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How to teach your child critical thinking

It's not enough for your children to be taught content at school, and to absorb information from other sources - reflective thinking, cognitive strategies, verbal learning, and a persistent disposition are essential for them to survive and thrive in the real world

Critical thinking for problem solving is very important in the modern world. Most schools do not teach critical thinking in any systematic way. But teaching critical thinking through academics in schools is integral in preparing students to succeed in the outside world, and being responsible for their own continuous learning and progress.
Schools are the first places where students/children are formally exposed to critical thinking strategy in a systematic way. The last 50 years have seen major changes in the world of information and in economic productivity in the marketplace, partly due to the rapid surge in the development of computers and the rise of the Internet, making access to information easy and ubiquitous.
These, and the globalisation of production have created what is called a "knowledge economy," which means that cognitive mental effort is rapidly becoming more important than manual labour in the market economy.
What is critical thinking?
Critical thinking is reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe and do. When teachers refer to teaching for 'critical thinking' they typically mean teaching for analytic thinking, which in turn means encouraging students to analyse, critique, judge, compare and contrast, evaluate, and assess. It should be taught throughout the child's life, starting early, and be continued in a systematic manner.
. Initial learning in preschool and primary grades should be structured.
. Facilitation of memory processes should be developed.
. Skills in managing, grasping and retaining information should be taught from a very early age, and consistently throughout the education process.
The overall process involves the five elements below:
. Logic and structure
. Processing skills (cognitive strategies)
. Metacognition & dispositions
. Intellectual standards
. Problem solving techniques & skills
What do children learn?
. They learn information stored in the memory, motor skills (like writing or throwing a ball), attitudes, and internal states that mould their actions.
. Children also learn intellectual skills that permit them to carry out symbol-based procedures (concepts, defined concepts, rules), and they learn what are called cognitive strategies, which are internal processes to help facilitate learning like images, concept mapping, comparison and inference.
. First, the student is learning something - think content - mostly languages, math, natural science, history and related subjects, verbal information, concepts, rules, principles and the logic and structure which comprise the subject. The most important insight for the appropriate design of instruction and curriculum to teach critical thinking is that content is nothing more nor less than a mode of thinking, a way of figuring something out, a way of understanding something through thought. The chart below shows the basic structure of learning to read words, which usually comes in the last year of preschool and the first year of primary school. Read the chart from the bottom up.
Using learning in the real world
Along with content, the student must learn how to grasp, process and store information in an effective way: these functions are called cognitive strategies. They are processes such as use of questions, metaphors, analogies, compare and contrast, use of images, and other strategies that facilitate acquisition. I call them initial processing strategies, the tools that facilitate learning. These can and must be taught beginning in preschool. Each of the following list of processing strategies can be taught in preschool.
. Attention strategies
. Physical strategies
. Verbal elaboration strategies:
. Repetition
. Paraphrasing
. Use of questions
. Grouping & selective combinations
. Elaboration through images:
. Images
. Structures and maps
. Mnemonics
. Episodes
One major category is verbal learning. Much of what children learn in schools has to do with manipulating verbal symbols (words, concepts, ideas, etc). This is what the child does to actively work with the material that comes in the form of verbal propositions (think sentences).
. Asking and answering about the material, describing, generating relations with things he already knows, figuring out the implications, and much more.
. In learning, words, phrases, associations, sentences and derivation of meaning is a major portion of what must be mastered.
. Verbal elaboration at the preschool level can be involved primarily in listening and speaking, with some initial efforts in reading and writing.
Within verbal learning, the role of questions is very important. Children learn more and better (by making more of a mental effort) and develop better linkage to existing schemes and structures. Posing and answering questions is a good means of insuring active mental process-ing, central focusing, and other comprehension fostering and monitoring activities. Children also learn that asking questions is a logical way to approach the unknowns in life, and to find out many things.

Persistence is key
Besides learning new information and skills, the child will progress better if he or she is aware of what and how they are learning. The student should learn to be aware of what and how he or she is learning, when and how to use cognitive and affective learning and enacting strategies, when to review, rehearse, and evaluate what is being learned, how to recognise and apply basic rules of logic, how to discern the overall structure of the subject being learned, and how to think about applying his or her knowledge.
Along with all of the above, the child should be learning certain dispositions, the most important of which is persistence. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: genius will not; education will not. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. And, parents and teachers are responsible for their children's persistence!
In summary, one cannot think without content so learning new information and ideas is important.
. Good cognitive strategies are required to ensure solid acquisition of required skills, knowledge and information.
. If a student does not have positive dispos-itions and attitudes about thinking, he or she will not be a good thinker no matter how much content he or she has accumulated.
. Awareness of the thinking process and its results contribute strongly to learning
. A good attitude and much knowledge will not be enough if the student has not learned the rules of intellectual standards.
. Solving problems requires all of the above.
(The writer works in education technology and reform issues around the world, and is a former editor of the Journal of Education Technology, published by the OAS (Organization of American States). The article is content from the workshop he presented at the 'How to Teach Children Critical Thinking' conference recently conducted by Arabian Child, the early childhood education care organisation.)