 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 and 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 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 That 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 How do we frame learning to get kids involved in thinking there's going to be two key things One is we talk often talk in the critical thinking consortium about tweaking the question so that it invites a judgment Often we'll ask kids questions that recall just really a recall question. So Look this up. Remember this brainstorm this, but there's no decision. Sometimes we ask preference questions, you know Who's your favorite hockey team is a very different question than which team is most likely to go deep into the playoffs I can say my favorite team is the Edmonton Oilers, but I might have a hard time unless you show up that gold Hending I'm not sure they're going to make it deep. So one is a preference question And one is using evidence to make a decision and we have to be careful that students understand the difference Because I want to frame my question so you're being asked to make a thoughtful decision So so we need to frame the question the other is that the one big danger We often have is that we frame a rich question But then we teach content to kids for several days and now that we feel we from part enough content We let them come back to that question You don't really nurture good thinking by saying to kids after I've asked this question sit tight Well, I impart content to you So we need to find ways that we call it a curriculum embedded approach that that Engaging kids in thinking is routine. It's how we learn every day and the kids start to see that thinking is what's expected on a routine basis It's not what we do when we get to the end You know, it's not a question asked at the beginning and you know book ending it But in between is a lot of content delivery. So even in learning content How can I how can I help you learn content in a way that engages thinking? So in our view everything we do can engage kids in thinking and that's that's how we get it to be a routine part of what they do So there are lots of ways we can take things that happen every day in a classroom and just invite children to make a decision a Thoughtful decision about it. Could you rewrite that title to make it more interesting? What would that look like? So the invitation is have we invited children to make a decision and as they said it often Complements the tasks are already doing as opposed to displacing it We were looking at a lesson with young children grade two students thinking about growth and change in animals and we began by asking them why do we have zoos? But instead of just brainstorming I presented, you know Here are four reasons we might have zoos and the children were invited to rank those from the best reason to the fourth best reason So now they have to make so notice as soon as I give a list I can turn into a thinking question by inviting you to pick from or rank my list So the children invited what do we have zoos to bring people to visit our city to study animals to observe animals? To protect animals and they talked about which is the best reason which is the fourth best reason So that's a way that we started the lesson and then we invited the children if you were to create an enclosure for an animal What would you do they give us might use? Well, what if we thought about this now? What changes would you make so we put the task the challenge up front and then as the children learn new content They can continue to get to revisit and rethink their ideas their responses to that Another example at a grade seven level looking at Acadian deportation inviting students to think about You know were the British just in the way they treated the Acadians and in a critical thinking lesson rather than saying well Here's all things that happened We played the song from the band called Acadian driftwood and invited the students to say well What can you learn from that song about who the Acadians were about what the British might have done? And they have to draw out the evidence and then they can exploring But why might the British have done that with that be legitimate reason? So notice there's a reversal there instead of me saying here's a reading to do or here's me telling you what happened We use a song digging into pop culture even for students to decode that to dissect that and then begin to respond So the invitation to think is up front and the kids are engaged always in building that background In nurturing critical thinking in students, you know, we often talk about how do you build the community? How do you frame the task? But my caution to teachers is always you know if you frame you know You could create a wonderfully supportive community. You have wonderfully rich tasks for kids that invite and challenge them to think But if that's where we stop you actually won't advance critical thinking very much because you haven't Given me the supports I need to do that Some kids go home to both parents who are well educated some go home to a parent working a single parent working evenings It's not a level playing field and I think you know We have a moral imperative as educators to say how do we build the intellectual tools that will allow all our children to succeed? Not be dependent on who's going home to what supports at home So that's part of our classroom job is to make sure children have those tools So there are five intellectual tools that we need to pay attention to when supporting students as critical thinkers One is building their background knowledge Second is helping them to identify and use criteria Third is ensuring that they understand and can use the critical thinking vocabulary that they need The fourth that we need to be conscious of our thinking strategies that will help