Integration of Critical Thinking

Method of teaching in most of the public schools is didactic where teachers teach by telling, explaining and showing. The teacher is active and the student is passive. Students passively acquire the information. But critical thinking further requires that students to effectively think about the concepts taught to them on a daily basis. How to develop the ability to question, reason, evaluate, apply and create. The question is, how do we move from a list of critical thinking skills to actual infusion of those skills into various subjects and grades of a K12 school.

Vikalp Online School has created a framework which tries to identify and define critical thinking skills at various levels of K12. ​It may not be the perfect framework. ​Moreover, critical thinking cannot be reduced to a universally applicable formula of skills or steps to follow. But it’s a pioneering step in the direction of implementation critical thinking at school level. Concepts are not introduced as a given fact. Students are made to discover the concept while doing activities with learning tools. Once they discover the concept, they are supposed to reflect on the concepts they have started to understand.

Teacher is supposed to ask a series of questions based on the topic so that students start to think and discover answers. ​Following are the typical questions asked in Vikalp classrooms: –

1. Getting students to clarify their thinking and explore the origin of their thinking e.g., ‘Why do you say that?’, ‘Could you explain further?’
2. Challenging students about assumptions. e.g., ‘Is this always the case?’, ‘Why do you think that this assumption holds here?’
3. Providing evidence as a basis for arguments. e.g., ‘Why do you say that?’, ‘Is there reason to doubt this evidence?’
4. Discovering alternative viewpoints and perspectives and conflicts between content e.g., ‘What is the counter-argument?’, ‘Can/did anyone see this another way?’
5. Exploring implications and consequences e.g., ‘But if…happened, what else would result?’, ‘How does…affect…?’
6. Questioning the question e.g., ‘Why do you think that I asked that question?’, ‘Why was that question important?’, ‘Which of your questions turned out to be the most useful?’

All the above changes are to move away from the method of teaching where information is taught as given facts. And the assessment tests how much a student can recall and understand. These are “lower-order-thinking”. In order to test “higher-level-thinking” such as the ability to analyze, evaluate, apply and reconstruct, the pattern of the test needs to be changed. This is what happens in Vikalp Online school. Additional parameters of assessment are used.

These parameters test a student’s “higher-​order-thinking” or critical thinking. These skills were decided upon and clustered into three broad categories.

• Clarifying Issues and terms
• Judging and utilizing information
• Drawing conclusions

The generic skills remain the same throughout the grade levels but the level of sophistication is expected to progressively develop.

Under clarifying issues and terms there is following sequence:

• 3^rd Grade – makes careful observations
• 6^th Grade – can distinguish clear from unclear formulations of simple issues or problems
• 8^th Grade – can identify central issues and problems
• 10^th Grade – can delineate controversial components
• 12^th Grade – can distinguish real and unstated problems

Under Judging and utilizing information:

• 3^rd Grade – identifies obvious stereotypes
• 6^th Grade – understands the ideas of stereotype and cliché
• 8^th Grade – can recognize stereotype and cliché
• 10^th Grade – can recognize subtle manifestation of stereotypes and cliches
• 12^th Grade – can distinguish between images and reality

Under drawing conclusions

• 3^rd Grade – recognizes the adequacy of data
• 6^th Grade – understands the idea of drawing conclusion from evidence
• 8^th Grade – can identify reasonable alternatives
• 10^th Grade – can justify the selection of an alternative
• 12^th Grade – can generate reasonable alternatives