Welcome
As I journey through the critical thinking maze, I learned there is no single way to learn critical thinking.
I now recognise that curiosity plays a crucial part in its development. I'm very excited about that because it means we can help your children and ourselves become comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity and find solutions to problems with fresh human thinking.
Teaching Critical Thinking is gaining much interest these days, and for good reason. With so much information at our fingertips, a 'consumer' mentality is more challenging to identify within ourselves and others. This leads to people who think they know the truth without evidence, logic, or reason, leading to misleading thoughts and actions. 
The fantastic thing is that specific critical thinking instruction can often be integrated into existing learning frameworks such as inquiry and curiosity.
How to teach Critical Thinking Habits
So, this is how we approach it. When teaching critical thinking, we seek areas that integrate into many ideas, subjects and curiosity. The more diverse our groups are, the more students learn different things. This way, correlations can be made, and specific critical thinking skills can be taught.
As cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham puts it, “Thought processes are intertwined with what is being thought about.” That is why we strongly emphasise sharing ideas, immersing ourselves in conversations, and following curiosities. A more profound understanding arises in these settings, providing a perfect entry point for critical thinking.
Open-ended discussions are an excellent way to spark curiosity. With practice refining their curiosity, our children will develop “metacognition” (thinking about thinking), in which students turn their curiosity to themselves and begin to ask why they feel, think, and believe what they do.
It will be interesting to see how our groups begin to open up and share their curiosities. If developed and refined through critical thinking, curiosity will become a lasting trait and help create new horizons for our children.
Little time is spent teaching our children or ourselves how to think critically. I hope to support its development in an inspiring and meaningful way.
Managing Emotions.
We will cover this in our following email. It will become integral to our children's experience when engaging with critical thinking.
Please send me your thoughts and articles that will help us better support our children in becoming skilled at managing their emotions.
Email Tala
tala@curiousminds.ac.nz