students to organize See trends make connections So those are thinking strategies that students would use and fifth are the habits of good thinkers that we want to nurture over time And there are 19 habits that we work with that we would use to decide what would most help students So those are the five intellectual tools we focus on Those tools I'm speaking of Background background is part prior knowledge. It's what does the child bring into my class? But if I've given you a rich task, what will I need to know before I can solve that task? What of that? Do I already know what additional learning do I need and how can I help you learn that? So there's a couple of pieces there right away. I have to differentiate the learning if a child comes in with a lot of background How do I make sure I don't make them go back through a lot of that content again? They come in with less background. How do I shore that up? You come in as an ESL learner Well, I use more visuals How will I differentiate that learning so all children can access the content and one things? We need to be thoughtful of is I want to engage all my children in building that background But I have to think about how they learn that background. How will I support them in doing that? How do I do that in a way that's not merely transmission? This is one of the interesting challenges How do I not simply say here's the content you need? So for example, can I present them? Yes and no examples so that they have to build the definition instead of me saying Here's the definition for nationalism. What if I said well here are yes examples and here are no examples What's different? Can you build the definition for nationalism? So note there are ways I can tweak How I deliver content to students that engages them in being actively involved in constructing their background knowledge So that's one of the distinctions we want to make is the construction of background knowledge with children as opposed to the transmission of background knowledge criteria is essential because the critical thinking at its core is Criterial thinking and it is important to help students in a couple of ways One is how do we distinguish from a preference response or critically thoughtful response? Well one is I can I can articulate why I made the decision that I made by saying well these are the criteria that I use But secondly it actually helps students organize their thinking and and be able to be thoughtful in their thinking So if I were to ask a question You know what makes an effective leader Which would be a good critical thinking question. Well, what criteria would you use for a leader? Well, if I wanted students to write me a paragraph response to my question Is steven harper an effective leader? I'm not asking you whether you like or dislike our prime minister. I'm asking you is he effective in his leadership Well, what what does that look like? Well, is he decisive? Is he inclusive? And so on so I might build a set of criteria But now to help students organize their thinking I could say well paragraph one I'm going to address Evidence of him being decisive and here's three supporting pieces and then I'm going to talk about being inclusive And here's the evidence I would use to support whether he is or is not By having criteria we begin to give students a structure for which they can respond As opposed to students just starting to write lots of stuff on their test response, you know So instead of saying Is steven harper an effective leader defend your answer note the difference between is steven harper an effective leader What criteria would you use for an effective leader and use evidence to support? One provides an inherent structure for students to work with To develop a sound well thought out answer and one kind of invites throw what you've got at the paper And hopefully we'll find some marks in there So I I think criteria helps to focus students thinking helps give them structure to do that thinking helps them organize their thinking It's a powerful tool for students to help them think more deeply in more organized ways The next tools, uh, the tool is critical thinking vocabulary is important and that If students don't understand the language of the question They'll often struggle. So if we first of all we need to use the vocabulary routinely, but we also need to slow down And unpack it with children. What does it mean to analyze? What is a sound inference versus a guess so that children when they see these words know of when we talk about thinking strategies I think it's really important to understand thinking strategies are not instructional strategies in that Over time they need to be owned by the children So all of the five intellectual tools we talk about are what the children use for their thinking My goal over time is that children have their own repertoire of thinking strategies if I gave you a task you could say Well, I could mind map this. I could use a venn diagram here I might use a five w's chart here that when when children have their own repertoire They become more self-regulated as learners They can say this would be a great place to use this one that we learned the other intellectual tool for the intellectual tools we talk about Background knowledge criteria vocabulary and thinking strategies. I can teach them I can teach you the criteria I can teach you how to mind map The fifth intellectual tool are habits of mind and I can't teach a habit This is an important distinction for teachers I can't teach you to be empathetic. Okay, so I can teach a lesson on empathy That doesn't mean you're going to be empathetic tomorrow It means you know the meaning of the word and you might recognize it in others because I taught you the word It doesn't mean you're empathetic. Okay, so I want I want you to be to persevere I want you to pay attention to detail Well telling