Critical thinking is a skill that allows an individual to be perceptive without becoming too cynical. It is the ability to be analytical and open-minded at the same time.
In the world today, exercising critical thinking is important. One of the reasons being the slew of information technology brings that is vast and many—and the hard truth is not all of them are accurate.
Ultimately, this affects many people, particularly scholars, researchers, and students of international schools in Manila. They must be careful of what data they share and include in their reports and assignments.
Aside from that, there are other ways students could use critical thinking. For instance, students could benefit from knowing when they are being peer pressured. Instead of simply giving in, they would be able to examine the situation to avoid it completely.
As you can see, it’s imperative for children to be taught how to adapt and navigate their way through processing correct information and identifying faulty reasoning.
Briefly elaborated below are some key approaches that you can use to develop your children’s innate critical thinking and assessment skills:
Build a Foundation
By practicing critical thinking, an individual could process various ideas and concepts that may come up when he is communicating with others.
As much as possible, encourage your children to do the same. The easiest way to do this is to ask them questions like “how does that make you feel?” or “what would you do if a certain situation happened? Why?”
Apart from that, allow them to come up with their own set of inquiries. Give your children the avenue for openness and enable them to process ideas and concepts on their own—both of which are crucial elements in building a foundation for critical thinking.
Speak with Images
Critical thinking is having the capacity to get a good grasp of abstract thoughts. Most children are good at this because they are innately visual learners. Use this to your advantage by simply doing some exercises like cloud watching, wherein you’d be describing what the clouds’ shapes resemble.
Another activity that you could do is to summarize the story you just read or the movie you just watched. By doing so, you would know if they truly understood what they read or watched. To discuss them even more, you could talk about the central themes in the book or film.
Developing Metacognition
Metacognition is the awareness of one’s own thought process. When sitting down and reading with your children, assist themas they form their own strategy towards figuring things out. However, you must steer them towards the right direction. This can be done by helping them connect the dots. Ask them questions as to how the events and the characters in a story connect and correlate with one another, and what bigger ideas can they form from these.
Key Takeaway
International schools in Manila continuously strive to provide the best education to their students. At this age of the internet, they may come across fictitious information as well as give into peer pressure (from various social media platforms). This is why developing their critical thinking skill should be done early on.
As parents, you could do your part at home by doing some of the exercises listed above. They will not only enable them to distinguish correct information, but also allow them to have their own set of ideas.
