Helping teens build critical thinking skills

Our strategy for building strong critical thinking skills breaks the process down to three-story thinking that students begin constructing in ninth grade and layer on new skills through 12th grade.

• 9th graders learn to gather facts independently
• 10th graders add independent processing
• 11th graders add independent application
• 12th graders apply all three levels of learning independently to adult challenges, becoming adept at synthesis and evaluation

The rapid development of the physical ability for executive brain function (higher-level thinking) that starts around age 14 and continues rapidly through a student's mid-20s determines how effectively students can perform the Processing and Application skills described below and can apply them in novel situations.

Gather

At the ground level, students develop tactics for fact-finding: gathering solid information on which to build their thinking and decision-making. These skills include:

• Complete a list based on increasing complex prompts and questions
• Define terms and concepts
• Describe ideas, events, persons, places, etc.
• Identify key points
• List relevant facts and materials
• Observe through experimentation or personal experience
• Recite relevant information
• Select the most relevant or important information

Process

Intermediate skills include a student's independent ability to compare, reason, and generalize using their work in the Gather stage. Skills include:

• Compare various information and begin to form opinions
• Contrast material seeking to identify key similarities and differences
• Classify information based on how it will be used, its validity, etc.
• Sort based on how or why it will be used
• Distinguish information based on value in the situation
• Explain why information matters or should be discarded
• Infer new ideas and conclusions based on facts gathered
• Analyze using what you have learned

Apply

Three-story thinkers can idealize, imagine, and predict using what they gather and process. Skills used to make decisions and create new knowledge include:

• Evaluate what was learned
• Generalize based on information gathered and processed
• Imagine new ideas or solutions
• Judge how to use information or what new information is needed
• Predict outcomes based on knowledge built
• Speculate on new approaches or solutions
• Understand that if what they have learned is valid, then they can conclude...
• Hypothesize and experiment or gather new information
• Forecast what might happen