me that and teaching me the words doesn't get me there That's something we have to nurture and notice habits of mind are called that because they must become habitual They have to come habitual over time. So there are a variety of ways we work with the habits But they really do need to be nurtured and if we bite off too many You find that it's a superficial treatment and really doesn't impact the way we want Helping teachers think about where to start when they want to embed critical thinking is Interesting and tricky question. So they can begin by saying How do I problematize each lesson in a small way? And I just and I would say if I found a teacher was a bit nervous about I'd say look Let's just find five ways that I can tweak a lesson that you already teach And just try that out and that will build some confidence. Let me just show you how I might Invite students to rewrite titles in a textbook that are boring so they become more interesting Let's say take Notes and have them reduce them down to the most important points So for some teachers it's going to be find that place that we can try a small tweak try it out See how it goes see if it increases student learning But the flip side of that is to say But if I want more and I want it sustained, how do I weave those together? How do I how do I launch with an interesting task that we're going to work with over the next few weeks? Now for some teachers That's an uncomfortable place because it requires a lot of scaffolding a lot of planning But for some it's an exciting place to say How do I put that rich exciting task as the driver up front and then Engage kids throughout the learning in that so I would say depending on the teacher And I would argue just like we differentiate for students We want to differentiate for teachers. Where are you in this process? What would be the most comfortable fit? Would it be a small task you just try out and see how it goes as you layer in more Are you willing to jump in with both feet and try something richer? So I think both are out there for teachers and teachers kind of figure out where their comfort level is So when we talk about digitally enhanced, I'm saying what are the goals that we have In education and we need to pause and say well we want children who can think critically who can collaborate Who can self-regulate in their learning and so on so if we look at what are those central goals that that we want in learning Then we ask ourselves so when will technology where does it actually enrich and enhance those goals? I think the thoughtful use of technology We need to ground that in what is the learning that we want and and I can tell you Many many jurisdictions across north american internationally have lists of Of competencies that they think the 21st century learner needs. So the OECD has a list You know bc has a list. We all are talking competencies. They can become our criteria Is this technology helping to create More collaborative learners. Am I using this in a way that allows kids to You know for example using poplet where students can go online at night and add ideas and I can open that up the next day And go oh look at all the ideas people have contributed now individually you could write to respond So we collaboratively think We individually respond So are we creating those collaborative communities? Are we using the technology to access a variety of source? So instead of a text that has a limited scope I can suddenly access resources that might give me multiple perspectives. So can I enrich? The perspectives represented can I enrich? The modalities being used so that I can reach more learners if I can use more modalities chances are I can I can engage more children. So today on you know the touch of a smart board I can have a video playing the words up there They can see the performance hear the performance read the lyrics all simultaneously We know from the research that multimodal learning is far more powerful. So can I increase modalities? Can I increase collaboration? Can I increase the perspectives represented in the learning? Can I increase opportunities for self regulation where students are able to monitor their own learning? So if we use the kind of competencies as our guide and ask ourselves So how is that technology helping advance the competencies we think are important for children? Then I think we have a good place to we should always going back to saying it How is that helping with that competency? And if it's not do we need to rethink how we're using it? This idea that learning is no longer confined to You know school starts at nine o'clock and ends at 3 15 and it happens within these walls Well children with an entrepreneurial spirit find that learning happens all the time it happens You know you you said something interesting. I googled that to find out more about it because I was interested I was intrigued by that. I wonder if that's actually true. Someone said this to me. I want to find out Well, that's that's an entrepreneurial spirit seizing the moment at any time to say I I can learn anywhere anytime um, that's an entrepreneurial spirit and and um, you know, we want to think about in the past We learned about subjects even if I only have one computer in my classroom I might say every day when you walk in I might say, okay, who will be my researcher for the day Could you take your books and sit by the class computer? Whenever a question comes up that is a really interesting question Could you google that and see what you find and when you find something because you feed that into our class discussion See that's nurturing an entrepreneurial spirit in the classroom if I have two computers in my room Could someone use Bing instead of Google will use different search engines. Did you find different information? Gee, how would we figure that out? So notice I think classrooms can