Implementing Critical Thinking in History
1) What we've changed / implemented:
The CPD we were given on critical thinking by Damian during the staff-training day really started the wheels in motion for me. I had always been interested in enhancing the students thinking skills and I wanted to find a way I could incorporate critical thinking into the History department on a daily basis. I was also a realist and didn’t want to add a large amount of work to the teachers otherwise it could be viewed as an unnecessary burden. With these factors in mind we decided to implement critical thinking starters across the board. These would constitute small thinking based starters that the teachers could use to begin their lessons and get the students immediately thinking/solving problems as soon as they entered the lesson. The starters would be scaled appropriately for the different age groups and would not need to be subject specific although they did organically evolve into historical based discussion as they progressed through the starter. Please see examples below:
5B – International Baccalaureate: Students were presented with a number of buttons that they could press on the whiteboard. These buttons were different colours and represented different superpowers. The students were then given one choice and they had to choose a button to press and justify their choice under class/teacher questioning. For example, one student chose the button that allowed him to fly, everyone agreed that this was a great choice. As justification he offered the reasoning that he could fly anywhere. Another student challenged this with international airspace laws and offered the real life example of Turkey shooting down the Russian military jet for violating Turkish airspace in 2015. This demonstrated that the students were not only thinking about the situation but also using real world example to justify arguments.
S4 – IGCSE: Students were presented with two words on the whiteboard: expansion and aggression. The students were asked to define these two words and then answer the following question: ‘can you have one without the other?’ The students were asked to provide examples to justify their answer. The examples were not limited to a historical context. The students provided a range of examples arguing both sides, which included reference to the animal kingdom and moving house. The starter then evolved to include our current topic where we were studying the Japanese invasion of Manchuria providing a seamless flow into the start of the main lesson.
2) The impact we have observed with the students:
From my observations the intervention of including critical thinking/thinking starters at the beginning of each class has been a positive addition to my lessons. The students enjoy the challenge that they are presented with and it forces them to practice their higher level thinking skills on a whole class level and in turn I believe this positivity is cascading into their historical studies. I have observed the need for the teacher to initially facilitate the questioning to foster the higher level thinking skills but the need for this has gradually decreased over time.
3) Ways forward from here:
We have made this a departmental policy with the History class teachers implementing it across the board, so for the immediate future it is here to stay. I would like to implement 100% subject specific starters at some point in the future but for now I think it is important for the students and teachers to both have fun with this concept and the fact that the starters don’t need to be subject specific at this moment in time make it far easier for teachers to put together ideas for the starters.