critical thinking skills early years

Parents' Guide

Introduction, critical thinking development: ages 5 to 9.

Critical thinking must be built from a solid foundation. Although children aged five to nine are not yet ready to take on complicated reasoning or formulate detailed arguments, parents can still help their children lay a foundation for critical thinking. 

In order to develop high-level critical thinking skills later in life, five- to nine-year-old children must first make progress along four different tracks. This includes developing basic reasoning skills and interests, building self-esteem, learning emotional management skills, and internalizing social norms that value critical thinking. The following sections will discuss the importance of these foundational aspects of critical thinking and offer parents guidance in how to support their young children’s development. 

1. Logic and Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is different from logical thinking. logical thinking is like math: it involves formal reasoning skills that can only be learned later in life. in contrast, critical thinking builds on everyday reasoning. so parents should guide their children’s critical thinking development from a very young age..

Formal logic is an important part of critical thinking, but ultimately critical thinking involves habits and skills going far beyond the domain of logic. Children are able to develop their critical faculties not from logical analysis, but everyday reasoning.

There are three main factors to keep in mind in differentiating logic from the everyday reasoning that underpins critical thinking.

First, logic is not a natural human trait. If logic were natural, we wouldn’t have to learn how to reason, and math wouldn’t be considered so difficult in school. The natural reasoning displayed by children is often founded on sensory experiences and marred by the cognitive biases discussed in the introduction. Consider this example. Someone says: “If it rains, I’ll take my umbrella with me.” And then a moment later adds: “It’s not raining.” What may we conclude? The vast majority of people — including both adults and children old enough to understand the question — will conclude that the person will not take an umbrella. In context, that is a reasonable conclusion to draw. 

Logic is not natural to humans and can only be acquired through learning.

But from a purely logical perspective, it does not follow. The fact that if it does rain, the speaker will take an umbrella implies nothing, strictly speaking, about what will happen in the case that it is not raining. Logic, the cognitive capacity for formal and reliable deduction, is not natural to humans. We can only acquire it through learning—and only at an age when the cognitive system and brain development allow for such learning (between ages 12 and 15).

Second, although logic is not natural, it can be taught with varying degrees of success, according to personality, cognitive profile, and so on. Multiple developmental psychology studies since Piaget have shown that our cognitive system can only become proficient in logical analysis later on, and with the correct training.

Third, if parents train children from ages five to nine to make more or less complex logical deductions, no deep knowledge is acquired. At a young age, the cognitive system does not yet have the capacity to discern logical invariables (i.e., the ability to reproduce a line of reasoning in a variable context). 

This is why we only explain mathematical principles to children when they are 13 to 14 years old. But again parents can encourage the basics of critical thinking at an early age by promoting social factors like self-esteem. 

Logic and Brain Development

Complex reasoning predominantly takes place in the prefrontal cortex and areas of the brain devoted to language. Language development is, of course, closely linked to explicit learning, as well as to implicit stimulation.

But reasoning requires more than just language skills. The prefrontal cortex carries out what are known as executive functions. It controls concentration, planning, decision-making, and many other functions. These allow us to break down complex tasks into a series of simpler tasks. Reasoning requires a strategy that breaks things down. The prefrontal lobe is a cerebral zone that only matures neurologically after the age of 20. 

Logic is neither natural nor easy. Its development requires a comfortable handling of language and the capacity for problem-solving in the prefrontal cortex. Where are we now? Where do we want to go? How can we get there?

Metacognition​

2. everyday reasoning, although their logical reasoning skills are undeveloped, young children can argue and express opinions. parents should encourage them. even though a child’s argument will tend to be based on emotion, the practice can help build a critical perspective and confidence..

Despite the fact that young children may not be able to grasp logical concepts, they still employ everyday forms of reasoning in both their use of language and in problem-solving and decision-making. It is from out of these capacities that critical thinking can begin to develop at this age.

As is readily apparent, communication via language is not logical. Natural language does not conform to a formal logical structure. It is contextual, whether we are talking about comprehension or expression. If someone says: “If I had a knife, I would cut my steak,” most people would understand that having a knife makes it possible to cut the steak. However, in formal logic, the sentence means that if I had a knife, I would be obliged to cut the steak. Logical language is systematic and obligatory. But a child learns to speak and to understand in a pragmatic and contextual, not logical, fashion.

Certain communication problems result from an overly rigid logical rigor, as in the case of people with Asperger’s syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism. Paradoxically, human communication only works because it is not a purely logical linguistic system. This is one of the reasons why automated translation between languages has been a thorn in the side of artificial intelligence experts since the 1970s.

Logical Proof and Factual Proof

Most real-life problems that we have been grappling with since infancy cannot be formally resolved by logical deduction .

Decision-making is based on a complex mix of different elements:

the cognitive processing of a situation and/or argument

intervention, conscious or unconscious, from our memory of similar past experiences, our preferences, and our personality in the broad sense

our emotions

This is how a child can choose between two toys or how an adult chooses between buying and renting an apartment. People with ultra-logical cognitive tendencies won’t have enough factors for their reasoning to work with, and may be incapable of making a decision—and therefore, incapable of taking action. Neurological studies, since those undertaken by Antonio Damasio in the 1990s, have shown us that decision-making processes and emotional processes are intimately linked , from both neurophysiological and behavioral perspectives.

Pure logic, besides often producing unfortunate results in the real world, can be a hindrance in a highly complicated universe where decisions require managing multiple factors. This is the main reason why artificial intelligence is only now starting to see results, despite the fact that information technology has been in use since the 1940s.

Computer engineers have needed to overcome their grounding in logical, mathematical, and hypothetical deduction, and to incorporate developments in cognitive science and neurology. Algorithms now operate more like children. That is to say, they make random decisions, analyze and memorize the outcomes in order to progress, and then correct themselves by discerning both the invariables and the contextual variables. This is called deep learning. 

Children cannot rely too heavily on logic, but they are still able to express opinions based on their experiences, intuitions, and emotions.

This is also how children between five and nine years old operate. They solve many problems and make many choices, without being able to demonstrate (in the purest sense of the word) why their conclusions and choices were correct.

Between the ages of five and nine, therefore, children cannot rely too heavily on logic. However, they are still able to to express opinions based on their experiences, intuitions, and emotions. To do this, they need to practice, have good self-esteem, and feel esteemed by others in order to believe they have the right, the desire, and the energy to put their critical thinking to use. In other words, they need to exist as a thinking and acting subject whose capacities are recognized by others.

At this age, children are able to argue based on things they have experienced and knowledge they have acquired at school or at home, from books, television, or the internet, or by talking with their friends. They are also able to argue with their “heart.” They assume that their emotions are arguments themselves. 

For example, a child might consider that we shouldn’t eat meat because innocent animals shouldn’t have to die. The child’s empathy is the crux of their argument and the strength of their insistence will often be proportional to that of their emotions.

Case in Point

We show children from this age group a drawing of a rectangular flask tipped at an angle, and we ask them: “If I fill this flask roughly halfway, could you draw the water line on the flask?” 

What would be the result? Most children will draw a line perpendicular to the flask’s longitudinal axis. Yet, since this axis does not run vertically but is at an angle, the line the child draws is not horizontal relative to the ground, as it should be. 

Children err here because their minds are referentially anchored to the flask, just as astronomers for many millennia fixated on the idea of the earth, and later the sun, as a reference point—before realizing that the universe does not have an absolute reference point.

