My folky experience I would say is make sure you provide examples. Make sure they are salient with the aspects you want to teach. Whatever problem you have the kids working on make sure you have a floor expectations. Normally this will be 2 or 3 choices you provide the kids can choose from, but the real purpose of these is you want the kids to say F it to your examples and think of their own. Besides that make sure you are personalizing from the kid outward, especially in mandatory education.
Give them small group assignments that ask them to solve a problem that has more than one solution. The students will have to work together to agree on something and figure out how to implement that solution. It can be something like asking students to think of rules/punishments for a certain scenario (like cohabitation), having them read from a list of different profiles (I’ve seen scenarios for choosing which employee a company needs to lay off and another for speed dating) and the students have to pick one profile and explain their reasoning (why this one/why not the others). There are also larger projects like asking students to create an invention, product, or service to help solve a problem (could be social, political, environmental, etc…)
If you haven’t familiarized yourself with Blooms Taxonomy, do so
Get some sarcastic gaijin to input some vocab by rote using flashcards, play a recognition ‘game’ and then sing some kids songs using a tired voice. They won’t say it out loud but there will be a lot of critical thinking going on in regards to the nature of your lessons.
Critical thinking isnt really something in itself that can be taught in my opinion. I mean of course you can tell a student to look at an issue or topic from multiple different points of view and then provide them with the questions and points of interest that are relevant to make them “think” critically but really thats just spoon-feeding them.
In reality a person develops critical thinking by accumulating a critical mass of knowledge about different topics which lets them compare and contrast amongst those different topics and formulate multi-faceted questions which we usually end up labelling as “critical thinking”.
So I suppose the real question is: How do we create an atmosphere where students are encouraged to be curious so they take initiative for their own learning about different things? How do we create a space for them in which failure and misunderstanding are not discouraged, but taught upon and learned from?
I recommend taking a look at some of activities in [Harvard’s Project Zero .](https://pz.harvard.edu/) . The include a wide-variety of thinking routines designed to help students explore and develop different aspects of thinking (critical, creative, analytics, vertical/lateral, etc)
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There is a Jalt critical thinking sig and they have publications.
[https://www.jaltcriticalthinking.org/](https://www.jaltcriticalthinking.org/)
My folky experience I would say is make sure you provide examples. Make sure they are salient with the aspects you want to teach. Whatever problem you have the kids working on make sure you have a floor expectations. Normally this will be 2 or 3 choices you provide the kids can choose from, but the real purpose of these is you want the kids to say F it to your examples and think of their own. Besides that make sure you are personalizing from the kid outward, especially in mandatory education.
Give them small group assignments that ask them to solve a problem that has more than one solution. The students will have to work together to agree on something and figure out how to implement that solution. It can be something like asking students to think of rules/punishments for a certain scenario (like cohabitation), having them read from a list of different profiles (I’ve seen scenarios for choosing which employee a company needs to lay off and another for speed dating) and the students have to pick one profile and explain their reasoning (why this one/why not the others). There are also larger projects like asking students to create an invention, product, or service to help solve a problem (could be social, political, environmental, etc…)
If you haven’t familiarized yourself with Blooms Taxonomy, do so
Get some sarcastic gaijin to input some vocab by rote using flashcards, play a recognition ‘game’ and then sing some kids songs using a tired voice. They won’t say it out loud but there will be a lot of critical thinking going on in regards to the nature of your lessons.
Critical thinking isnt really something in itself that can be taught in my opinion. I mean of course you can tell a student to look at an issue or topic from multiple different points of view and then provide them with the questions and points of interest that are relevant to make them “think” critically but really thats just spoon-feeding them.
In reality a person develops critical thinking by accumulating a critical mass of knowledge about different topics which lets them compare and contrast amongst those different topics and formulate multi-faceted questions which we usually end up labelling as “critical thinking”.
So I suppose the real question is: How do we create an atmosphere where students are encouraged to be curious so they take initiative for their own learning about different things? How do we create a space for them in which failure and misunderstanding are not discouraged, but taught upon and learned from?
I recommend taking a look at some of activities in [Harvard’s Project Zero .](https://pz.harvard.edu/) . The include a wide-variety of thinking routines designed to help students explore and develop different aspects of thinking (critical, creative, analytics, vertical/lateral, etc)