Fostering critical thinking in the classroom

Christina Cavage
A group of young adults sat at a table in a library looking up towards a older woman

Critical thinking is a term often thrown around the teacher’s lounge. You often hear, “Of course, teaching critical thinking is essential.” However, in that same space, we may also hear the question, “But how?”

Teaching students to think critically involves helping them to develop a critical mindset. What exactly does that mean, and how can we do that?

What does it mean to think critically?

Critical thinking is a complex process that involves students reflecting, analyzing and evaluating ideas. Building a community of critical thinkers in our classrooms involves going beyond the cognitive domains and building the affective domains.

The cognitive domain concerns subject knowledge and intellectual skills, whereas the affective domain involves emotional engagement with an idea or learning material.

This deliberate teaching of critical thinking needs to be part of our teaching toolkit. We need to develop a mindset around it in and out of our classrooms.

How can teachers develop a critical-thinking mindset?

Consider all the questions we pose to students during our classes. Do we expect a yes or no answer, or have we established a classroom environment where students offer considered reasons for their responses?

By following some guiding principles, we can get into the practice of naturally expecting deeper answers:

  1. Students need to engage in critical thinking tasks/activities at all levels.
  2. Teachers need to provide space/time in the classroom to build critical thinking learning opportunities.
  3. Practicing critical thinking must be incorporated throughout the course, increasing complexity as students improve their critical thinking ability.
  4. Students must be given opportunities to practice transferring critical thinking skills to other contexts.

Activities to foster critical thinking in the classroom

Activity/Strategy #1: Categorizing

Provide a set of vocabulary terms or grammatical structures on the board (or pictures for true beginners). Ask your students to gather in pairs or small groups and have them categorize the list. Ask them to be creative and see how diverse the categories can be.

Example:

Desk, computer, pencil, stove, dishes, forks, novel, cookbook, sink, shelf

  • Made from trees: pencil, novel, cookbook, desk.
  • Made from metal: fork, stove, sink, etc.

Activity/Strategy #2: What’s the problem?

Provide students with a short reading or listening and have your students define a problem they read or hear.

Tomas ran up the steps into Building A. The door was closed, but he opened it up. He was very late. He took his seat, feeling out of breath.

  • Determine why Tomas was late.
  • Underline verbs in the past tense.
  • Create a beginning or ending to the story.

Activity/Strategy #3: Circles of possibility

Present a problem or situation. Consider the problem presented in strategy #2 above: Ask the students to evaluate the situation from Tomas’ point of view, then, from the teacher’s point of view, and then from his classmate’s point of view.

This activity generates many conversations, and even more critical thinking than you can imagine!

Activity/Strategy #4: Draw connections

Provide students with a list of topics or themes they have studied or are interested in. Place one in the center, and ask them to draw connections between each one.

Afterward, they should explain their ideas. For example:

“Energy and environment are affected by sports. Most sports do not harm the environment, but if you think about auto racing, it uses a lot of fuel. It can negatively impact the environment.”

Activity/Strategy #5: What’s the rule?

Play students an audio clip or provide them with a reading text. Draw students’ attention to a particular grammatical structure and ask them to deduce the rules.

Activity/Strategy #5: Establishing context

Show your class an image and put your students in small groups. Give each group a task. For example:

The Jamestown settlement in the United States
“A famous historic site is the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. People from England were the first people to live in Jamestown. When did they arrive? They arrived in 1607. They built homes and other buildings. They looked for gold, silver and other materials. They sent the materials back to England. It was a hard life. Jamestown wasn’t a good place to settle. The winters were cold, and the settlers didn’t know how to protect themselves. After some time, they traded with the Native Americans, including tools for food. This helped the hungry settlers. Did many people die? Yes, many of the first settlers died. Later, more settlers arrived in Jamestown. It wasn’t easy, but in the end the settlement grew.”

Ask questions like this:

  • If this were in a movie, what would the movie be about?
  • If this were an advertisement, what would it be advertising?
  • If this were a book, what would the book be about?

There are many other wonderful strategies that can help build a classroom of critical thinkers. Getting your students accustomed to these types of tasks can increase their linguistic and affective competencies and critical thinking. In addition to these on-the-spot activities, consider building in project-based learning.

How can you incorporate project-based learning into your classroom?

Project-based learning often begins with a challenge or problem. Students explore and find answers over an extended period of time. These projects focus on building 21st Century Skills: Communication, Creativity, Collaboration, and Critical Thinking.

They also represent what students are likely to encounter when they leave our English language classes.

An example project

Consider this project: Our cafeteria is outdated. It does not allow for food variety, or for guests to sit in groups of their desired size and activity level. Survey students who use the cafeteria. Follow up the survey with interviews. Determine how your group can reimagine the cafeteria. Prepare a proposal. Present your proposal.

You can imagine the amount of language students will use working on this project, while, at the same time, building a critical mindset.

Teaching critical thinking is all about building activities and strategies that become part of your teaching toolkit, and your students’ regular approach to problem-solving.

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  • A girl sat at a desk looking at an exam paper, there are people behind her sat at desks in a row doing similar

    Reducing exam day stress

    By Amy Malloy

    What are the origins of exam-day stress?

