How to get teenagers to think critically

Anna Roslaniec
Anna Roslaniec
A group of young people sat at a table discussing with a woman stood up

Critical thinking is a 21st century skill that has been around for thousands of years. There are records of Socrates using critical thinking skills in his teaching in 4th century BC Greece. In recent years though, critical thinking has again become more prominent in education.

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking requires students to do more than remember and repeat information. Instead, it encourages them to analyze, examine, evaluate and use their problem-solving abilities through questioning, theorizing and rationalizing to have a deeper understanding of the world around them, both inside the classroom and beyond.

Why is critical thinking so important?

In the past, success in education was largely based on the ability to remember facts and figures. However, the skills which our students need today go further than memorization. With our rapidly evolving technology, the internet, and the bewildering amount of information online, it is essential that our students can use higher-order thinking skills to analyze and assess the information they are presented with.

How can you incorporate critical thinking into your classes?

Devising long-term goals

We all know the importance of looking ahead and planning for the future. We can encourage this skill in our students and directly relate it to their learning.

At the start of the course, take a moment to chat with each student individually and ask them to identify an objective for the first part of the year. You may like to brainstorm possible objectives as a class first, but it’s important for students to determine their own personal objectives, rather than imposing objectives on them.

During the first half of the year you can talk to each student about their progress and ask them to assess to what extent they’re achieving their goals.

The key point comes at the end of the semester when students evaluate their progress and set a new objective for the following one.

Analyzing

The ability to analyze options, risks and opinions will help your students in the future in many situations, including when they decide which course to take at university or which job to take.

You can practice this skill by providing students with relatable situations and asking them to analyze and compare the options.

For example:

Imagine you are taking a trip with some friends this summer. You have a number of different options and want to discuss them before finalizing your plans. Talk to a partner about the different trips and decide which would be best:

  • Traveling around Europe by train for a month ($1,000)
  • A weekend hiking and camping in the countryside ($200)
  • A weekend break in a big city, with shopping, sightseeing and museum trips ($500)
  • A week-long trip to the beach in an all-inclusive resort ($650)

Anticipating consequences

Students also need to have an awareness of the consequences of their actions; this is a skill which is transferable to making business decisions, as well as being important in their everyday lives.

To practice this skill, put students into small groups and give them the first part of a conditional sentence. One student completes the sentence and then the next student adds a consequence to that statement.

For example:

Student A: If I don’t study for my English exam, I won’t pass.

Student B: If I don’t pass my English exam, my parents won’t let me go out this weekend.

Student C: If I can’t go out this weekend, I’ll miss the big football match.

Student D: My coach won’t let me play next year if I miss the big match.

Rearranging the class menu

By giving students more responsibility and having them feel invested in the development of the lesson, they will be much more motivated to participate in the class.

Occasionally, let students discuss the content of the day’s class. Give them a list of tasks for the day, including how long each will take and allow them to discuss the order in which they’ll complete them. For larger classes, first have them do it in pairs or small groups and then vote as a whole class.

Write on the board:

  • Class discussion (5 minutes)

The following tasks can be done in the order you decide as a class. You have five minutes to discuss and arrange the tasks as you choose. Write them on the board in order when you’re ready.

  • Check homework (5 minutes)
  • Vocabulary review (10 minutes)
  • Vocabulary game (5 minutes)
  • Reading activity (15 minutes)
  • Grammar review game (5 minutes)
  • Speaking activity (10 minutes)

Take this one step further by asking your students to rate each activity out of 10 at the end of the class. That way, you’ll easily see which tasks they enjoy, helping you plan more engaging lessons in the future.

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    Are you teaching in a 21st-century classroom? Chances are, If you are an English educator working in the classroom today, you have already moved well ahead of your peers and colleagues teaching math, science, and good old-fashioned grammar. Now that you know you are a 21st-century teacher, what does that mean? And how do you know if you have moved ahead of the curve to embrace what we call 21st-century skills?

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    • Be capable of adaptive, flexible and creative thinking.
    • Understand how to plan for, build, and include collaboration with peers who are colleagues and experts in the field.

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    This goes a bit above and beyond the basics of the walls of the English language classroom. And yet, preparing our students for the 21st century doesn't require a classroom resembling a science fiction movie set. Several teachers have proved that you can embed these skills by utilizing the most important resource available in the classroom.

    Your students.

    Sergio Correra is an inspired young teacher at the Jose Urbina Lopez Primary School on the US Border with Mexico. After a year of teaching uninspired curriculum to disengaged students, he returned to the drawing board. He spent time researching ways to improve student engagement and performance and stumbled across exciting research that could be boiled down to one question: Why? Or rather, getting students to ask the question: "Why?" At the beginning of his next school year, he arranged the desk in a circle, sat his students down and asked: "What do you want to learn about?".