Even if we explain the error to children—and they say they understand—many will, shortly afterwards, make the same mistake again. Their cognitive system is not mature enough to incorporate the logic behind reference and relativity. The example shows how logical thinking is not natural. It requires a learned ability to step back and remove oneself from immediate engagement with a particular situation. 

3. Preparing Kids to Think Critically

Parents or guardians can foster critical thinking skills in children from an early age. First, it’s important to understand the basics of how children learn to think and how a child’s mind differs from that of an adult. Critical thinking in their early years prepares children for life’s challenges and allows them to live a productive life.

How to teach critical thinking to your child

Here are four ways you can support your child’s early cognitive development and put them on the path to becoming critical thinkers. Teaching critical thinking may seem daunting, but having a primer on the particular needs of a child can help you better approach this important task.

1. Encourage children not to see everything as centered only on them by involving them in discussions on an array of topics, including current affairs.

Contrary to popular belief, from the age of five—and sometimes even earlier—children like to be involved in discussions, provided they are not drowned in technical vocabulary or formal logic . They also need to feel that adults are interested in what they are saying and that they are being listened to. Adults need to learn to step away from the role of educator and engage children at their level.

It is highly important for the development of critical faculties that children see their thoughts on the world are accepted. By taking those thoughts seriously, we are taking our children seriously and accepting them.

For example, ask five-year-old children whether Santa Claus exists and how they know. Listen to their arguments: they saw Santa at the mall; they know their Christmas presents must come from somewhere. Contradicting them or breaking down their worldview would be a grave mistake. It would fly in the face of our knowledge about cognitive development, and it would disregard their emotional need for this belief. Paradoxically, we need to let children formulate their own ideas and worldviews, namely through dreaming and imagination. In this way, they will grow happy and confident enough, in time and at their own pace, to move on to more mature ideas.

2. Value the content of what children say.

With encouragement, children will want to express their thoughts increasingly often, quite simply because they find it pleasurable. A certain structure in our brains, the amygdala, memorizes emotions linked to situations we experience. We are predisposed to pursue experiences and situations which induce pleasure, be it sensory or psychological. If a child puts energy into reflection in order to convince us that aliens exist, and we then dismantle their arguments and dreams, we will be inhibiting their desire to participate in this type of discussion again.

For children aged five to nine, the pleasure of thinking something through, of expressing and discussing their thoughts, of feeling language to be a source of joy, are all of far greater importance than argumentative rigor or logical reasoning .

Children debate and give their opinions. This stimulates their brain, which creates a whole host of connections, which, in turn, improve their abilities and their cognitive and emotional performance. The pleasure of discussion, of having someone listen to your ideas, releases a “flood” of neurotransmitters that promote cerebral development. An atmosphere of kindness and benevolence in which the child feels heard produces neural connections and develops various kinds of intelligence. As the child learns through debate, putting effort into reflective thought and into verbal and bodily expression, the brain evolves and invests in the future. This results from cognitive stimulation paired with  joie de vivre  that comes from being heard by others and receiving their undivided attention.

Parents should not hold back from bringing children into discussions and debates.

3. gradually, the ability to argue with pertinence, on both familiar topics of reflection or debate and new ones, will increase..

Numerous recent studies show that doing well in school results more so from pleasure and the development of self-esteem than heavy exposure to graded exercises, which can create anxiety and belittle children. Children are vulnerable and quickly internalize the labels others place on them.

In short, parents should not hold back from bringing children into discussions and debates, keeping to the principles outlined above. Also, be sure to respond to their desire to start discussions within their frame of reference and be sure to take them seriously.

4. Gradually, with time, pleasure, learning, and cognitive and emotional development, it will be possible to encourage children to argue without pressuring them through open-ended questions.

From the age of eight, children can start learning about  metacognition and the adoption of alternative points of view. They should also be trained at this time to understand the difference between an opinion, an argument, and a piece of evidence.

An opinion is the expression of an idea that is not, in and of itself, true or false. Children are empowered to express their opinions early on by all the preliminary work on building up self-esteem. “I think they should close down all the schools, so we can be on holiday all the time” is an opinion. A child of five can easily express such an opinion.

An argument is an attempt to convince others by offering information and reasoning. A child of eight might argue: “If we close down all the schools, we can get up later. Then we’ll have more energy to learn things better at home.”

Evidence are the facts we use to try to prove a point in an argument. Evidence can be highly powerful but it rarely amounts to conclusive proof. When an unambiguous proof is presented, alternative opinions evaporate, provided that one can cognitively and emotionally assimilate the perspective of the person presenting the proof. Something can be proven in two ways. On the one hand, it can be proven through formal reasoning—attainable from the age of nine upwards in real-life situations and, later on, in l more abstract situations. On the other hand, it can be established through factual demonstration. If a child claims that “you can scare away a mean dog by running after it,” proof can be given through demonstration. This leaves no need for argument.

From ages eight to nine, children can come to differentiate and prioritize opinion, argument, and evidence in what they say and hear, provided that their own flawed arguments at age five to six were met with respect and tolerance. This is vital for developing children’s self-esteem and respect for others. It enables them to take pleasure in argument and increases their desire to express themselves more persuasively.

Critical thinking exercises for kids

Hunting—for or against? For a debate like this one, with considerable social implications, focus on these concepts:

1. Teach children to distinguish between:

An opinion : I am against hunting…

An argument : … because it entails animal suffering and human deaths.

 Hunting significantly increases the production of stress hormones (such as hydrocortisone) in hunted animals.

There are around thousands of hunting accidents each year.

2. Teach children to adopt a counter-argument for practice:

An opinion : I am in favor of hunting…

An argument : … because it allows us to control the size of animal populations.

Evidence : Wild boar populations are high and cause a great deal of damage to farmland.

New Perspectives and Overcoming Biases

4. the importance of self-esteem, children need self-esteem to think themselves worthy of expressing their opinions. parents can strengthen their children’s self-esteem by encouraging them to try new things, stimulating their curiosity, and showing pride in their accomplishments., understanding the importance of self-esteem, the foundation of critical thinking.

Before children can learn to analyze and criticize complicated material or controversial opinions, they need to have a strong sense of themselves. Their capacity to question external sources of information depends on feelings of self-worth and security.

The terms “self-confidence” and “self-esteem” are often used interchangeably. There is, however, a difference between the two, even if they are related. Before we can have high self-esteem, we must first have self-confidence. The feeling of confidence is a result of a belief in our ability to succeed. 

Self-esteem rests on our conscious self-worth, despite our foibles and failures. It’s knowing how to recognize our strengths and our limitations and, therefore, having a realistic outlook on ourselves.

Self-esteem requires an ability to recognize our strengths and weaknesses, and to accept them as they are.

For example, children can have high self-esteem even if they know that they struggle with math. Self-esteem can also vary depending on context. Children in school can have high social self-esteem, but a lower academic self-esteem.

Self-esteem requires an ability to recognize our strengths and weaknesses, and to accept them as they are. Children must learn to understand that they have value, even if they can’t do everything perfectly.

Self-esteem starts developing in childhood. Very young children adopt a style of behavior that reflects their self-image. From the age of five, healthy self-esteem is particularly important when it comes to dealing with the numerous challenges they face. Children must, among other things, gradually become more independent, and learn how to read, write, and do mental arithmetic. This period is key, and children need self-confidence as well. More than anywhere else, it is in the family home that children develop the foundations for self-esteem.

