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January 2012
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| Happy New Year! The Thinking Teacher is a monthly compendium of ideas, strategies and resources for teachers and teacher leaders who are working to support critical thinking among K–12 students and staff. The digest is published ten times a year, from September to June, by The Critical Thinking Consortium (TC2). [See archived issues.] | ||
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Getting started with critical thinking In this 4 ½ minute video from LearnAlberta, Garfield Gini-Newman defines critical thinking and describes how teachers can encourage critical thinking through activities requiring decision-making and judgment, based on criteria. View video. |
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What’s in the box? Children learn to use clues and think like detectives in this challenge from Celebrating Families. Curiosity and attention to detail are emphasized as students identify clues and generate reasonable guesses about the contents of a drinking cup and a teacher’s mystery box. (Social Studies, Science, Language Arts) Download PDF. |
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Interpreting colonial conditions Students analyze data and make inferences in this cross-curricular lesson from Early Contact and Settlement in New France. They create a profile of living conditions based on data from the first census, taken in 1665–1666. Students visually represent the information in graphs, tables or maps that are created manually or using the E-STAT capabilities of the Statistics Canada website. (Social studies, Mathematics, Language arts) Download PDF. |  |
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How globalized are our lives? In this two-part introductory challenge from Globalizing Connections, students learn to recognize the complexity and extent of globalization. They sort newspaper articles and look for evidence of globalization in their own lives before rating the extent of globalization in four categories of activity—social, political/legal, economic, and environmental. Download PDF. |
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Powering Up to Critical Thinking Teachers at École Meridian Heights School in Stony Plain, Alberta are looking for powerful ways to make critical thinking an everyday part of their instruction. This article describes several professional development strategies they have implemented with the support of lead teachers Jacqueline Victoor and Cindy Hopley. Download PDF. |
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“Every day give yourself a good mental shampoo.” – Dr. Sara Murray Jordan |
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