    Using this as the jumping-off point, he encouraged students to ask questions, seek out more information, and find more questions to answer.

    Over the next year, he saw his students' test scores rise, the engagement and enthusiasm improved and he received approval from his principal and fellow educators. With few resources and limited access to technology, he found his students shifting from the lowest testing group in the nation to being ranked among the highest for their performance on standardized tests in the country. One of his students was the highest-performing maths student in the country.

    Mr. Correra was inspired by research and reports based on the work of the Indian educator Sugata Mitra. The principle behind Mr. Mitra's approach is to drive student's curiosity by letting them carry out their own learning. In one of his most famous examples, he walked into a classroom in India with computers loaded with information. He explained to the students, now curious about the big shining boxes that held inside something interesting.

    And then he left the students to it.

    In the course of a year, students had taught themselves everything from English to molecular biology, all without the guidance of a teacher. Rather, they were driven by their natural curiosity, playing off of each other's discoveries to go farther and learn more. Embodying what it means to be self-guided, innovative, collaborative and curious learners.

    Keeping your curriculum up to date

    These students who were given freedom are much more likely to ask questions out of curiosity, motivate themselves and learn without guidance. And while this may be wonderful for learners, this isn't exactly helpful for teachers. To get to the 21st-century skills and inspire motivation, do we have to throw away our syllabus and books and trust only in our learners to motivate themselves?

    Fortunately for those of us who have chosen a career in education, that is not the case. We as educators can take lessons from Mr. Correra and Mr. Mitra and use these as a way to inspire interest and engagement in our own classroom while building these skills in our learners.

    As language teachers, it's a matter of blending the 4Cs more thoughtfully into a student-centered classroom where learners can engage in high-interest content that is relevant, useful, and promotes innovation.

    Take your average prepositions lesson as an example. Even in the best communicative classroom, a teacher may still spend time explaining the rules, setting up the activity and delivering instruction. By applying the 4Cs we can turn this lesson a bit more on its head, making a typical ELL grammar lesson magical.

    For example:

    Collaborate: Start by handing out magazines or picture books. Have the students work together and choose a picture.

    Communication, critical thinking, and creativity: Ask your students to work together to create two ways to give directions. One set of directions for a student who is blind. Another set of directions for a student who is deaf.

    Encourage students to think outside the box and think about ways to give directions using a computer, a mobile phone, a television, or a YouTube video. While there may be some L1 use in the classroom, the goal is for the final product to be in English. Stand back and watch your learners go.

    Another way to engage with 21st-century skills using a typical ELL lesson: the "What's your favorite food lesson?" At some point, we have all experienced it.

    Collaborate: In groups, have students create a survey to assess classroom interest in 10 different foods representing different types of meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert).

    Communication: Once finished, have learners use the information to create a pie or bar graph to communicate the results and determine which meals are the favorite.

    Critical thinking: Have the students compare their answers with answers from other groups. How many differences are there in the reporting? Is the information consistent with the same foods or does it change drastically? Have students compare their results with other teams. Then ask the groups to create a short written or spoken piece to explain how their results differed from other students.

    Creativity: Using the information collected from the class and after analyzing data from other students, have groups work together to create an advertising campaign that will make the foods that students liked least into foods students may like more. For example, if the survey said that most students did not like kim-chi-chigae for breakfast, the group would need to work together to create an advertising campaign to make kim-chi-chigae seem like a tasty choice for breakfast. To do this students should consider what makes certain foods more popular in the class.

    This may require further follow-up interviewing to find out why students like one thing and not another; this information can then be used in the campaign. This lesson may play out over a few days, but in the end, everyone involved will have gotten much more out of the lesson than they had anticipated.

    Both of these examples represent the use of skills in the ELL classroom. Each lesson also embeds, in one way or another, critical STEM skills.

    In the preposition lesson, the students may use engineering and technology to find a better way to give directions. In our favorite foods lesson, students engage with science (and a bit of sociology) and mathematics. Altogether it becomes a rounded classroom experience where teachers have an active role as facilitators and students become inspired, self-guided learners who still manage to work inside of the confines of the curriculum.

    In the end, 21st-century skills, and using them in the classroom is not really about teaching at all. These skills are truly ones that will spell success for our learners in the future, leading them to be capable, Independent and curious individuals.

    Our real challenge as educators is to model a desire to embrace the known, the unknown, and the just plain unknowable. As Alwin Toffler, writer and futurist, put it: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."