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Critical Thinking and Literacy Strategies
- October 30, 2023
- Posted by: The Teachers Academy
- Category: All Blog Postings Classroom Activities Educator Resources / News Online Courses

Are your students thinking critically? How do you know for sure? The Teacher’s Academy’s course: Critical Thinking and Literacy Strategies provides insight into how critical thinking can be an active part of any classroom. In this course, teachers are given a variety of critical thinking activities to try as well as effective literacy strategies that will help increase student achievement. Just like all of our other courses, Critical Thinking & Literacy Strategies is filled with quality educational resources that will save teachers time from trying to find them on the Internet and stress knowing these resources have been gathered by teachers. Enjoy!
Here is a quick clip from Critical Thinking and Literacy Strategies:
Critical Thinking Defined:
There are many different types of thinking and many different ways thinking is affected. For instance, the environment, our experiences and emotions are just a few factors that affect our thinking. Our brains also use mechanisms like logic and rationalization to understand problems or make decisions. The idea of multiple intelligences has helped educators organize diverse brain functions into a practical hierarchy, which serves as a key component to lessons. As teachers, we can teach, measure, intervene, and use every cutting-edge strategy some guru recommends, but how do we really know if our students are thinking critically? What does it really mean to think critically?
Critical Thinking: is a complex process that is based on objective standards and consistency. It includes making judgements using objective criteria and offering opinions with reasons. (Sousa, 2011)
It is also:
- “Seeing both sides of an issue.” – Daniel Willingham
- “An ability to use reason to move beyond the acquisition of facts to uncover
- deep meaning.” – Robert Weissberg
- “A reflective and reasonable thought process embodying depth, accuracy,
- and astute judgment to determine the merit of a decision, an object or a
- theory.” – Huda Umar Alwehaiibi
- “Self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the
- highest level of quality in a fair-minded way.”- Linda Elder (Finley, 2014)
Let’s try a quick brain game so you can see the difference in the complexity of a few questions:
- What color is a cloud?
- What role do clouds play in the water cycle?
- Why should we protect our environment?
The first question only took your brain a few milli-seconds to recall information and provide an answer. Question number two took a little more time to for your brain to process.
You had to recall some basic knowledge about the water cycle, isolate the different phases of the cycle, then analyze the role of the cloud. The final question required you to retrieve lots of information about the impact of pollution, sift through a variety of possible reasons, and defend your answer. Notice how your brain worked a little harder to answer that last question? You might even say, your brain had to think critically. This activity might be a great way for your own students to develop an awareness of how their brains are working!
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