When we’re first learning at school, it’s important to follow what others tell us, for example accepting that 2+2=4. However, as we get older, we learn about things that can have many different answers, and that’s when we need to use critical thinking skills. 

Here at i-Learner Education Centre, we’re dedicated to building critical thinking skills, and we’ve got a great series of articles on the topic here. This piece on Fostering Critical Thinking Skills at Home is particularly useful. To expand on this, let’s look at the way students can stretch their skills on their own. Work with your child to practise the tips below, and encourage them to keep trying even when you’re not around.

Read, Watch and Listen Actively

People can easily consume stories passively. Whether they’re reading or listening to a book or they’re watching a film or a TV show, they often sit back and absorb whatever’s happening. However, strong critical thinkers are constantly asking themselves questions and engaging with the story. The easiest questions are about what will happen next. Even very young children can make guesses about this. As children get older, they should be encouraged to think deeply about characters, asking themselves about motivation and the personality aspects a certain behaviour reveals. More mature thinkers should look for links between different stories and see patterns that repeat, such as the leaving, transforming and returning of the hero’s journey narrative.

Look for Purposes

This tip requires an even more active mind as it concerns everything we see in the world and asking ‘Why?’ about it. The easiest thing to practise this on is the adverts we pass in the street. We naturally try to ignore these, but they’re excellent tools for developing critical thinking skills. From an early age, children should be encouraged to think about what these adverts want us to do. Then learners can extend this and analyse every element of the image and text. Why might a poster about an environmental charity be red and yellow when we usually associate nature with the colour green? Why is there so little information on a fast-food poster when a poster about a medicine contains lots of text and detail? Understanding what choices have been made to meet a certain purpose is an essential critical thinking skill, and we can practise it everywhere we go.

Think Sideways not Straight Ahead

A key aspect of critical thinking is making new and interesting connections between things. That’s how we supercharge our learning and develop a complex understanding of the world without having to be told every fact about it. The way to practise this is to broaden our initial ideas in response to a question or topic, instead of narrowing down straight away. You can play fun games with children of all ages to practise this, for example challenge each other to think of the most uses for a simple item like a paper clip. You can also encourage your child to think of alternatives as often as possible, for example, if you buy sun cream when you’re shopping with them, they might ask if you’re going to the beach; see what other reasons they can think of for buying this. With older learners, you can use this conversation style when discussing current events, asking whether people in the news might have had other motives than the one everyone assumes or if a law could have been interpreted a different way.

Work on all these skills together and encourage your child to keep doing them on their own. The more critical thinking skills they build, the better they get at independent thinking, and soon they’ll be telling you about new ways to challenge your thinking too! 

To build strong critical thinking, students from K3 to S3 can join our Critical Reading and Writing courses, and older students can stretch their skills in our Applied Critical Thinking course.