Children with high self-esteem:

have an accurate conception of who they are and neither over- nor underestimate their abilities;

make choices;

express their needs, feelings, ideas, and preferences;

are optimistic about the future;

dare to take risks and accept mistakes;

keep up their motivation to learn and to progress;

maintain healthy relationships with others;

trust their own thoughts and trust others.

As parents, developing our own self-esteem enhances the development of our children’s self-esteem, as their identity is closely entwined with our own. Our children learn a great deal by imitating us. Modeling self-esteem can therefore be a great help to them. Here are some examples of what we can do:

Be openly proud of our accomplishments, even those which seem minor to us.

Engage in activities just for fun (and not for competitive reasons).

Don’t pay too much heed to other people’s opinions about us.

Don’t belittle ourselves: if we’ve made an error or if we aren’t so good at a certain task, explain to children that we are going to start again and learn to do it better.

At mealtimes, prompt everyone around the table to say something they did well that day.

On a big sheet of paper, write down the names of family members; then, write down next to everyone’s name some of their strengths.

5. Promoting Self-Esteem

To promote healthy self-esteem in children, parents must strike a balance between discipline and encouragement., the most important thing of all in the development of young children’s self-esteem is our unconditional love for them..

Children must feel and understand that our love will never be dependent on their actions, their successes, or their failures. It is this state of mind that allows them to embrace the unknown and to continue to progress despite the inevitable failures that come along with learning new skills.

Developing Self-Esteem

But be careful not to let unconditional love prevent the imposition of authority or limits. Instead of developing their self-esteem, the absence of limits promotes the feeling in children that they can do no wrong and renders them incapable of dealing with frustration. It is necessary to establish limits and to be firm (without being judgmental). The desired result is only reached if effort and respect are taken seriously.

Self-esteem means loving ourselves for who we are, for our strengths and our weaknesses, and it is based on having been loved this way since birth.

Advice: How to promote the development of a child’s self-esteem

As parents, we have a big influence on our children, particularly when they are young. Here are some ways to help build up children’s self-esteem:

Praise children’s efforts and successes. Note that effort is always more important than results. 

Don’t hesitate to reiterate to children that error and failure are not the same thing. Show them that you’re proud of them, even when they make mistakes. Reflect with them on how to do better next time.

Let children complete household chores; give them a few responsibilities they can handle. They will feel useful and proud.

Show children that we love them for who they are, unconditionally, and not for what they do or how they look.

Let children express their emotions and inner thoughts.

Assist children in finding out who they are. Help them to recognize what they like and where their strengths lie.

Encourage them to make decisions. For example, let them choose their own outfits.

Invite them to address common challenges (according to their abilities and age).

Pitfalls to avoid

Avoid being overprotective. Not only does this prevent children from learning, it also sends them a negative message: that they are incapable and unworthy of trust.

Don’t criticize them incessantly. If we’re always making negative comments about our children, and if we show ourselves to be unsatisfied with their work or behavior even when they’re doing their best, they will get disheartened. 

If children don’t act appropriately, stress that it is their behavior, rather than their personality, that must change. For example, it is better to explain that an action they may have done is mean, rather than that they are themselves mean.

Always be respectful towards children. Never belittle them. What we say to our children has a great impact on their self-image. 

Show them we’re interested in what they’re doing. Don’t ignore them. We are still at the center of their universe. 

Don’t compare them to their siblings or to other children their age. (“Your four-year-old sister can do it!”) Highlight how they are progressing without comparing them to anyone else.

Risk-Taking

6. the role of emotions, emotions are an important part of children’s cognitive development, but if emotions become overwhelming they can be counterproductive. parents should help their children learn how to express their feelings calmly and prevent emotions from becoming a distraction., understanding the role of emotions  in the development of critical thinking.

Young children may develop skills in language and argument, and benefit from a level of self-esteem allowing them to stand their ground and explore the unknown. Nonetheless, the development of their critical faculties will still be limited if they haven’t learned how to manage their emotions.

Emotions appear in a part of the brain called the limbic system , which is very old in terms of human evolution. This system develops automatically at a very early stage. But very quickly, children experience the need to rein in the spontaneous and unrestricted expression of their emotions. These emotions are, of course, closely connected to basic relations to others (and initially most often to one’s parents) and to cultural norms. 

The prefrontal lobe contains the greatest number of neural networks that simultaneously regulate the scope of conscious emotions and their expression in verbal and non-verbal language, as well as in behavior. From the age of five or six, children start their first year of primary school, where they are forced to sit for hours on end each day. They must also listen to a curriculum designed more around societal needs and expectations, rather than around the desires and emotions of children. Frontal lobe development enables the inhibition of urges and the management of emotions , two prerequisites for intellectual learning and for feelings of belonging in family and society.

The ability to manage emotions has a two-fold constructive impact on the development of children’s critical faculties. First, it enables children to override their emotions, so they may focus their attention and concentrate. This is essential for both cognitive development in general and their argumentative, logical, and critical skills.

Management of emotions also allows us to feel settled and to convince and influence others when we speak. Paradoxically, children learn that, by managing their emotions (which is initially experienced as repression), they can have an impact on their peers, make themselves understood, and even be emulated. The pleasure they derive from this reinforces the balance between spontaneity and control, and both pleasure in self-expression and respect for others will increase. Self-esteem will therefore progress, also allowing the child to assert his or her will. 

Development of the critical faculties will benefit from a heightened level of self-esteem. But it’s important to remember that this is a balancing act.

If family or social pressures excessively inhibit emotional expression, feelings of uniqueness and self-worth are compromised. In this case, even with otherwise normal (and even excellent) cognitive development, children’s critical faculties can be impeded. A child won’t truly become an individual and the development of his or her critical faculties will therefore be stunted. Such a child is like a mere cell, rather than a whole organ. This lack of individuality is found in the social conventions and education systems established by totalitarian regimes. Highly intelligent, cultured, logical people can, under such regimes, remain devoid of critical thinking skills.

Emotion is the psychological motor of cognition. But in high and uncontrolled doses, emotion can override cognition.

Conversely, if children’s emotions and expressions of emotion are badly managed or not curtailed at all, they will come to see themselves as almost omnipotent. The consequent behavior will be mistaken for high self-esteem . In reality, cognitive and intellectual development will be dampened due to a lower attention span caused by poor emotional management. Logical and argumentative skills will be less developed and what may appear to be “critical” thinking will, in fact, be nothing more than a systematic, unthinking opposition to everything. 

Critical thinking without cognitive and intellectual development does not truly exist. Real, constructive critical thinking requires listening, attention, concentration, and the organization of one’s thoughts. The development of these faculties itself requires good emotional management, which must intensify from around the age of five or six, in order to strengthen learning skills and social life. Above all, parents should not try to snuff out a child’s emotions. Emotions are what give children vital energy, the desire to learn, and the strength to exercise self-control. Emotion is the psychological motor of cognition. But in high and uncontrolled doses, emotion can override cognition.

7. Managing Emotions

Parents should not ignore or simply silence their children when they act out or are overcome with emotion. they should work with them on strategies for coping and discuss how they can more calmly and productively express their emotions., how to help our children to control their emotions.

Our emotions are a part of who we are: we have to learn to manage and accept them. In order to help children manage their emotions, we must set limits (for example, by forbidding them to waste food or lie). However, setting limits on their behavior does not mean setting limits on their feelings.

