because they are all over the place sometimes which is where your patience ability has to kick in. Kids who are really young have a lack of trepidation meaning they rarely understand what’s going on around them (educationcareerarticles.com, pg.2).

According to Supon, one of the fundamental purposes of teaching critical thinking is to enhance the abilities of students to become critical thinkers. Corporate leaders, educational researchers, employers, and parents have continually pushed teachers to assist their students in the development of critical thinking ability. Critical thinking is a skill that ?involved not only knowledge of content by also concept formation and analysis, reasoning and drawing conclusions, recognizing and avoiding contradiction, and other essential cognitive activities? (Supon, 1998).

This paper explores critical thinking skills and teaching them in an educational setting. Teaching critical thinking is highly debatable. Many feel as though it is not a necessary skill that needs to be learned and others feel as though it is not a skill that can be taught. In this paper I will discuss what critical thinking is and ways it can be taught in an educational setting.

Critical thinking is a significant and essential topic in recent education. The strategy of critical thinking skills helps identify areas in one's courses as the suitable place to highlight, expand and use some problems in exams that test students' critical thinking skills.

When defining the term “critical thinking” it can seem overwhelming and daunting, especially for young learners. In laments terms, you are teaching your student how to think for him or herself when it comes to problem solving. Instead of giving the student the answer, you give them the tools to discover the answer him/herself. Critical thinking is an important component of any classroom. No matter the age group, these skills stay with a child for the rest of his or her life. As a teacher, it is important to understand what critical thinking pertains to and how to structure part of your lesson plan around developing critical thinking skills.