Description
Teaching Critical Thinking to Middle-Years Students
What comprises skilful and effective critical thinking? Using a discussion-based approach with easy-to-follow stories, teaching tips and accompanying student activities and focus questions, Thoughtworks introduces students to some of the key concepts and skills that underpin sound reasoning and rationality.
Thoughtworks helps students to understand critical thinking through philosophical enquiry, and features teacher’s notes and solutions with each exercise. It is ideal for enrichment and extension programs, and introduces reasoning and rationality to middle-years students with included student activity pages.
Thoughtworks is designed to assist teachers to better understand what sound critical thinking looks like and to provide students in the middle years with concise and accessible activities to hone critical thinking competencies and skills. Written with the view to addressing the general capability categories of critical and creative thinking, ethical behaviour and personal and social competence in the Australian Curriculum, the intention is that Thoughtworks will help to stimulate authentic classroom discussion and encourage higher-order thinking.
Each exercise anticipates the next and either focuses on a particular facet of reasoning, or introduces philosophical problems and enquiries that enable both teacher and student to apply learnt thinking skills. Thoughtworks has also been positioned to meet the needs of both highly able students, capable of working at greater depth than their age peers, as well as mixed ability students, or those with purely an interest in, but no prior knowledge of, philosophy. Exercises are limited to a page and should ideally be worked through sequentially, allowing students to build on their repertoire of critical thinking competencies and skills.