We cannot stop children from getting angry even if they are forbidden from acting on that anger rather we can coach children in controlling their reactions. Sending them to their rooms to calm down will not prevent them from being upset and frustrated. On the contrary, by conveying to them the idea that they must face their emotions alone, we encourage them to repress their feelings. When children repress their emotions, they can no longer manage them consciously, which means they are liable to resurface at any moment.

An angry child is not a bad person, but a hurt person. When children lose control over their emotions, it is because they are overwhelmed.

These outbursts, when our children seem to have totally lost control of themselves, can frighten us as parents. Indeed, if children habitually repress their emotions, they become unable to express them verbally and rage takes over.

Failing to acknowledge children’s emotions can prevent them from learning to exercise self-control.

Advice: How do children learn to manage their emotions?

Children learn from us. When we yell, they learn to yell. When we speak respectfully, they learn to speak respectfully. Likewise, every time we manage to control our emotions in front of our children, they learn how to regulate their own emotions.

To help children manage their emotions, we should explicitly explain how to do so and discuss it with them.

Even older children need to feel a connection with their parents to manage their emotions. When we notice our children having difficulties controlling their emotions, it is important to reconnect with them. When children feel cared for and important, they become more cooperative and their feelings of joy cancel out bad behavioral traits.

The best way to help children become autonomous is to trust them and to entrust them with tasks and little challenges.

An angry child is not a bad person, but a hurt person. When children lose control over their emotions, it is because they are overwhelmed. Controlling their emotions is beyond their capacities at that particular moment in time and emotional control is something that they’ll build gradually as they mature.

If we continue treating them with compassion, our children will feel safe enough to express their emotions. If we help them to cry and let out their emotions, these feelings of being overwhelmed will go away, along with their anger and aggression.

Is it important to teach children specific language for expressing emotions?

Of course it is! But don’t try to force children to voice their emotions. Instead, focus on accepting their emotions. This will teach them that:

There is nothing wrong with emotions—they enrich human life.

Even if we can’t control everything in life, we can still choose how we react and respond. 

When we are comfortable with our emotions, we feel them deeply, and then they pass. This gives us the sensation of letting go and of releasing tension.

If we actively teach these lessons—and continue to work on resolving our own emotions—we will be happy to find that our children will learn to manage their feelings. It will eventually become second nature to them.

Emotional Management

8. critical thinking and social life, critical thinking is a positive social norm, but it requires the support of background knowledge and genuine reasoning skills. without them, critical thinking can become an illusion..

Parents should balance their encouragement of children’s argumentative skills and self-expression with an emphasis on intellectual rigor.

Taking account of social norms and peer groups

No child grows up in a vacuum. As they develop, children internalize many of the norms and ways of thinking that are dominant in their families, social lives, schools, and society more broadly. Parents should be aware of the positive and negative influences these different spheres can have on their children. They should know what they can do to expose their children to norms that will foster healthy and independent thinking.

It seems that the right, even the responsibility, to think for oneself and to exercise one’s critical faculties has become increasingly tied to notions of dignity and individuality. More and more we see factors that have historically determined who has the “right” to be critical—age, origin, gender, level of general knowledge, or other implicit hierarchies—fade in importance. 

Thus, it is becoming more and more common for students (with disconcerting self-assurance) to correct their teachers on aspects of history or other issues that are matters of fact. This raises some important questions, notably regarding the role of the educator, the goals of education, and the relationships between generations. 

Our society encourages critical thinking from a very early age. We have insisted on the fact that, for young children, although intellectual rigor is difficult to attain, it is crucial to develop self-esteem and self-affirmation. But we have also seen that from around the age of eight, it is necessary to move towards teaching them basic reasoning skills.

The risk of making the “right to critical thinking” a social norm from a young age is that we lower intellectual standards. If the encouragement of children to think critically is not paired with intellectual progress in other areas, critical thinking is rendered a mere simulation of free thought and expression. This is as true for children as it is for teenagers or adults.

The entire population may feel truly free and have high self-esteem. However, if the intellectual rigor that comes with arguing, debating, and reasoning, is missing from children’s intellectual and social education, the people will be easily manipulated. Giving our children the freedom to exercise their critical faculties must be paired with the demand for intellectual rigor and linguistic mastery, without which “critical thinking” would offer the mere illusion of liberty.

Striking a balance:

For parents today, it is a matter of striking a balance between fostering critical thought from an early age, in spite of gaps in knowledge and logic, and developing our children’s cognitive faculties and knowledge base. Without these faculties of listening, attention, comprehension, expression, argument, and deduction, critical thinking is an illusion, a pseudo-democratic farce. This  can lead to a society plagued by ignorance and vulnerable to barbarism.

On the other hand, we cannot simply slip back into old social conventions whereby children were told to simply keep quiet and learn their lessons passively. The only thing this approach ensures is that the child won’t become a troublemaker.

What is needed is an approach that harmonize advances in philosophy and psychology, which consider children as fully fledged individuals, on the one hand, with an understanding of the intellectual immaturity of this child, on the other.

Disagreeing in a civilized manner, in the end, allows us to agree on what matters most.

With the help of an affectionate, attentive, but also sometimes restrictive and guiding parent—who is at once intellectually stimulating, indulgent, and patient with the child’s needs—early development of self-affirmation and critical thinking becomes compatible with growing intellectual aptitude.

This intellectual aptitude is crucial to a healthy social life as well. People lacking this intellectual maturity cannot even disagree with each other productively; they lack the ability to discuss subjects worthy of critical interest, as well as the social and cognitive skills of listening, argument, and logical deduction. Disagreeing in a civilized manner, in the end, allows us to agree on what matters most.

Consider this discussion between two eight year olds.

 – “I saw a show on TV yesterday that proved that aliens really exist. Tons of people have seen them, and they’ve found marks left by flying saucers in the desert!”

– “But there’s no real evidence. Those clues and eyewitness accounts weren’t very specific. Different witnesses described the aliens in very different ways—some said they were little green men, while others said they were big with glowing eyes. And the marks from UFOs could have been formed by strong winds.”

– “Oh, so you think you’re smarter than the scientists on TV, is that it?”

One child declares that a TV show they saw proves the existence of aliens. He or she takes it for granted that what we see on TV is true. The second is educated into a norm that calls claims into question and demands evidence. The first child doesn’t understand the second, because, to him or her, seeing it on TV is proof enough. From this point onward, the discussion can only go in circles. In this case, different social or family norms are incompatible.

Independent Thinking

Case study 1, metacognition.

Already at a young age children can begin to gain perspective on how they reason.  One good way to help them foster this metacognition is by pointing out the variety of different methods available for solving a particular problem. By, for example, seeing the multiple different methods available for solving a math problem, children can begin to think about their own thought processes and evaluate various cognitive strategies. This will gradually open up the world of reasoning to them. They will begin to pay more attention to how they solve problems or complete tasks involving reasoning, instead of focusing only on answering correctly or completing the task. 

How do children calculate 6 x 3, for example? 

There are several ways:

They could add 6 + 6 + 6;

They could recall that 6 x 2 = 12, then add six more to get 18;

They could simply memorize and recall the answer: 18;

They could draw a grid of 6 by 3 units and then count how many boxes are in the grid.

Or they could use one of various other techniques…

Our culture values accurate and precise results but tends to pay little attention to the route taken to arrive at those results. Yet, if children are aware of their train of thought, they will be in a better position to master the technique—to perfect it to the point where they may even decide to switch to another technique if they need to increase their speed, for example. That is why it is important to help children understand the method they are using to the point that they can explain it themselves.

In helping their children with schoolwork or other projects involving reasoning, parents should ask them to explain themselves, make explicit the steps they’re taking to solve a particular problem, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of their method and alternative methods. The result will be a much deeper understanding not only of the particular task at hand, but also of the practice of reasoning itself.

Case Study 2

Logical proof and factual proof​​.

At this stage, we can begin to introduce rudimentary logical concepts and distinctions. In everyday conversation, children have already begun using what we might call “natural logic.” They may, for example, get in arguments, like the one below, in which they draw conclusions based on premises. When children present these types of arguments, parents can intervene to teach basic logical concepts and ask children how a given conclusion might be proven or disproven. 

One distinction appropriate to teach at this age is that between logical proof (proof that draws logical conclusions from certain premises) and factual proof (proof that uses actual facts to prove or disprove a given statement). The following anecdote provides the opportunity for such a lesson.

William and Eve, two children walking their dog in the park, are having a conversation about Labradors:

— “There are two kinds of Labradors—black and golden,” declares William.

— “That’s not true; there are also chocolate Labradors,” replies Eve. “My friend Adam has one.”

— “Well, his dog must not be a Labrador then,” William says.

How might we interpret this conversation?

In terms of logical proof, if Labradors are either black or golden, Adam’s chocolate “Labrador” cannot be a Labrador. That is a logically formulated proof. The reasoning is valid. It is the basic premise, William’s initial declaration that there are only two kinds of Labradors, that is false. It is, therefore, possible for William to draw a false conclusion even though his logic is technically correct.

In terms of factual proof, if we can prove that the chocolate-colored dog has two Labrador parents, we can factually prove that William’s premise is wrong: there are at least three types of Labrador.

There are many opportunities like this one to begin to make explicit the logical steps involved in everyday conversations with your children and to show them that they are already using logic, even if they may not know it. This serves to get them thinking about their own thinking, and it makes the topics of logic and reasoning less intimidating.

Case Study 3

What is bias.

A bias is a simply a preconceived and unreasoned opinion. Often biases are formed due to upbringing, larger societal biases, or particular subjective experiences. They exist in many forms and can persist into adulthood unless a child builds a firm foundation in critical thinking and reasoning.

How to overcome bias

The following anecdotes demonstrate how parents can use everyday events to help their children better understand and relate to perspectives outside their own. In order to think critically, children must be able to imaginatively and empathetically put themselves outside their own experiences and perspectives. Children thereby begin to come to terms with the limitations their own upbringings and backgrounds necessarily impose on them. 

This is a vital part of metacognition since it allows children to see themselves, their attitudes, and their views as if from the outside. They become better at overcoming biases, prejudices, and errors in thinking. This process also enables them to entertain the perspectives of others and thereby engage in argument and debate in the future with more charity and nuance. Finally, it encourages them to seek out new experiences and perspectives and to develop intellectual curiosity.

In this first anecdote, a child learns to broaden her horizons through an interaction with another child whose experience is different from her own. In the second, a child learns that his attitude toward particular objects can depend strongly on the context in which they are experienced. 

Overcoming Bias Example 1: Fear of Dogs

Jane is eight years old and lives in a small village. Her parents own several animals, including two Labradors. 

Jane’s cousin Max is nine and a half and lives in central Paris.

Max is always happy to visit Jane, and they play together outside, dreaming up adventures and climbing trees. But he is terribly afraid of Jane’s big dogs; whenever they come near him, he screams at the top of his lungs and runs indoors to hide. Jane finds this funny, calling her cousin a “fraidy cat” and devising ploys to lure Max close to the dogs.

Jane does not realize that, unlike her, Max is not used to having animals in his daily environment. She interprets his attitude exclusively from the viewpoint of her own experience.

What would you do if you were Jane’s parents?

At the dinner table, Jane’s mom asks her to stop teasing Max and explains that he is not used to animals because he lives in different circumstances than she does.

She asks Max to tell them what it is like living in the city. Max talks about his daily life and, notably, how he takes the metro by himself to school in the mornings, two stations from home.

The blood drains from Jane’s face: “You take the metro all by yourself? I could never do that, I’d be much too scared of getting lost.”

Her mom says to her: “You see, Jane, you fell into a trap—thinking that your cousin was just like you. We are all different. You need to remind yourself of that in the future because it’s easy for you to forget!”

This focused discussion has given Jane the opportunity to overcome her own egocentrism by realizing that she and Max inhabit different worlds. She, therefore, realizes that even though Max is scared of dogs (whereas she is not), he is capable of things that intimidate her, like taking the metro alone. This allows her to re-examine her way of reasoning through a “meta” example of her own ideas about the world, eventually leading her to change her attitude toward her cousin.

As parents, we should look for and take advantage of opportunities to open up our children to new perspectives, especially with respect to unexamined biases they may have against peers or outsiders. They will gradually learn to identify and guard against the tendency we all have to generalize recklessly from our own limited experience. Moreover, they will develop the capacity to see things from other perspectives and interests outside their own narrow sphere.

Overcoming Bias Example 2: Fear of Nettles

Josh has recently been on a field trip with his class. Before a hike, the teacher warns the students to steer clear of the nettle plants in the area  These “stinging nettles” can cause a nasty itching and burning rash. 

A few days later, at dinner, Josh finds that his parents have prepared a nettle soup . Boiling water makes the nettles safe to touch and eat.  But he refuses to eat it, since his experience tells them to keep nettles as far away from his body as possible— especially his mouth.

Josh vehemently refuses to try the soup at first and insists on having a frozen pizza instead. But his parents are firm with him and show him that the soup poses no danger by eating it themselves. Finally, Josh relents and tries the soup. He finds that it causes him no harm, and, much to his surprise, he actually enjoys it.

Children who do not know that nettles are safe to eat formulate their prejudice against the soup based solely on their experience, which is limited to the nettle’s irritant qualities. These kinds of learning experiences can be good moments for parents to point out to their children how they may falsely generalize their own limited experiences and how those experiences can produce unwarranted biases. These prejudices may stop them from trying out new things that may very well enrich their lives. 

Case Study 4

Developing self esteem.

Climbing Esther and Ali, both five years old, are at a playground, looking at a climbing wall designed for five to 10 year olds.

Esther goes over to the wall, looks at it, and touches the climbing holds. She starts climbing, pulling herself up with her arms and putting her feet on the lower holds to relieve her arms.

When she is about six feet up the wall, Esther stops.

“Go on, Esther — you’re almost there! Come on, just one more push. You can do it!” calls out her father from the bench he is sitting on.

Esther looks at the top of the wall. She wants to make it all the way up, but her hands hurt from clutching the climbing holds. She lets go and lands on the soft covering of the playground.

“Oh—you almost made it,” her father calls out.

Ali’s father goes over to his son: “Do you want to try? Grab onto these with your hands, and then put your feet on the ones at the bottom. Then you move your hands up more, and then your feet—hands and feet… Go slowly; it’ll be tricky to start with. Check where the holds are before you start climbing.”

Ali goes to the foot of the wall and grabs the holds to see what they feel like. He starts climbing, following his father’s advice.

Ali climbs slowly. He is about halfway up the wall, far below where Esther reached. He asks to get down, and his father takes him in his arms and puts him on the ground.

 “Great job, son! That was really good for a first try! I’m proud of you. That wall isn’t easy—it’s for children up to 10.”

In these two examples of the same situation, what is the impact of each parent’s behavior on the child’s self-esteem? What will each child remember from their first try at climbing?

Esther will probably be left with a sense of failure, thinking that she disappointed her father because she didn’t reach the top of the wall on her first try. She may not be willing to try again in the future, and she may hesitate to take on other new challenges. Even though he didn’t reach as high as Esther, Ali’s first climbing experience will likely be gratifying to him. His efforts have been recognized and encouraged by his father. He may be motivated now to make new efforts in the future, both in climbing and in other challenging new activities.

Case Study 5

Risk taking.

An important part of supporting the development of critical thinking skills at this age is encouraging children to take risks. Parents should beware of being hypercritical when their children make mistakes. They should also be proactive in exposing their children to new and potentially challenging situations. Finally, they should encourage their children to put themselves at risk in these situations, especially when it comes to putting forward arguments or answering questions. When they are (inevitably) wrong, children should be encouraged and supported rather than criticized. Being wrong should not become a source of shame for the child, but an opportunity to learn and grow. Consider the following anecdote.

Eight-year-old classmates Laura and Adam sit next to each other in a theater. Some 60 children, including Laura and Adam’s class, are on a field trip to see a historical reenactment. 

Before the curtain rises, the activity leader presenting the show asks the children: ″Who can tell me the name of the Roman emperor who conquered Gaul?”

Adam, who happens to be an avid reader of a cartoon about history, knows the answer immediately (Julius Caesar) and wants desperately to say it—but is afraid of making a mistake in front of everyone and, as a result, remains silent.

Laura hesitates. Several names spring to mind as she thinks back to what she learned in history class: Nero, Caligula, etc. Finally, a few seconds later, no longer able to restrain herself, she blurts out, “Julius Caesar!”

The activity leader congratulates her and then gets the show started.

In this situation, we see two different attitudes toward the risk of being wrong:

Adam would rather keep quiet than risk giving a wrong answer. We can deduce from this that Adam associates mistakes with something negative that could earn him disapproval or lead to him being mocked—even punished. He has thus pressured himself into thinking that only perfection is acceptable and has therefore reduced his ability to try things out.

Laura, on the other hand, would rather risk being wrong than remain silent. We can deduce from this that she does not feel shame about making mistakes; in any case, her desire to try and the excitement of taking risks outweigh the drawbacks of being wrong.

We learn through trial and erro r , which is necessary for the development of the ability to reason. Risk-taking and trial and error are vital.

Children’s environments, and notably their parents’ attitudes regarding mistakes, are determining factors in how they approach risk-taking and in whether they allow themselves to make mistakes.

Case Study 6

In addition to acquiring perspective on their own experiences and their own reasoning, children should, at this age,  begin to acquire perspective on their own emotions and to learn strategies for managing their emotions.  Without these management skills, children will be continually overwhelmed by their emotions and allow them to compromise their reasoning. The anecdote below can be used as a model to help parents guide their children in learning to express and manage their emotions, and to think clearly in spite of strong emotional reactions.

Seven-year-old Eddie is on vacation by the sea with his parents, who suggest that they all go out and take a boat to a nearby island for a few hours. They can visit the lighthouse there.

Eddie, who is busy playing with his figurines, refuses to get ready for the trip as his parents have asked.

“I haven’t finished playing! I want to stay here,” he exclaims.

“You can play with your figurines at home whenever you want, Eddy, but this boat trip is special. It’s something we can only do on vacation,” argues his mother. “Come on now, hurry up and put your shoes on, and then go and get your bag. Take a jacket as well, please—it can be cold out at sea.”

Eddie’s parents are all ready, and he still has not budged. He carries on playing with his back to them.

“That’s enough now, Eddy. Get up and get ready so we can leave,” orders his father, raising his voice slightly.

Without looking at them, Eddy bursts into tears.

“I don’t want to go on a boat! I’m scared of falling in the ocean! And what if the boat sinks? There are sharks out there! Plus I get scared of swimming if I can’t touch the bottom—if the water is too deep for me,” he says with a quavering voice.

“Oh, Eddy, why didn’t you say so before? I didn’t realize you were worried about the boat. I didn’t even think of that. But you know what? It’s normal to be scared the first time. And the ocean is daunting, that’s for sure. Listen, I’ll tell you what: let’s look at the shipping forecast together. I checked it earlier and it’s going to be a really nice day, with a very calm sea. As for swimming offshore, that’s out of the question! We’ll go swimming at our usual beach when we get back later this afternoon. And we’ll all be wearing life jackets on the boat, so there’s no way you can drown! Are you less worried now?”

“Yes… But I don’t want you to think I’m a wimp…”

“Being scared is nothing to be ashamed of! It’s a normal feeling which helps to protect us from danger. You should always say if you’re scared. I can’t always guess how you’re feeling—you’ve got to tell me!”

In this scenario, after a bit of hesitation, Eddie was able to express his fears. His parents accepted this emotion and drew on it to reassure him with clear, objective facts, helping him to understand the unfamiliar circumstances. This way he could feel completely safe on the boat.

If Eddie had not expressed his fears—because he was afraid of his parents being judgmental, angry, or perhaps even making fun of him—the situation could have taken one of the following turns:

Eddie could have categorically refused to go on the trip, and his parents would either have had to force him to come, or drop the plan entirely.

Eddie could have obeyed them without saying anything, but the trip would have been ruined by his anxiety.

Although dealing with and expressing emotions may seem far afield from critical thinking, it is a vital precondition of critical and independent thinking that children have the confidence to recognize and acknowledge their emotions. Otherwise, children will be unable to set their emotions aside in order to  consider complicated questions or scenarios in a clear and unbiased way.

Case Study 7

What is independent thinking.

What does independent thinking mean? Independent thinking is when an individual forms their own thoughts rather than just going along with what others are thinking. They apply their personal experiences, knowledge, and observations to form a personal viewpoint.

Independent thinking vs critical thinking

We can think independently without thinking critically, but we can’t think critically without thinking independently. That is, independent thinking is a precondition of critical thinking. In order to begin assessing information and making judgments objectively, we must first prevent ourselves from being unduly influenced by our peers’ views.

Example of independent thinking

In certain scenarios, children’s developing perspectives on their own beliefs, reasoning, and emotions can combine in the analysis of a challenging source of information.  The wealth of media to which children are exposed today can be overwhelming, but these media can also provide opportunities for learning and practicing the skills of critical analysis. Parents can help guide their children in these situations by prompting them with questions and asking children to make their beliefs and reasoning explicit. At this young age, preparation for independent and critical thinking need not interfere with the fantasy life of the child, as the example below shows. 

Six-year-old Tom has just written a letter to Santa Claus. Now he is watching television, flipping between channels until a show about Christmas catches his attention.

The TV presenter explains that nowadays children do not believe in Santa Claus the way they used to. Christmas has been totally commercialized. What’s more, red only became the color of Christmas due to the branding of the Coca-Cola company. 

First part of the program: “What do those concerned say?” A journalist standing outside a school asks several children their opinion. The children interviewed say that their parents have told them about Santa Claus, but that he does not really exist, at least no more than witches and ghosts do. They say that they know exactly what they are going to get for Christmas and how much it will cost. Their little brothers or sisters may still believe in Santa, but they themselves are not babies anymore. Regardless of whether they’re “naughty or nice,” they know there will always be gifts for them under the tree.

Second part of the program: “Santa Claus: salesman.” Images in the background show check-out lines in toy stores, parents with shopping carts full to the brim, others taking photos of the shelves on their phones. We see Santa Clauses of all shapes and sizes in shopping malls, day care centers, in the street, and even sitting in donkey-drawn carriages. A narrator provides statistics on the average amount spent by families on gifts, as well as the percentage of gifts purchased in-store versus online.

Finally, the presenter comes back on the screen and concludes with, “Christmas has lost its magic!” before going to a commercial break.

Tom’s father came into the room while the show was on air and has seen part of it. He can tell that his son is both confused and unsettled.

“Why do you believe in Santa Claus, Tom? What are your reasons?”

“Because he’s come every year since I was little. And because he comes at nighttime. Who else could come in the middle of the night? Because he always drinks the hot chocolate we leave him under the tree, and he eats the cookies. Because I’ve seen him more than once, near the Christmas tree at school and in stores. Because no one else could make toys for every kid and deliver them all.”

“Yes, those are very good reasons to believe in him, Tom. And what about at school? Do you talk about Santa with the other kids?”

“The big kids say the same thing as the people on the TV: that he doesn’t exist and that their parents made him up. When I told them there was no way presents could just appear under the tree overnight, they said I was a baby. I don’t talk about Santa anymore because of that.”

“I think you’re right to assert yourself and say what you really think. There’s what they say on TV, what your friends say, and then there’s your own opinion. And it’s important for you to say what you think and defend your point of view. It’s important to listen to other people too, of course, because no one is right all the time. But having your own ideas and expressing them is really important all through your life.”

What would you have done if you were Tom’s father?

Would it have been better to admit the truth about Santa Claus to Tom and contradict his beliefs and imagination? If Tom’s dad had done that, what value would his son have placed on his own reasoning? Would he have dared to defend his opinion in the future? 

During this conversation, the father chose to give weight to Tom’s arguments by giving credit to them and praising the way he expressed his personal thoughts. He did not state his own opinion on the matter, but instead focused the discussion on dealing with clashing points of view and on arguing. He hopes that Tom will now see the value in his own arguments, even if they go against what was said on the television show. Now, the next time he finds himself in a similar situation, Tom will probably be confident enough to express his own opinion on the information he receives.

The repetition of situations such as this should allow Tom’s critical thinking skills to develop. They will reinforce and strengthen his self-esteem and build his confidence in his ability to develop his own thoughts.

This situation may seem counter-intuitive. We usually associate the development of critical thinking with questioning certain beliefs, in this case the belief in the existence of Santa Claus. 

This viewpoint, though, projects our own adult understanding onto Tom. Children of his age should instead be encouraged to express themselves, to be creative in their arguments, and to believe in the value of their own points of view—rather than in the truths that are thrust on them by adults, media, or their friends.

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Privacy overview.

MSU Extension Child & Family Development

The importance of critical thinking for young children.

Kylie Rymanowicz, Michigan State University Extension - May 03, 2016

Critical thinking is essential life skill. Learn why it is so important and how you can help children learn and practice these skills.

We use critical thinking skills every day. They help us to make good decisions, understand the consequences of our actions and solve problems. These incredibly important skills are used in everything from putting together puzzles to mapping out the best route to work. It’s the process of using focus and self-control to solve problems and set and follow through on goals. It utilizes other important life skills like making connections , perspective taking and communicating . Basically, critical thinking helps us make good, sound decisions.

Critical thinking

In her book, “Mind in the Making: The seven essential life skills every child needs,” author Ellen Galinsky explains the importance of teaching children critical thinking skills. A child’s natural curiosity helps lay the foundation for critical thinking. Critical thinking requires us to take in information, analyze it and make judgements about it, and that type of active engagement requires imagination and inquisitiveness. As children take in new information, they fill up a library of sorts within their brain. They have to think about how the new information fits in with what they already know, or if it changes any information we already hold to be true.

Supporting the development of critical thinking

Michigan State University Extension has some tips on helping your child learn and practice critical thinking.

• Encourage pursuits of curiosity . The dreaded “why” phase. Help them form and test theories, experiment and try to understand how the world works. Encourage children to explore, ask questions, test their theories, think critically about results and think about changes they could make or things they could do differently.
• Learn from others. Help children think more deeply about things by instilling a love for learning and a desire to understand how things work. Seek out the answers to all of your children’s “why” questions using books, the internet, friends, family or other experts.
• Help children evaluate information. We are often given lots of information at a time, and it is important we evaluate that information to determine if it is true, important and whether or not we should believe it. Help children learn these skills by teaching them to evaluate new information. Have them think about where or who the information is coming from, how it relates to what they already know and why it is or is not important.
• Promote children’s interests. When children are deeply vested in a topic or pursuit, they are more engaged and willing to experiment. The process of expanding their knowledge brings about a lot of opportunities for critical thinking, so to encourage this action helps your child invest in their interests. Whether it is learning about trucks and vehicles or a keen interest in insects, help your child follow their passion.
• Teach problem-solving skills. When dealing with problems or conflicts, it is necessary to use critical thinking skills to understand the problem and come up with possible solutions, so teach them the steps of problem-solving and they will use critical thinking in the process of finding solutions to problems.

For more articles on child development, academic success, parenting and life skill development, please visit the MSU Extension website.

This article was published by Michigan State University Extension . For more information, visit https://extension.msu.edu . To have a digest of information delivered straight to your email inbox, visit https://extension.msu.edu/newsletters . To contact an expert in your area, visit https://extension.msu.edu/experts , or call 888-MSUE4MI (888-678-3464).

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Birth To 5 Matters

Guidance by the sector, for the sector

Thinking Creatively and Critically (Thinking)

Having their own ideas (creative thinking) • Thinking of ideas that are new and meaningful to the child • Playing with possibilities (what if? what else?) • Visualising and imagining options • Finding new ways to do things

Making links (building theories) • Making links and noticing patterns in their experience • Making predictions • Testing their ideas • Developing ideas of grouping, sequences, cause and effect

Working with ideas (critical thinking) • Planning, making decisions about how to approach a task, solve a problem and reach a goal • Checking how well their activities are going • Flexibly changing strategy as needed • Reviewing how well the approach worked

• Use the language of thinking and learning: think, know, remember, forget, idea, makes sense, plan, learn, find out, confused, figure out, trying to do. • Model being a thinker, showing that you don’t always know, are curious and sometimes puzzled, and can think and find out. I wonder? • Give children time to talk and think. Make time to actively listen to children’s ideas. • Encourage open-ended thinking, generating more alternative ideas or solutions, by not settling on the first suggestions: What else is possible?. • Always respect children’s efforts and ideas, so they feel safe to take a risk with a new idea and feel comfortable with mistakes. • Encourage children to question and challenge assumptions. • Help children to make links to what they already know. • Support children’s interests over time, reminding them of previous approaches and encouraging them to make connections between their experiences. • Help children to become aware of their own goals, make plans, and to review their own progress and successes. Describe what you see them trying to do, and encourage children to talk about what they are doing, how they plan to do it, what worked well and what they would change next time. • Talking aloud helps children to think and control what they do. Model self-talk, describing your actions in play. • Value questions, talk, and many possible responses, without rushing toward answers too quickly. • Sustained shared thinking helps children to explore ideas and make links. Follow children’s lead in conversation, and think about things together. • Encourage children to choose personally meaningful ways to represent and clarify their thinking through graphics. • Take an interest in what the children say about their marks and signs, talk to them about their meanings and value what they do and say. • Encourage children to describe problems they encounter, and to suggest ways to solve the problem. • Show and talk about strategies – how to do things – including problem-solving, thinking and learning. • Encourage children to reflect and evaluate their work and review their own progress and learning. • Model the plan-do-review process yourself.

