#140WC Critical Thinkers

Critical Thinking — What is it?

This graphic provides guidelines for developing critical thinkers — active minds that analyze issues for relevance and importance, thinking beyond what is known to develop new possibilities based on evidence and analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

A critical thinking climate integrates these skills across disciplines in a safe, risk-accepting learning environment in which students have the opportunity and time for conversations and practice of higher-order thinking skills.

This might look like:

• teacher teams developing projects across disciplines
• projects provide for time for conversation. dialogue, and work on the issues by students
• projects include checks for understanding and discussion by students to review where they are and where they decide to continue or change direction
• projects include reflection on the process and product through-out to consider both content in the topic and skills of critical thinking

Students applying the skills of critical thinking develop open minds as they consider their analysis, reasons, and evaluations of the issues. They think creatively as well as critically, communicating their problem-solving ideas and facts clearly and accurately in their collaboration with others on real-world issues. Reflection on learning about problem-solving, the content, and the thinking skills is continuously practiced.

This might look like:

• teams of students consider an issue through brainstorming questions, developing resource lists, and assigning roles to research for their team.
• team members communicate clearly and accurately in order to collaborate on research, solutions, and reflections
• teams analyze and reason the facts, evaluating relevance, accuracy, and possibilities
• teams consider alternatives — creatively considering what might be rather than only considering facts and others’ solutions
• teams regularly check-in and reflect on their process, goals, audience, products, considering their successes and failures to build for themselves a direction towards success

 What is the source of the image?

Source of idea from the Image in this Tweet:

#Ontario Teachers: Do you want to develop 21st-century critical thinkers? This is how! pic.twitter.com/fRozENqisQ

— ONTSpecialNeeds (@ONTSpecialNeeds) December 1, 2014

 

The original image is from Mentoring Minds. I did an image search and discovered this at TeachThought in this post explaining the image. Both links offer more information.

Part of critical thinking is analyzing sources, so I asked: “What is the original source?” because it seemed that only part of the message existed in the original Tweet.

Next, what are resources for critical thinking?

The Critical Thinking Community

University of Michigan Critical Thinking Skills

Mentoring Minds Guide

Teach Thought Blooms

Habits of Mind (Art Costa) free resources

Nancy Rubin

Annenberg Critical Thinking Lessons

Read-Write-Think Whole Class Dialogue

North Carolina Lessons

Critical Thinking CCSS with Graphic Organizers by Dr Thigpin

Mentoring Minds provides an embed code for their full poster: