22.12.2018
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Just an English teacher…or an educator?

Has it ever happened to you to be frustrated about your students` progress?

As a language teacher, you are conscientiously teaching them vocabulary and grammar, your students successfully pass their tests. However, when you start having a conversation with your students they would stare at you and it was just not working. And you were thinking: “Something went wrong”. Because you know that your students will graduate and get into a working environment. There,  they will be expected to think, to analyze, to synthesize, to evaluate and to make good decisions. And they will have to do it in English! And you want them to be there!

Today more and more teachers talk about the need to teach students how to think instead of what to think in order to prepare them to be valuable and ready to cooperate and contribute to modern society. Let us talk about how we, English teachers, can participate in this so long-awaited educational reform. And why do we need to do so? Below there are the ways to teach critical thinking through our engaging language lesson plans.

What is critical thinking?

The first thing that is very important to realize is that critical thinking is not about being critical or just finding flaws in other people opinions. What critical thinking teaches us is how to question things rigorously, how to form sound, well-reasoned, profound thoughts and arguments. To be a true critical thinker means being creative, reflective and adaptable. Evaluating the evidence to decide for yourself what is accurate, what is relevant, and do I have sufficient information to take a decision on this topic.

How to develop critical thinking?

1) Encourage active questioning

Teach your students whenever they read anything, whenever they listen to a Ted talk, a conversation, a debate they should ask a number of specific questions.

Who..?, What..?, Where..?, When..? and so on. Doing so will teach them to evaluate the speaker. Is the speaker comprehensive? Ask them to analyse the text, infer meaning, discover the meaning and evaluate the opinion.

When you say something you are responsible for providing evidence for that claim.

A confident speaker, a person who knows what he/she is talking about will provide the details unless he does not try to conceal something.  

2) Stimulate their own thinking

Attain understanding not just knowledge. Memorization. Don`t let your students stay at the level where they only memorize and repeat, this is not deep thinking at all.

Instead of just telling the students to memorize the right answers ask them to engage their own minds and start questioning things. And this involvement, this engagement is so important because it keeps the spark of curiosity alive. If you teach adults students try to resurrect a little kid in them who keeps asking why…?  and why…? but how…? and so on.

3) Encourage students to collaborate in their learning

Collaboration requires communication. Communication requires critical thinking. Critical thinking requires creativity. Creative and critical thinking are two sides of the “how to think” coin. What if we try to convert a classroom into a situation where students need to innovate in order to solve the problems. Communicate in order to share their opinions, be ready to filter, resonate and what is most important to change their opinions.

4) Teach your students to write

Yeah, that can be unbelievably time-consuming and not all of the students are easily engaged in writing. But it is the most powerful weapon for developing critical thinking. Make your students write their ideas on the paper, ask to exchange papers with the partner and write comments about partner’s ideas.

Thinking makes us act effectively in the world. Thinking makes us win the battles we undertake. And those could be the battles for good things. As educators or teachers, we want our students to win their battles, by teaching them speaking, thinking and writing we provide them with the most powerful weapon.

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