    There’s no doubt about it – exams are scary. But why exactly is this? What is it about an exam scenario that stresses us out and how can we make it feel okay?

    To answer these questions, we’re going to have to take a trip back in time and look at how our ancestors evolved their abstract thinking skills. At the same time, we’ll look at how mindfulness can actively help shift the way we think about exams.

    About 70,000 years ago, or thereabouts, a critical development happened in how the human brain processed experiences.

    Over a relatively short time (in evolutionary terms), scientists believe we stopped simply experiencing primal urges (safety/hunger/tiredness etc.) and responding to them.

    Instead, we started to be able to imagine, analyze and believe in things that didn’t exist. This meant not only could our brains respond to the threat of a real predator in front of us, but also to the perceived or imagined threat of a predator. This shift had really interesting consequences for our future relationship to threat.

    Developing imaginations also meant we started to believe in the same things as our peer groups. As a result, if a member of the tribe stopped behaving in a way that supported the tribe’s survival, other members might start to doubt their usefulness as a member of the community.

    At this time, social isolation meant no share of the food and no protection against predators. Inclusion was directly linked to survival. Essentially the physiological consequences of not meeting societal expectations were the same as coming face-to-face with a lion: fight or flight.

    Why is fight or flight mode a problem for exam performance?

    Fast forward to the present day and the context of English language exams. Exams are a type of societal expectation: a standard of language proficiency which a student is required to meet to prove their usefulness in a community who speaks that language.

    Thinking about it this way, it’s no wonder we can experience stress and panic at the thought of an exam or in the exam room itself. In evolutionary terms, an exam = a lion or the possibility of social exclusion!

    Fight or flight mode is designed to help us overcome or escape danger as quickly as possible.

    When fight or flight is activated, our brain shuts down the bodily functions it doesn’t need to survive. This includes digestion, language creation, creative and strategic thinking, writing, and deeper breathing.

    Unfortunately, some of these are key to performing well in a language exam!

    that, especially in an exam course context, “extremely high stress levels[…] can affect your cognition, negatively impacting your memory and ability to complete a task. Over time, chronically high stress levels can also impair your ability to form new memories, so high stress levels all semester long could impact your final exam performance later.”

    This means that high stress levels in the exam make it hard to perform at one’s best, and stress in anticipation of the exam can mean that the content is not learned properly in the first place.

    What can teachers do to help?

    Ultimately, we want to make the exam scenario seem safe. When our mind and body do not perceive danger, they will allow the ‘rest and digest’ functions to become active and allow our performance to flow.

    There will of course be some nerves. But the key is to help the student stay in that sweet spot of clear thinking before the stress takes over and turns into panic.

    Here are three ways we can help:

    1. Practice mindful breathing

    Practice some simple mindful breathing with your students. Mindfulness refers to the awareness that we find by focusing consciously on the present moment, objectively, with compassion and without judgment.

    It takes us back into the physical reality of the present moment and out of anxious thought cycles, which can make our stress spiral out of control. Practicing regularly ahead of the exam will help build up neural connections in the brain around the areas that help us relax and .

    The following straightforward routine can be used both regularly at the start of class and by the student in the exam itself if they feel panic rising:

    • STOP: Close your eyes. Take a moment to notice the physical sensation of the chair beneath you and the floor underneath your feet. Notice the sounds around you in the room and allow them simply to flow in and out without needing to follow them.
    • BREATHE: Focus your attention gently on your breath going in and out of your nose at the tip of the nostrils. Count ten breaths in and out, seeing if you can notice something new about each one. If you feel panicky, allow the breath out to continue a little longer than the breath in.
    • WATCH: Become aware of your thoughts and allow them to simply come and go, like clouds across the sky. Notice if you are holding on to something from the past or striving towards something in the future. Allow these to simply release and take your attention back to the breath in the present moment. Count another ten breaths. Then open your eyes and come back into the room.

    2. Familiarize your students with the exam scenario

    Make the exam scenario as familiar as possible in advance. Anything you can do to make the exam conditions appear less threatening ahead of exam day will be of great benefit.

    This may be as simple as making conditions surrounding regular progress assessments as close to the main exam as possible, so it is less strange on the day. If you have control over the exam day itself, make this as low pressure as possible.

    3. Help students develop a growth mindset

    Foster a growth mindset with your students by using the word ‘yet’ with them. Encourage them to replace ‘I can’t do it’ with ‘I can’t do it yet’. This simple word takes them out of comparison mode with where they think they should be in terms of language ability and helps them stay focused on where they are, reducing self-pressure.

    All of the above strategies are designed to take away the threat of a lion in the exam room when the day comes.

    Wishing your students all the very best for their exam preparation and good luck!

  • A teacher holding books in a classroom

    Mindfulness for teachers: managing expectations over the holidays

    By Amy Malloy

    Mindfulness and your routine

    In the run-up to the holidays, it is common to feel like your routine has completely broken down, especially when you’re not giving classes or working at school. The holidays also often bring with them lots of people, family, and excitement. That sometimes means we also experience fluctuating emotions, stress and the feeling that everything should be perfect.

