Starting from scratch to promote critical thinking in your classes

From our extensive experience as instructional designers, we recognise the importance of teaming up with teachers and educational staff to promote critical thinking among students, so they become able to apply it inside and outside the classroom.

Why is it important to apply critical-thinking strategies in our classes? Since students are exposed to news, social networks and a great deal of other information and media, we believe that it’s important to apply critical-thinking strategies to promote the following skills:

• Solve relevant and complex problems: finding new, effective and better solutions in different fields
• Make reasoned decisions: expressing ideas in a more powerful way
• Establish intellectual environments: applying higher levels of thought to real-world situations
• Collaborate with others: valuing and respecting the ideas of others
• Think critically and creatively: being well informed, focusing on details and considering multiple perspectives; thinking outside the box
• Communicate clearly and accurately: using evidence and reasoning to support thinking; conveying ideas
• Question information found on the internet: selecting information that is truthful, useful, relevant, important, objective and extracted from official and validated media.

Working hand in hand with teachers has allowed us to incorporate different strategies that promote critical thinking in class activities. We hope the following will be a useful guide for your future teaching.

1. Enquiry-based learning (IBL)

This is one of the most common strategies in the design of classes that promote active student participation. It is about learning by researching and connecting research with teaching. As instructional designers, we try to recommend activities focused on the development and strengthening of research skills and would urge you to consider the following components in the design of activities:

• orientation: introduce a new topic or concept for the students to explore and analyse
• conceptualisation: encourage students to develop questions about the topic and generate predictions and hypotheses
• research: this is the most robust stage; students must take the initiative (with the teacher’s support) to answer the questions raised and present evidence to support the hypothesis
• conclusion: with the information and data collected, students develop conclusions and responses to their initial statements
• discussion: all students learn from each other and share results, promoting debate and reflection.

To document their notes, observations, photos and comments, students can make use of applications such as Science Journal and Google Docs.

2. Project-oriented learning (POL)

Planning, developing and implementing activities that have application in the real world encourages students to analyse different projects. Students “learn by doing” through activities such as information searches, data analysis, and preparation of proposals, advances and prototypes.

At the end of the project, students can present the results after their critical analysis, along with the delivery of products, conclusions and presentations. To share the results of their critical analysis, students should use collaborative documents and interaction spaces such as Google Docs, Padlet, Flipgrid or Planner.

3. Phenomenon-based learning (PhenoBL)

Phenomenon-based learning is a relatively new, cross-curricular approach that involves teaching by focusing on a real-world problem, be it social, cultural, political, scientific, geographical, etc.

In this strategy, the teacher initially provides the phenomenon to be investigated – climate change is a classic example – and some guiding questions, which should cover different aspects of the same phenomenon. The aim is that the student not only reaches a single answer – they also analyse the phenomenon from various angles and use multiple disciplines.

Motivation and guidance of students is important in PhenoBL, so the teacher should always be present and provide constant feedback during the activity.

Move towards self-aware learning

As educational workers our mission is to give students the necessary tools to live and thrive in a rapidly changing world. Integrating critical thinking into our classes helps expand the limits of traditional education and encourage the migration to self-aware learning and interdisciplinarity.

Students must be able to think and make decisions by themselves, as well as discern the situations and information they will  face in their day-to-day lives. Teaching students to think critically will always be helpful in building their own cognition and preparing them for the future.

It is certainly a challenge, but with these and many more recommendations, you should be well on the way to developing great activities that encourage the crucial art of critical thinking in your classes.

Adriana González Nava and Paulo Mendoza Rivera are instructional designers in the architecture and pedagogical design department at the Monterrey Institute of Technology, Mexico.

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For more resources on this topic, go to our Teaching critical thinking collection.