Critical Thinking

Introduction

This entry was developed in the last month of school and unforunately was never shared. However, I wanted to be sure to still post these incredible examples to the blog. Hopefully they may inspire new ideas or ways to weave critical thinking skills into the curriculum.

Critical Thinking

In the last post we began looking at the 4 C's: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration and Communication. My post was specifically dedicated to "creativity."   I only feel that it is natural to focus on "critical thinking" next.  I recently read a chapter in, Power-Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning (Neebe & Roberts, 2015), where they cite Dee Fink (2013) explaining that "... creative thinking leads to critical thinking. Asking students to engage in meaningful, creative work sharpens their ability to conceptualize, apply, analyze, and synthesize- essential skills for critical thinking."

If we know that allowing students to be creative will lead to critical thinking, and we already see creativity happening in our classrooms at LGES then we can only conclude that "critical thinking" is also happening. I have seen many units of study throughout the building that have woven critical thinking skills into the curriculum, 2 of which I have chosen to highlight this month. In both units, I feel that it is worth noting that teachers spent time designing curriculum that would challenge students in a particular content area, and also allowed for student choice and creativity, which ultimately required students to use critical thinking skills. In addition, the structure of both units integrated content, creativity and critical thinking together without seeing "creativity & critical thinking" as add-ons. I feel that this a valuable part of their lesson design and reminds me that 21st Century Skills should not been seen as an "add-on", but should be viewed much like we view technology in our building. It should be a seen as a seamless part of our day and integrated into our classroom culture.


1st Grade: 

Mrs. Abrantes has recently been motivated by the success of inquiry based instruction in her classroom and has slowly integrated inquiry throughout her curriculum. The unit that I have been observing is a science unit based on plants. The ultimate goal is for students to be able to plant their own plants and then teach others how to do so.

Mrs. Abrantes first tasked the students with planting a garden. She told the kids that she knew nothing about planting a garden and that they needed to figure out what she needed to buy because she was going to the store tonight. The students quickly started using resources such as PebbleGo to determine what they needed and jotted down all of the things that they were discovering. Mrs. Abrantes could have easily told the students what plants needed to grow, but instead she put the learning on them, and motivated them to be critical thinkers with an authentic purpose.

Students continued to work in teams at their tables over the next couple of days going through the inquiry process by researching, recording, and developing new “I Wonder Questions.”  As a class they complied 3-5 of the most popular "I wonder questions..." and set out to answer them ("Wonder" and "Investigate" stages of inquiry).  Students used apps called Pic Collage, Explain Everything, and Book Creator to create their pages for their Plant Book that they will share with an authentic audience ("Synthesize" stage of inquiry). Students recorded each other during the planting process and added those videos to their books.  Some students used airdrop to share a video they preferred, this is a great example of how students used critical thinking skills.  In celebration, all books were uploaded to our class blog in Kidblog and shared with family and peers ("Express" stage of inquiry).

2nd Grade:

The second grade team designed a place-based unit that addressed the Social Studies standard, "The location of physical features and natural resources often affect where people settle and may affect how those people sustain themselves." From that standard they developed the EQ: How does the lake (Lake George) affect the community?"

Wonder

Students started the unit off by visiting the lake with the EQ in mind and taking pictures (with their ipads) of things that they were interested in learning more about. After they took a picture, they then recorded their voice with their questions that they wanted to learn more about that particular "thing of interest." They used the EduCreations Apps to take pictures and record their questions.

When they got back to the classroom as a class they started to group and organize their topics of interest and questions into categories (history, geography, recreation, etc).  Then students chose an area of focus and developed strong questions (not "yes" or "no" questions) to learn more about their topics of interest, always keeping in mind that the ultimate goal is to answer the EQ. This required them to use higher level thinking skills.


Investigate

Once students developed their questions they discussed places that they can find the answer to their EQ. They discovered that the best place would be to ask the experts. So they brought in experts from the community to help answer their questions. This year the experts included members of The Park Commission, a guide from Fort William Henry, the town historian, and a Captain from Shoreline boats.

Students spent an hour asking the experts their questions and taking notes. They needed to be critical listeners and thinkers during this process. Some students needed to tweak their questions "on the fly" because their questions were already asked by another student and sometimes new questions came up because they learned new information.


Synthesize 

Once the students finished taking their notes they needed to re-evaluate and assess where they were in the inquiry process. They needed to determine how they were going to answer their EQ, who they were going to share it with and how the information would be shared, all part of developing students critical thinking skills.

As a class they brainstormed who their audience would be, which varied per class. Some classes thought the library could benefit from a book about the lake, other groups thought it would be nice to share with the experts themselves so that they could share it with others.

Next students had to critically think about what it was that they were going to create. In all classes they decided that they would create something collaboratively, since each member of the class had different interests and if they put them together they would have a comprehensive resource. Between the 3 classes they decided to create an A-Z Book about the Lake, an informational e-book, and a video.

After deciding what they were going to create and who they were going to create it for many students realized that they didn't have enough information. Those students went back around the inquiry wheel, by determining what they still needed to know (critical thinking) and where to find the information.

Once students had their information they could start creating. This is where the student creativity shined through. Students had chose how they were going to create, which led to critical thinking. They needed to take all the information that they had learned, synthesize it and answer the EQ. The part that proved to be the most challenging and that required them to apply their critical thinking skills was answering the EQ. They had all this information, but applying it to answer the question required that higher level of thinking.

Express

Once students created their final knowledge product they shared them digitally to their desired audiences.

Mrs. Dudla's Class

Mrs. Zehr/ Aspland's Class

Assessing Critical Thinking

Below are a few rubric resources that you may be able to adapt when trying to assess critical thinking skills. These resources come from The Buck Institute for Education.

K-2 Rubric

3-5 Rubric

6-12 Rubric