 So what does it mean to think critically? It's an interesting question because there's a lot of confusion for people that It's one of these things that's widely valued. It's taught It's been in curriculum for generations and yet not a lot of clarity about what it is So in a nutshell it comes from a Greek word meaning criteria It's criteria thinking and that's an important distinction often students think it means it means to criticize to be critical That's a misunderstanding and so what we wanted is help students understand critical thinking is to make thoughtful decisions using criteria to Guide you in your decision-making. So why is it important that that we focus on critical thinking? And I think there are two two sides to that one is So that students I mean first of all I frame it We live in a democracy if we have thoughtful civic engagement students have to be thoughtful about decisions they make they have to be Thoughtful about career choices they make about being a thoughtful consumer So to to just to live a full life you need to be thoughtful in decisions the flip side though Is that the students will learn the concepts in the content? We want them to learn more deeply if they learn it in a critically thoughtful manner So you know they can learn it in a more superficial way or they can learn it in a way that has engaged them in thinking more Deeply and so I would argue that whatever concepts I want students to learn They're going to learn more deeply in a critically thoughtful classroom And they're going to live a richer deeper life as a critically thoughtful person learn to think think to learn is to kind of picking up on two sides of You know we need to teach kids the intellectual tools to allow them to do the thinking But at the same time we found in working with with students and with teachers That you'll learn the content much better if it's been Problematized if you've been invited to think about the content But not only do I need to teach you the intellectual tools you need to be successful in thinking But what we find is the content the concepts I would learn much more deeply So there's kind of a double payoff when critical thinking underpins learning kids learn how to think better But they also learn to they learn deeper as a result of the thinking they're doing So it's kind of a double payoff teaching kids learning the ability to think deeply teach them to learn content through that thinking