Do our children understand what are they learning? This is a basic question that must be answered.
One day in a fruit shop a child was insisting the “golden apple” which was not an apple because it is not red. He was unaffected as the kid’s parents was trying to explain as he was not ready to receive any other information on an apple. This case is not only true to that particular child but most of our children. Kids does not have to mind to think critically or say that they are not trained that way.
Research suggests that a more in-depth focus on enhancing critical thinking skills in K-12 can add academic rigor and increase the scores on the standardized assessments (VanTassel-Baska, Bracken, Feng, & Brown, 2009; McCollister &Sayler, 2010; Snodgrass, 2011; Tsai, Chen, Chang, & Chang, 2013).
Critical thinking helps students to survive and thrive in this world of uncertainty.
We have a miss-conception that children are too young to learn critical thinking. As a result students coming to higher education lack critical thinking to understand the concept and end up learning by hard.
Utilizing Critical Thinking
Samriddhi School, therefore conducted a “Teacher’s training on Critical Thinking” by Ms.Claire Bennett (@mandarin giavarny ) and Ms.SumatiShakya.
In this training program, our teachers are trained to infuse critical thinking in all the lessons by utilizing in depth questioning and evaluation of both – data and sources. The activities can help students to enhance their critical thinking and better understand why something has occurred over just understanding what has occurred.
Students are trained to track patterns in the information instead of simply memorizing it. This helps them to develop skills of recognition and prediction. Critical thinking helps students evaluate available information and sources and learn appropriate procedures to find and utilize credible information. These skills will help in comprehensive reading and problem-solving skills which plays an important role in standardized assessments.
Educators Role
The roles of educators is invest more time in developing critical thinking than they typically play. The educators need to act as a facilitator over a teacher and encourage freer thought process as well as encourage understanding that thinking critically does not always results a right answer. It also involves preparing even youngest children to learn appropriate responses to the conflicting opinions.
Result of Critical thinking
By adopting critical thinking in education contexts students will be able to think and evaluate about their own thinking and behavior on given issues. It will help them understand the role and significance of the culture and its influence on their daily lives and community. Further benefits are listed below:
- Plan and think strategically
- Make reasonable and defensible decisions about issues related to individual and community well-being
- Take action and challenge(individually and collectively) to address social, cultural, economic, and political inequalities
- Be broad and adventurous thinkers
- Generate innovative solutions
- Use your reasoning skills to analyze and evaluate
There isn’t distinct type of critical thinking in classroom for different subjects. It helps to systematically develop and reinforce skills. The potential benefits to students seem obvious, and we probably need to be doing much more to help students learn wisely.We are positive about this new approach of critical thinking in our classrooms. We believe, utilizing critical thinking and its components effectively and systematically in classrooms can have enormous gains for both the students and the society. This helps students to survive and thrive in this world of uncertainty.