It's summer time. School's out. Your classroom is closed.
Finally---you’re on vacation.
But if you're like most teachers, you're already thinking about how to begin the next school year, and with each new experience you wonder, "How can I use this in my classroom?
You may be out of school for the summer, but your mind is still in the game.
You're a thinker---
- looking for evidence/drawing conclusions;
- activating your prior knowledge/making connections;
- examining things from varied perspectives;
- considering new instructional approaches;
- evaluating your year
- reflecting on the significance of what you do.
Intelligent Thinkers Question Everything
Thinking and questioning your thoughts comes automatically for you because you have been doing it for a while; but, students need to be taught these questioning techniques explicitly, because when they learn them, they arrive at well-reasoned decisions and solutions.
Critical thinking skills are the constant that runs throughout all decision-making and problem-solving situations, and knowing how to use them will enable your students to keep up with the pace of in the 21st century.
So sit back and read this blog.
Enjoy the think-and-take activities that help your students explore, learn, and apply the critical thinking habits of smart thinkers, and inspire each of them to become a life-long thinker and learner like you.
The think-and-take ideas shared in this blog are mini-lessons from Project Based Learning (PBL) samples that show how to teach students to become intelligent thinkers. Each week, for the next five weeks, one metacognitive / critical thinking skill will be examined. Below is a Mental Checklist you can use with students when beginning each lesson that gets students thinking about their thinking.
- Looking for Evidence
- Making Connections
- Points of View
- Considering Alternatives
- Considering Significance
Lesson from GoTeachGo
Critical Thinking - The Complete Starter Guide - All Grade Levels
On Teacher's Pay Teachers
You teach students to find evidence to support their opinions or assertions all of the time. But when you teach them to analyze and question how they arrived at the conclusions they made, their understanding deepens.
Tell your students that each day they are going to practice skills that smart thinkers use to make good decisions and solve problems. Then use each mini-lesson as a bell-ringer, and wake your class up to a deeper level of learning. Tell your students these skills are called critical thinking skills, and remind them that smart thinkers use them every day.
Tell your students that each day they are going to practice skills that smart thinkers use to make good decisions and solve problems. Then use each mini-lesson as a bell-ringer, and wake your class up to a deeper level of learning. Tell your students these skills are called critical thinking skills, and remind them that smart thinkers use them every day.
Other suggestions: Use the first week of instruction as an introduction to all 5 skills, teaching one per day; and revisit the skills, focusing on one per week for more intensive practice.
Procedures
1. Write on the board the objective: Today our learning outcomes are to begin developing the critical thinking skill of looking for evidence and show an understanding of how we arrived at our conclusions. (You can word this your way).
2. Show students the Mental Checklist on the ELMO or SmartBoard. Tell students these are the five critical thinking skills, and they will be practicing and learning one new skill each day.
3, Put the graph on an ELMO or SmartBoard. Tell them that today they are looking for evidence to support their findings.
1. Write on the board the objective: Today our learning outcomes are to begin developing the critical thinking skill of looking for evidence and show an understanding of how we arrived at our conclusions. (You can word this your way).
2. Show students the Mental Checklist on the ELMO or SmartBoard. Tell students these are the five critical thinking skills, and they will be practicing and learning one new skill each day.
2. Show students the Mental Checklist on the ELMO or SmartBoard. Tell students these are the five critical thinking skills, and they will be practicing and learning one new skill each day.
3. Put the graph on an ELMO or SmartBoard. Tell them that today they are looking for evidence to support their findings.
- Encourage them to answer questions and write responses using specific numerical data from the chart.
4. Ask students the following question and choose students who want to share.
- What sport do most students like to play?
5. Follow-up with these questions and encourage specific responses.
- Why do you say that?
- How do you know?
6. End the lesson by having students write a paragraph about what they learned. Ask them this and prompt a discussion as follows:
- What did you learn in this lesson? You might write about being introduced to critical thinking.
- Did you discover anything you already do that uses the skill of looking for evidence?
7. Consider asking students this question:
- How did thinking about how you arrived at your conclusions help you understand why you made your decision?
Other questions to for students to think about when writing responses:
- Are you wondering why you are learning about thinking and practicing thinking strategies? Express your ideas in a paragraph.
- Are you wondering about the other thinking skills on the Mental Checklist? Why? What would you like to know?
Be sure to walk around as students are writing, and observe their responses while prompting them for specific details where needed.
Collect paragraphs from students who want you to share what they have written, and put them in one stack. Put the others in a second stack. Assure students whose paragraphs you will read that you will not read aloud their names unless they have let you know it is okay to do so.
On Grading
- You can collect student responses, count them as participation points for daily grades and have students file them in their writing portfolios daily. Then they can revisit them each week to monitor their understanding.
- Or you can let students keep them as a reminder of what they are learning throughout the week, and have them turn the paragraphs in each week or file them weekly and turn them all in at the end of each quarter.
No matter how you assess these paragraph responses, you will have gotten the students thinking about their thinking.
And that's the objective!
Next Week's Lesson: “Making Connections”
And if you would like to examine PBL units of study, please visit TeachersPayTeachers.Recommended Reading for this Week:
Integrating the 16 Habits of Mind
Written by Sheri Rose, Owner of Precision Copyediting, LLC.
