Bitesize Research: Building Student Criticality

By Jaya Carrier

I hope you’re all having a good week! With our forthcoming INSET day in July, we’ve got an external facilitator session planned to continue the work we’ve been doing on anti-racism and to honour our commitment to a keynote in this area annually.  As such, this week, I was interested in seeing an article published in Edutopia, about criticality, particularly when considering multiple and diverse perspectives.

Objectives: To consider how teachers can supporting building students’ criticality 

Summary: 

• The author delineates a difference between critical thinking and criticality. Critical thinking refers to deep, analytical thinking, whereas criticality is about power, equity and anti-oppression. 

• The author suggests engaging students with particular questions to support building criticality:

• 1) The author suggests starting by using ‘what’ questions to activate critical thinking. E.g. What is your summary? What is your key takeaway? What information supports your explanation?

• 2) The author then suggests introducing criticality questions, best summarised as ‘so what?’ and ‘what next?’ questions. For example: What voices are missing here? What assumptions does this make? Can or should we take action about this to promote social change? 

  
  

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

• How am I currently supporting critical thinking and criticality in my students?

• What elements of critical thinking and criticality would work well with my subject, and the topics I am planning?

• What elements of critical thinking and criticality would work well in parts of the RSHE curriculum I am teaching?

• What further support do I need on this?

Please do get in touch if you would like to talk further about this - I’d love to hear from you!