5 Activities for Fostering Critical Thinking
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- Introduction:
- 5 Activities
- 1. Write
- 2. Games
- 3. Illusions
- 4. Models
- 5. Vicarious Experience
- In Closing
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Hands-on Activities
and Classroom Management
Being a science teacher trained to appreciate inquiry teaching, content area reading, and conceptual change theory; being an avid reader of science fiction; being a movie and tv fan; and being an explorer of the internet, I have collected a few items that I consider useful for fostering critical thinking.
Many ideas will do triple duty in that they also create teachable moments, and frequently motivate students to learn more. I want to say that they enable more effective classroom management, and in some ways they do. But, I have found that hands-on teaching requires its own set of classroom management skills and so I do not offer the ideas as a panacea for controlling a difficult class.
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5 Critical Thinking Activities
Foster Imagination for Writing
1. Get students to write. Stimulate their imagination using images,
half-told stories, snippets of movies or tv shows, post-discussion
of the entire story, movie or show, a common hands-on activity or
demonstration, or a statement of a controversial issue or challenge.
Book reports, lab reports, and discussion questions all fall into
this category for stimulating student thought, but teachers can always
go one step further by providing an additional stimulus of high interest
to the students. By choosing media with a connection to the unit
topic, the excercise becomes enrichment, on-task, and an integral
part of the teaching unit.
poisson rouge dans un aquarium © Gilles Cohen
Source: fotolia.com, a source of royalty-free images for which you pay only $1-3/image.
Consider this picture. Imagine the essays that students might write about thinking outside the box, achievement, leap of faith, animal behavior, the story of fish, requirements for life, stress of competition, niche, and the beat of a different drum. You can even get students to solve math/science problems like how high did the fish jump, what is the size of the fish based on the scale of the picture (hint: use average size of a goldfish?), and what is the momentum required for the fish's trajectory (The fish escaped the bowl; what is the "escape" velocity?) Elementary students can write stories about the lonely fish.
There are several companion pictures on the Fotolia page to which the first link will take you. (The photos there are a joy to view. Check out the ladybug on the tip of a blade of grass!)
During a unit on ecology I had my biology classes listen to the song The Circle of Life. I gave them a print-out of the words and had them sing-a-long. I then asked them to write a short essay about what the song said to them. I got some some beautiful essays about the metaphors in the song.
Buy the sheet music.
Circle
Of Life - Sheet Music (Digital Download)
Circle
of Life - From 'Lion King' - Music Book
I also learned that motivational activities must be presented properly if I wanted students to learn the desired lesson. In each of two classes I had assigned the essay on the song at the same sequence in the unit. In one class I had asked the class to write an essay about what the song said to eacg of them. Thinking that the class discussion on ecology that we had just completed would focus their thoughts on life cycles, niches, compitition, and resource limits, I was a bit shocked to read essay after essay on the power of faith and generosity of God and some knowledgeable discourse on the value of metaphors. (Naturally, I gave passing grades based on essay quality, since the assignment had been given as, "Tell what it means to you.")
A bit wiser, I assigned the next class to write what the "Song says to you in terms of our discussions during the past couple of days on ecology." From this class I received some insightful statements about the principles of ecology and some knowledgeable discourse on the value of metaphors. One little phrase included in the assignment kept the assignment open-ended yet on-task in terms of the lesson, and still enjoyable for the students as a critical-thinking activity.
Games Foster Problem-solving
2. Offer games to students. Remember the games we played as children? Monopoly
and Life and Old Maid and even Go Fish all taught/reinforced age-appropriate
skills. Think about the abstractions of classification and strategy
and just plain keeping track of events and the impact of events on
one's portfolio. Small groups can gather at a computer to play online,
or with individual software programs for enrichment or as a planned
skills lesson. Simulations and games motivate students in unique
ways. (Click an image
or link below to purchase that game or item from the sponsoring
merchant.) Challenge students with Othello.,
a game of strategy. Try
these challenging board games. The schemes of The
Game of Life translate
well to the memes of modern pop culture.
Download over 200+ puzzle and action games at Shockwave.com.
Now Atom (formerly Shockwave) offers Nick and Nick, Jr. games through purchase and online subscriptions.
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Visit the VCCTI Toy Shop to get a range
of educational toys and games.