nurture this entrepreneurial spirit by moving beyond the text into saying We have rich opportunities You know if if you have a bring your own device policy Google goggles on my phone. Let's me take a picture and scan it and within a minute I can find that painting wherever it sits in the world online It's amazing how many pictures and textbooks have been cropped Just invite kids to scan that picture find the original And think about why did they crop that what does it tell us about what mattered and didn't matter who'd they crop out Who'd they leave in like all of a sudden? I've got whole new questions kids can explore And that to me is that the essence of an entrepreneurial spirit and learning is to say, you know You asked an interesting question It could take me in multiple directions and we might go in different directions And we can all and then we come back together So it's it's this idea that that we can seize opportunities to learn and they're not limited So, you know age-old View of critical thinking and creativity used to be that that they're separate dimensions that that there's critical thinking There's creativity that one is rigorous and one is kind of spontaneous and one is You know logical sequential and the others this and and So for a while we've been saying well, that's actually not true. They actually overlap Now I actually would say to you Just to be a little provocative. We're not even sure there is any such thing as creative thinking And let me explain that Is there creativity? Absolutely But when we say there's critical thinking and creative thinking We seem to be implying that there's two different parts and so from a neuroscience lens There's no part of the brain devoted to creativity If I ask you to Generate some creative ideas and I watched your brain in MRI scan You will not see a particular part of the brain light up You will actually see the frontal lobes light up Which is the part of the brain of decision-making goal setting what we would attribute to critical thinking lies That creativity is in fact good quality thinking There's two steps in creativity that one that was distinguished. One is the fluency just the generation of Of new ideas, but then the second step is so which of those ideas have merit which are most useful So you notice If I'm if I'm not a critical thinker How do I decide which of those interesting ideas we generated are helpful and most useful? So creativity by its very nature embeds The two have to go together I'll give you a quick example of a strategy to nurture creativity and how it uses a critical thinking students were asked In a grade six class Their challenge was to develop a poster an anti-bullying poster to combat poster to combat bullying in their schools We want them to generate ideas that would help them create a poster that was creative And so we use this strategy called synesthesia Which is using the senses to help me think differently And so we asked children if bullying were a color What color would it be? And I'll never forget this 10 year old boy said it would be burgundy And I said burgundy he said Well, red is the color of the pain you feel when you're bullied And black is the isolation you feel when you're bullied and if you mix black and red you get burgundy I thought wow It came from a 10 year old isn't my goal as an educator to close the gap to give all children the tools that will allow them to Be more successful. So creativity matters. It's not about figuring out which kids are creative which aren't It's about giving kids the tools that will allow them to engage in creative endeavors So that all kids are more more successful when we invite innovation So I think, you know, we can support Creativity and innovation through a variety of approaches and people talk about problem-based learning problem solving teaching There are varieties So first of all problem-based learning the caution that I would make and if you look at john hattie's research in visible learning He actually shows that project based learning has a low impact actually doesn't have the payoff that we want But he shows that problem solving teaching has a high payoff now Sometimes this is a bit of semantics. So we'll just you know clarify that If I give kids a problem to solve say there's your problem. We go go solve it Kids get overwhelmed and lost and they're not sure where to go This is where my caution is to teachers. That's why I often use the term Choreographing the learning. We used to talk about teachers sage on the stage We want to move away from sage on the stage At times that gets displaced by teacher's guide on the side guide on the side. There's your problem Go solve it. I'll come around and see how you're doing We often see in the research there that doesn't have the payoff We wanted because kids get lost overwhelmed frustrated. It takes way too much time But what if I choreograph that so what if the problem comes first I can project based learning But as a teacher I consciously am building those intellectual tools the background kids need the criteria they'll use Providing them thinking strategies So the project or the problem to solve drives the learning But the teacher carefully choreographs the experiences for kids To help ensure that they're staying on track and they're being successful So I think project based learning if those intellectual tools are being taught supported I have seen project based learning where they're not and and kids get overwhelmed and frustrated So I think it's it's a matter of saying have we frame that project in a way that invites innovation and creativity and critical thinking Have we choreograph the learning to support kids on that journey? Then it's powerful if we don't do that you'll find that we're sorting kids again So my my caution is that we have to build a level playing field by building the tools that all kids need