Seems these days we are spending a lot of time and resources developing artificial intelligence, paying less attention to our own intelligence, to help us in our daily lives. Unsure of something? Search Google. Have a question? Ask Siri. Need an essay? Prompt ChatGPT. That’s not to say that using these technologies automatically makes us dumb; rather, we need to be smart (critical of, even) how we use technology. This is where our critical thinking skills (and the need to use a critical thinking process when blindly consuming technology-driven drivel) are most needed.
Benefits and Barriers
Critical thinking is important. No doubts, no arguments there. There are many critical thinking benefits in school and beyond. A recent Forbes article noted this about critical thinking:
In academic settings, it allows students to comprehend and engage with complex subjects while discerning valid arguments from fallacious ones. In the workplace, critical thinking empowers individuals to analyze problems, devise creative solutions and make informed judgments. In everyday life, it helps individuals navigate an increasingly complex world by making sound choices and avoiding cognitive biases. It is our primary defense against misleading or “spun” information.
The same article posits that critical thinking benefits our decision-making, problem-solving, communication skills, and recognition of cognitive biases.
As an English Language Arts teacher, I know those are certainly skills I’d like to help my students develop alongside our reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. In fact, one can argue that critical thinking involves these tasks in the classroom.
How can a student, for instance, write an argumentative essay without thinking critically about the rhetorical situation? How can a student participate in a discussion without thinking critically about what others have said and what to say in response?
So while our Common Core State Standards (or whatever extensive list of skills you use) don’t state “critical thinking” in each standard, it’s likely the underbelly of many of them.
Which brings us to the critical thinking barriers, like people trusting their gut over reason, missing knowledge to apply to different situations, lacking will and dispositions, misunderstanding or ignoring truth and facts, and having a closed mind, according to this Psychology Today article.
So how can we reap the critical thinking benefits and beat the critical thinking barriers? Read on for some ideas of how you can begin teaching critical thinking skills in the English Language Arts Classroom!
Critical Thinking Activities, Games, Thinking Exercises for the Classroom
Mystery Solving
When we analyze a film, a short story, a poem, etc., we can look at it as a mystery to be unraveled. How does a theme emerge in this line from the poem? What contributed to this character’s change in the rising action? Why’d the writer do x instead of y?
To help students with these critical thinking questions, we can pose mysteries for them to puzzle their way through as critical thinking involves navigating uncertainty to arrive at conclusions.
Mysteries I love to pose to students come from the Crime and Puzzlement book series where students view illustrated crime scene photos, read a text associated with the image, and then need to closely examine both to gather clues, reason possibilities, and draw conclusions.
These critical thinking activities are a great way to introduce or develop argumentative skills in the English Language Arts classroom where students need to develop a thesis and an argument supported by evidence they cite. (Bonus, too, is the real-world connection you make with this critical thinking process; while the scenarios and “crimes” are fake, crime-solving isn’t just for Batman, for it’s a real-world activity done by real-life heroes.)
Critical Thinking With Opinionnaires
Opinionnaires and other analysis activities like those Dr. Larry Johannessen pioneered have been shown to build critical thinking characteristics in students as they require students to engage in conversations with texts, with ideas, and with others.
For instance, let’s say you want to have discourse about politics in the classroom (perhaps as pre-reading for a text), you could start with an opinionnaire on Politics, Protest, and Patriotism and ask students individually to agree/disagree on statements like “In certain situations it may be justified for a political leader to bend or break the law for the good of the country” or critical thinking quotes like “‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’”
Students, then, have to defend their positions, citing evidence. Starting with students’ individual opinions and then moving to trying to find consensus on statements in a class discussion, creates a critical thinking process where students need to engage, negotiate, consider, and reconsider their thinking.
A bonus here is that you can return to these opinionnaires later either through the lens of a character in the story and ask: to what extent would x-character agree or disagree with y-statement? You can also return to opinionnaires after the study of a concept to see if students’ opinions and thinking have changed.
Thinking Critically With Ethical Dilemmas
You can pose critical thinking skills examples like the famous “Trolley Problem” to students and engage them in discourse and exploration of ethical and moral questions–for which there aren’t clear and obvious answers, a hallmark of critical thinking activities.
For instance, you could begin an analysis of Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button” with the Trolley Problem to get students to consider the ethical implications of taking or not taking action, of considering themselves versus considering others.
Students, then, turn to the text with these ideas in mind as they analyze the story’s theme and character. This pre-reading activity and anticipation set can help them better access the core of the story and its underlying theme and morals.
A bonus here is that you can return to the Trolley Problem and put the characters from the text in the hot seat. Would Norma pull the lever? That’s for students to debate!
Brainstorming Sessions
People say, “There are no bad ideas in a brainstorm.” Then let’s give students the opportunity to test that theory. You can pose to students a problem/subject/issue/question and then ask them to brainstorm every possible solution they can, no matter how outlandish or unlikely.
You can even pull a subject straight from the headlines, creating a question for exploration and brainstorming: For example, what (if any) restrictions should be put on social media?
As students brainstorm individually and with others, they are problem-solving as, eventually, you can ask students to begin to cultivate their brainstormed lists, whittling them down to what’s most logical, plausible, doable.
From there, students can do the research, do the collaborating, and do the idea-developing to do the subject justice.
A bonus here is that you could incorporate AI here as a tool to help students brainstorm and then process what the computer contributed versus the humans contributed.
Indeed, in a world where critical thinking is necessary and artificial intelligence is inevitable, we need to help students build critical thinking skills that help them do just that: be critical.
It’s all too easy to accept ChatGPT as infallible and all-knowing. But what we should be doing is looking for faults, knowing that just like humans, computer programs have their shortcomings, limitations, and biases. That’s why critical thinking remains critical in the world today, in and out of the classroom.
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