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WHEN I was told by an elementary school principal that "Critical thinking is the heart of our curriculum", 1 expected to see kids deeply engaged in high-level thinking.
Instead I found a few feeble attempts to add "thinking skills" to lessons. And I discovered that, with few exceptions teachers had muddled notions about critical thinking and little training in developing their students' thinking skills.
One fourth-grade teacher gave kids time to work on a long-division problem. When some students struggled, she simply instructed them to "stop and think" about what they were doing wrong.
Down the hall, a fifth-grade teacher was lecturing about weather and climate at the South Pole. At the end of the lesson, she held up a photograph from the 1914 Shackleton Expedition of the ship Endurance locked in ice. "Take a moment to think about what it would take to survive in this type of climate," she instructed, before handing out homework assignments.
What's missing in these lessons? Richard Paul and Linda Elder, of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, have some answers. Students, Elder says, need opportunities to "take thinking apart"-that is, analyze their own thinking according to standards of clarity, accuracy, relevance, logic, and fairness.
To put students' thinking at the center of their daily lessons, Paul says, teachers should encourage students to: summarize what others have stated, elaborate on concepts and ideas, relate topics to their own knowledge and experience, give examples to clarify and support ideas, and make connections between related concepts.
Too often, teachers allow students to get by with random and undisciplined thought, Paul says. Instead, he recommends developing students' creative and critical reasoning through what he calls the basic building blocks of thinking: beginning with clearly stated goals and purposes for study and inquiry, formulating and framing problems and questions, developing a defensible perspective and point of view, assessing resource materials and texts for honesty and fairness, questioning assumptions and biases, making valid inferences, and evaluating consequences of judgments and reasoning.
Students should be taught to "reason their way" into school subjects, Paul says, instead of being spoon-fed information that they memorize and then forget. Schools should see to it that students become progressively "more disciplined in their reasoning, and more self-critical...