We want our students to make sense of content, be engaged, and see connections to contemporary issues. That’s why we’re so bought into the idea of using primary sources, fiction and nonfiction, and hands-on strategies in our social studies, ELA, and science classrooms. But we also know that using these sorts of tools can be difficult for our students.

“Thinking is skilled work. It is not true that we are naturally endowed with the ability to think clearly and logically, without learning how and without practicing.”
Alfred Ernest Mander

So we need to always be on the lookout for powerful tools and activities which provide scaffolding that can help our kids make sense of content.

I'm especially excited about short, easy-to-use mini-strategies that extend and deepen student thinking that some call thinking routines, visible thinking strategies, or thinking graphic organizers.

These are learning activities or processes that you use with your students over and over to support specific types of thinking, behaviors, or tasks. You're probably already using activities that structure the way students go about the process of learning. One most of us are familiar with is the Think Pair Share activity.

These mini-strategies can be simple structures, such as a coded text reading. But they can also be designed to promote deeper student thinking, such as asking students what they know, what they want to know, and what they have learned as part of a unit of study. These activities are relatively simple to implement and are structures that can be used across grade levels and content areas.

Here's the thing. Critical thinking activities already exist in your classroom, whether you are aware of it or not. They are the repeated patterns, procedures, and processes that we all use to structure a workable classroom environment. We all have routines for managing student behavior or to establish basic rules for how things work. We also have routines that structure the way our kids go about the learning process. They can be super simple, such as reading from a text and answering chapter questions or the method you use for accepting finished student work.

We often don't even think about these processes. But we need to be more intentional about using activities that encourage high levels of critical thinking in students. These are not basic classroom organizational things such as how a student might return a borrowed pencil or the process for turning in homework - a great critical thinking activity is designed to ramp up rigor and support quality instruction.

The research supports structured patterns that can be used across various grade levels and content areas. What makes them powerful is that you intentionally use them over and over again in the classroom. They become one of the regular ways students go about doing the work of learning. And as you and students become more comfortable using them, critical thinking activities are perfect for mashing together to increase engagement and learning!

In this course, we'll dig a bit deeper into the basics of what these activities can look like in your classroom. We'll also explore how a pair of teachers have ramped up these sorts of thinking into what they call EduProtocols. They have some amazing tools and resources (that you should seriously purchase and use in your PLCs, departments, and classrooms) that are great for encouraging critical thinking.

When you're finished with this course, you will:

• have a deeper understanding of the research
• know where to find resources
• be familiar with EduProtocols and what they look like
• have walked through several teacher-tested examples with ready to use templates
• be so much smarter that you will be almost impossible to live with!

Throughout the course, you'll be asked to do some focused thinking about what you're reading and viewing. Don't skip these questions! They're designed to help you see the possibilities and challenges of using these tools in your classroom. They will also help you complete the required end of course reflection activity

Let's get started!

Grab a bit of background on the idea of critical thinking and how teachers are using it by reading this 2008 article originally published in Educational Leadership titled: "Making Thinking Visible."

As you read, mentally complete the following tasks in your head:

• circle the things that make sense to you
• underline statements that are new to you
• put a question mark beside anything that raises a question

(Feel free to print the article out and use an actual pen or pencil to complete these tasks. I'm good with what ever works best for you!)

Asking you to finish this simple Coding the Text activity is our first example of a critical thinking activity in practice. Being intentional about what we want our students to look for as they encounter information is a great way to scaffold their thinking and encourage conversation.

In a classroom setting, your students could do this same thing with paper, pencil, and hard copy text or just as easily annotate a digital version on a Google Doc or Microsoft 360 document. The next step would be to ask students to share their textual coding with one another. This could be a traditional F2F triad convo or you could ask students to first post their thoughts on a Google Jamboard or Google Doc. Then have student triads browse the shared document to find similarities and differences in their responses.

And feel free to change the coding! Do you want kids to connect the text to something they viewed online? Or to highlight changes over time? Or focus on bias or loaded language? Yes, yes, and yes! This activity also works with non-textual content such as images, video clips, maps, or audio. You're starting to see how adaptable and powerful a critical thinking activity can be!

Take a few minutes to have a conversation with someone else and share your coding with them.

• Based on your coding, what has become clear to you?
• How does your classroom compare and contrast to classrooms described in the article?