    On top of this, shops and social media are filled with advertising – and there’s definitely more ‘stuff’ to buy. In addition, we can see messages telling us we need to feel ‘merry’ and ‘bright’ wherever we look. Even the popular greeting, ‘Merry Christmas’, can sometimes feel less of a greeting and more of an instruction.

    Sometimes it feels like the people around us expect us to always feel happy and joyful over the holiday season. This is fine if we do feel merry, but we will always have ups and downs. If you don’t feel happy, for whatever reason, it can feel even harder than it might at times where there is less expectation all around us.

    Overcoming the challenge

    Finding a way to introduce mindfulness into the holiday season can be a wonderful way for us to understand our emotions at this time of year. It will help you think about your expectations and let you find a moment to pause to accept whatever the reality actually is.

    Here are some quick and easy ways to find some ‘you’ time and keep checking in with how you’re feeling. These are also tips you can try with children in the classroom and for yourself at home to keep yourself on track.

    3-minute body scan

    Find a quiet moment. This may be in the few minutes after you wake up or go to bed, during break time, or even at the start of a lesson.

    • Notice the contact of your feet with the floor. Notice the sounds around you in the room.
    • Take three deep breaths and notice how they feel.
    • Scan down the body in your mind from the top of your head all the way down to your toes. Observe what you notice about your body with an air of curiosity – look for any tension, discomfort or comfort. Also, notice if there are any expectations you have of that day or moment. See if you can simply notice them and set them aside. This curiosity helps us stay detached from what we notice so we can just observe.
    • Take three more deep breaths, and carry on.

    2-minute notebook

    Writing something down can be a wonderfully mindful exercise. Have a stack of post-its or a little notebook on your desk or bedside table. You could encourage your students to do the same.

    1. Pick a point in your day. It could be at the start of each day, the start of each lesson, or just before bed. Each day, at that time, take a moment to write down three:

    • good things that have happened in your day
    • things that felt challenging
    • things you feel grateful and thankful for.

    2. Review your notes every now and again during the holiday period. This will give you a sense of your shifts of mood and energy that might have occurred.

    Noticing something you feel grateful for has been shown to .

    1-minute cupboard pause

    When things feel over-stimulating, find a quiet space just for a minute. Even if it’s in a cupboard!

    STOP: notice the contact of your feet with the floor.
    BREATHE: take ten deep breaths, breathing in for a count of four and out for a count of six.
    WATCH: watch each breath coming and going from the nose or chest or belly. Observe what your thoughts and feelings are doing. Allow them to sit without needing to respond.

    Then head back into the area you were in.

    I hope these tips help you to navigate the festive season without expectation and with curiosity for what each moment holds along the way.

    Remember that the holiday days you celebrate are really just normal days. It’s simply that expectations have changed, and what’s more, everyone’s expectations will be different.

    Simply taking time to notice this can make a massive difference to the pressure we put on ourselves. Releasing this pressure can even lead to more enjoyment overall – so why don’t you try it and see?

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    Understanding and managing technostress

    By Amy Malloy

    What is technostress?

    Technostress affects people in different ways. I resonate with Chiapetta’s (2017) definition:

    “Technostress is a syndrome that occurs when the person, subjected to information overload and continuous contact with most digital devices, develops a state of stress.”

    This explanation isn’t limited to any particular symptoms. However, most of us can relate to being over-exposed to technological devices – especially in the past year. Consequently, I imagine many people have experienced some symptoms of technostress as a result.

    What are the symptoms of technostress?

    While the symptoms of technostress differ, there are a number of common experiences. Perhaps you obsessively check social media, or struggle to focus on everyday tasks. Or maybe you feel demotivated and low in mood. You might find yourself overly focused on getting the latest technology. Or you might be actively avoiding or feeling anxious about using technology.

    Why should we be concerned about technostress?

    People are adaptable, it’s part of our biology, but if change happens too quickly, we experience symptoms of stress. And, in our modern, continuously busy culture, it can be easy to assume something is wrong with us if we feel we can’t cope with technology. It can feel like we’re failing because we’re not focusing or achieving enough. We might also feel stupid for not understanding how a piece of software works.

    In response, we need to find ways to relieve that stress and return to a more restful state.

    Tips to prevent and manage technostress

    1. Switch off – This may be hard to do with the demands of life but sometimes, just turning your devices off and stepping away from technology is the best approach. Do something to pull you away from the information overload, like a walk in nature or reading a fictional book. Something that pulls you away from life’s goings-on.
    2. Limit your exposure – If you can’t switch off completely for whatever reason, then maybe rationing your exposure to devices is key. Time and limit your time on devices, taking regular breaks away. If you struggle to pull yourself away, there are apps and device functions that can restrict access for you.
    3. Only use with a purpose – Before you start using technology, ask yourself: “What am I using this for?”. Study? Research? Or is it just out of boredom? If you haven’t got a set aim or goal, then you are likely to mindlessly scroll and get pulled into the vast information overload of social media and the web. Try to avoid this by having a set aim/goal when using technology.