What does crticial thinking mean in education?

Critical thinking is an important skill in the  21st century learning. Education's overall goal is to produce students that will be able to think critically and not just take in things like a parrot. Of course there is  a bunch of other important skills out there but this particular one stands out from the crowd. The thing about this skill is that while almost all  teachers agree upon its priority in education only few really know what it really means.

Sometimes the lines between some technical terms are blurred as is the case in the educational jargon when referring to critical thinking as synonymous with creative thinking, a blunder that is though seemingly unimportant yet it can make all the difference for experts. As teachers and educators , we do need to delineate the territory of each term and make sure they do not overlap. We can not say to have developing critical thinking as a goal of our teaching while we still do not understand what it really means to be a critical thinker.

Critical thinking as described in the video below refers to a diverse range of intellectual skills and activities concerned with evaluating information as well as evaluating our thought in a disciplined  way.

Critical thinking has a multitude of benefits for us in education, here are some of them :

I would also recommend that you watch this video, it is one of the best videos I have ever watched on critical thinking. Please make sure you share it with your students, they will learn a lot from it.

Enjoy

Nigel and Craig