Critical thinking empowers children to achieve their potential as students. How to teach critical thinking to students? Read on for practical tips.

Make Critical Thinking Part of Everyday Life

Like any skill, critical thinking develops with regular practice over time. Weave it into ordinary family conversations and activities so it becomes second nature. Here are easy ways to start:

Model critical thinking by voicing open-ended questions, evaluating evidence and considering multiple perspectives when making even small everyday choices. Children naturally emulate their parents’ thinking habits.

Draw out their opinions, ideas and questions about anything that interests them. Validate their views respectfully, without judgement. Encourage them to think independently. When they make claims or statements, gently probe with questions like:

• Why do you think that?
• What shows your idea is right?
• Who might hold a different perspective and why?
• Can you tell me more?

So, aim to make discussing and sharing ideas a natural and enjoyable part of your daily routine.

Foster Passionate Curiosity

Curiosity motivates critical thinking by driving deep investigation of topics. Nurture children’s natural curiosity by:

• Helping them explore their interests. Give them resources, experiences, and guidance around their areas of passion.
• Leading them in hands-on discovery of how the world works through nature, experiments, and taking things apart to see how they function.
• Introducing them to captivating places, events, and ideas beyond their direct experience through books, documentaries, museums, cultural events , and vacations.

Critical thinking comes naturally when children actively pursue understanding around something that matters to them. Allow space for open, unstructured exploration driven purely by their curiosity.

Read Critically Together

Books serve as valuable tools for analysing ideas, claims and interpretation of evidence. Foster active reading and viewing by discussing stories, articles or videos with children:

Before:

• What do you already know about this topic?
• What questions do you have going into it?

During:

• What arguments, claims or evidence does the author present?
• Do you find them convincing? Why or why not?
• What seems well-founded? What seems questionable?
• What other perspectives or interpretations might offer a different viewpoint?

After:

• What new insights did you gain?
• What more would you like to learn about this topic?

Make this a two-way street by expressing your reactions and unresolved questions as you critically analyse content. 

Practice Socratic Questioning

This powerfully simple technique uses exploring open-ended questions to uncover assumptions, analyse logic and distinguish what we know from what we don’t know. Some starter examples:

• What does this statement mean?
• Can you find clues that support what you think?
• How did you come up with that idea?
• Why do you think the author presented data this way?
• What alternate perspectives should we consider here?
• How can we find more information to learn more?

Keep “Why?” front and centre when reading, watching or discussing to dig beneath surface facts to deeper reasoning and evidence. Periodically summarise key information gaps driving your collective curiosity. The goal is to model comfort with uncertainty around complex issues until adequate evidence resolves them.

Foster Peer Interactions

Kids construct and revise their thinking by arguing, questioning, explaining, and hearing others’ viewpoints. Give them open-ended collaborative projects requiring problem-solving, designing, investigating or innovating. Avoid predefined outcomes so they learn from mistakes, not just getting correct answers. Combining diverse perspectives stretches their thinking in new directions.

You can also lead Socratic discussions with their friends around movies, current events or challenges to sort through complex issues. Maintain a judgement-free zone where out-of-the-box thinking thrives and is actively encouraged..

Above all, embrace intense curiosity, creative error and debate between children. Resist overly focusing on conflict resolution. Their bumping up against other worldviews teaches flexible thinking, empathy and metacognition about their blind spots.

Incorporate Critical thinking Activities and Games

Play fuels emotional, social and cognitive development. Helpful games for building critical thinking include:

• Twenty questions: Guess what the other person thinks of by asking only yes/no questions. The limited information forces creative questions to narrow down possibilities.
• What’s My Line? Two teams take turns having one person convey a concept to their group through verbal cues without saying keywords for teammates to guess. This stretches communication and logical thinking skills.
• Classifying exercises: Categorise a random collection of household objects any way you choose, then explain your classification logic. Re-categorise the objects creatively (e.g., colour, material, purpose, size).
• Escape rooms: These immersive puzzle-based experiences require deductive and inductive reasoning, spatial logic, critical evaluation of subtle clues and great teamwork.

Once they become engaged in activities that challenge their logical thinking, continue to nurture their interest.

Cultivate Growth Mindset

How children talk to themselves internally can greatly impact their thinking ability. If kids are consistently told they’re smart, they might avoid situations where their reasoning could be flawed because they link effort to a lack of inherent intelligence. This fear of making mistakes can stifle their creativity.

Instead, it’s beneficial to encourage a growth mindset that emphasises learning rather than constantly judging their abilities. Let them know that their brains form new connections whenever they step out of their comfort zones to acquire new skills. Mistakes and failures are not signs of weakness but crucial steps in the challenging process that drives critical thinking forward.