Present the Unexpected Illusion, Teaser, Problem
3. Optical illusions, brain teasers, and online simulations all offer opportunities to develop critical thinking skills. The internet abounds with such activities. One site associated with the Google gadget below is this blog, Mighty Optical Illusions. It has beautiful artwork associated with illusions. (One page from the site has two widget/gadgets on optical illusions in addition to the beautiful optical illusion painting. The comments from the people trying to find all 13 get a bit risque in their expressions of frustration in not finding all 13, but the rare obscenities are generally mild.)
There are rich lessons utilizing these activities available at Homeschooling Supply and Teachnology, Inc., many of which are free. Try the lesson plans that I wrote for using widgets in science. Read about them here. Feel free to download the sample lesson plan/lab write-up assignment form that follows the format of the Widgets Science lessons, or just give it a looksee..
.
.
The gadgets below are from Google;Yahoo calls theirs widgets. Both are free downloads. (Click on the gadget's Google button to go to Google Gadgets.)
....
I have included more gadgets throughout my site. Locate them using the sit map page. For instance, the subject chart "Social Studies" lists the gadget of history. If the link is broken, check back. Some pages are still under construction. If you want an update, join the forum or the newsletter. The gadgets and their uses are really intriguing to me.
Motivate and Engage Students with Models and Robots
4. Building models
and robots also fosters critical
thinking. First there are the skills involved in following directions,
in working with scale models, and in relating the concrete structure
to an abstract idea. 
Modeling
is a teaching strategy I often used in teaching science. The constructed
model also served as a vehicle for demonstrating concepts and for
discovering what about a concept was still confusing or misunderstood
by a student.
An example of how effective models are for teaching is the experience of teaching chemistry with the MolyMod kits, which have been renamed by the distributor Prentiss Hall. Don't worry about the complexity of organic chemistry for which the kit is sold. This kit works with inorganic chemistry for grades 7-12, too! Just make your own instructions. Students learn about bonding with ionic charges by matching the correct knobs and holes per ball. It really works! Many teachers use the marshmallows and toothpicks to accomplish the same thing: model the structure of a molecule with its bonds between its elements. I have used both with the same students, sometimes starting a unit with a candy lab (marshmallows and toothpics with extras to eat!) then using the MolyMods for practice later in the unit; or sometimes using the candy lab as a test review and allowing the extra marshmallows/gummyballs to be eaten as an end-of-unit reward.
that
modeling involves students: they like doing models that are geared
to their abilities and learning level, and they enjoy the group work
of modeling. Within the realm of models are math manipulatives
I offer search boxes for the toy, puzzles and games merchants and pages of educational toys and games in the Ads for Toys and VCCTI Toy Shop pages. Read about robots in the classroom.
Music and instruments merchant products and search boxes are offered in the Music Store pages.
Provide Plenty of Virtual Experiences
Actual experience can be hard to obtain. In today's technological age, virtual experiences are easily obtainable from movies, educational videos, photos and books on all kinds of topics. To locate movies with descriptions, try Amazon.com or http://www.imbd.com. Art and music foster critical thinking. Patel, in a talk on UCTV's Music and the Mind (written about here) discussed the value of music in developing cognitive thought and how the brain responds to music. This talk is offered as a streaming video, free. (More info and resources on this topic are in the Music Store.) Read more about using movies in teaching.
Shop the Learning Disabilities section of Shop.pbs.org ...
Shop the PBS Kids Shop at shop.pbs.org
You can get streaming videos of many of the science, political, cultural and fine arts documentaries and talks of booktv, uctv, uwtv, documentary channel, limetv, and others on line. Many are excellent. Google the name of the show, the talk, the network or the speaker to find a wealth of resources. Some I have written about either here or in my blog, Valerie's Soapbox. I try to include links and products that reinforce any lesson that would use the show. Again I welcome contributions of ideas and links from you either in the forum or by email.
You can also purchase many of the excellent documentaries from the tv network stores online:
A Few Closing Remarks
It was for this reason--broadening the backgrounds of students-- that I began partnering with my chosen merchants and to posting the music, software, ebook, book, science fiction book, videos and magazine stores, linked from All Stores, for which my mantra is "Chosen with teaching and learning in mind." Look for the essays concerning music and learning linked from the Music Store.
Essay by Valerie Coskrey ©2007
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