• In planning activities, ask yourself: Is this an opportunity for children to find their own ways to represent and develop their own ideas? Avoid children just reproducing someone else’s ideas. • Build in opportunities for children to play with materials before using them in planned tasks. • Play is a key opportunity for children to think creatively and flexibly, solve problems and link ideas. Establish the enabling conditions for rich play: space, time, flexible resources, choice, control, warm and supportive relationships. • Recognisable and predictable routines help children to predict and make connections in their experiences. • Routines can be flexible, while still basically orderly. • Provide extended periods of uninterrupted time so that children can develop their activities. • Keep significant activities out instead of routinely tidying them away, so that there are opportunities to revisit what they have been doing to explore possible further lines of enquiry. • Plan linked experiences that follow the ideas children are really thinking about. • Represent thinking visually, such as mind-maps to represent thinking together, finding out what children know and want to know. • Develop a learning community which focuses on how and not just what we are learning. • Setting leaders should give staff time to think about children’s needs, to make links between their knowledge and practice.

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Learning and Development

Thinking Skills

• Written By: Pamela May
• Subject: Cognitive development
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Supporting young children’s developing thinking skills will open up lifelong learning opportunities, says Pamela May…

“Why are the trees empty?” That question was posed to me by a curious three-year-old as we walked together through the orchard behind my house one winter’s afternoon. Brainteasers such as these are often asked by very young children, and all of us will have our own memories of similar delightful and often original and unexpected examples of childhood curiosity. Although we may smile inwardly at the way in which these questions are phrased, we answer them with all the clarity and honesty that we can muster, as we recognise their importance to the child’s developing ability to notice, to understand and to reason. Their ability to notice what happens in the world around them is a key element in the development of the good thinking skills that they will need to become successful learners. Every scientist, designer, writer, cook or crafts person needs to be able to notice small changes in what they see in the course of their work, and to be able to respond in thoughtful and measured ways to what they see. It is then possible to make reasoned judgements and achieve understanding as a result of what they have noticed.

This process of cultivating a thoughtful approach to life begins in the cradle with loving and respectful exchanges between carer and baby. The baby who experiences being involved in conversations, and being sung and read to by adults who enjoy her company, knows from early on that her feelings and ideas are important to those she loves. From this starting point grows the understanding that the world works to patterns that she can understand and play an active part in shaping. By being interdependent with trustful adults, the very young child will move towards becoming independent and gaining the self-confidence to make suggestions, express ideas and make choices that she knows will be valued.

Children who experience being loved, cherished and responded to will flourish in all areas of their development . For example, in emotional development, the confident learner will begin to empathise with others and to understand how others may be feeling. In their cognitive development they will begin playing with the concept of symbolism, realising that one thing can represent something else in a game. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities as the idea of ‘what if?’, rather than ‘what is’, is played out in imaginative role play games.

Positive habits

The type of experiences that a child needs to have access to in order to encourage the fostering of successful learning habits are enshrined within the EYFS . It states that a number of characteristics are highlighted, describing factors arising within the child which play a central role in learning, and in becoming an effective learner. Ways of learning that support these characteristics have been grouped within the EYFS commitments and are:

● playing and exploring;

● active learning;

● creating and thinking critically.

So crucial are these characteristics that they now form a part of the Early Years Profile, and practitioners need to consider and comment on how their key children are progressing in the development of these aspects. Again, as the EYFS rightly says, these learning characteristics are about processes rather than outcomes. The suggestion is that practitioners will notice how children are learning by noticing the attitudes they see. Observable attitudes in children that would suggest they are developing these characteristics might be:

● concentration;

● persistence;

● questioning;

● enthusiasm for new learning;

● the ability to seek help;

● using their initiative to solve problems;

● being prepared to have a go;

● coping with failure;

● applying what they know to new situations;

● enjoying success;

● being able to plan and review activities.

Practitioners can support children’s developing positive habits of learning in two major ways. Firstly, the learning environment needs to have interesting and challenging elements in it that will unlock children’s natural propensity to be curious and to explore. The setting that will unlock children’s characteristics of effective learning will be a place where, although routines and carers remain constant, sometimes surprising things happen, sometimes things go wrong or there are unexpected outcomes. In the outside area, for example, there will be a balance between safety and challenge, with nooks and crannies to be explored, holes to be dug, something to climb and somewhere to hide. Children will be encouraged to choose their own activities, to be either inside or outside, combine different pieces of equipment and use them for their own purposes.

Responsive adults will be on hand to engage in the sustained shared thinking that might lead in many different directions, all unknown at the outset but all rich with possibilities. What has been learned before can be applied to new situations, and children can begin to build on earlier experiences to plan and predict their next course of action.

This type of learning environment is an exciting place to be for both adults and children. The emphasis here is not so much on the body of knowledge being learned as the processes of positive learning styles that are being encouraged. Happily, though, in my experience this is not an either/or situation. For where children are realistically challenged and confidently engaged in their learning, their knowledge base increases significantly as they discover important things that must be practised, experimented with, recorded or recalled in a range of ways.

Thinking skills

The second role for the adult in supporting the development of critical thinking is the teaching of skills that children will need to use when they are tackling something new and need a high level of cognitive functioning to succeed. Think, for example, of the four-year-old boy at the creative area of his setting who wants to make a car from the boxes, paper, glue, scissors and stapler that are available. What skills does he need? He will need a good memory of what a car looks like. He will need to be able to match the picture in his head to what might be possible from the equipment he can see that he has at his disposal. He will need, probably, all of the characteristics of effective learning listed above as well as a key person who knows him well and can sensitively share in this project in a supportive role.

Skills, such as the development of memory, the ability to predict and the ability to plan and to persist can all be taught through games, rhymes and stories, routines and conversations with young children. What is needed is a recognition by practitioners that these skills are vital for children to acquire in order for them to make the most of their learning opportunities. They are, incidentally, not just useful skills for a child to possess, but, once securely available for everyday use, become the habits of mind that lead to creativity and to what is often known as a positive disposition to learning.

Children who have gained these high order thinking skills are sometimes referred to as ‘mastery’ learners; that is, children who see complex new learning as a realistic challenge and an achievable goal. They believe that they are intrinsically able, by effort, to experience success and they steadily grow in confidence and competence. It is within the early years setting that such habits of mind can be introduced and nurtured. Early years practitioners with a sound understanding of child development are thus perfectly placed to instil a lifelong love of learning in the children in their care.

Pamela May is the author of The Thinking Child: Laying the foundations of understanding and competence .

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Creative and Critical Thinking in Early Childhood

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Early childhood (from prenatal to eight years of life) is the most important period of growth in human development, with peak synaptic activity in all brain regions occurring in the first ten years of life. This time-sensitive course of brain development results in different functions emerging at different times. It is during the preschool years that sensitive periods for cognitive development are formed, in particular, creative and critical thinking skills. Sociocultural perspectives ascertain that a child’s cognition is co-constructed through the social environment. This chapter draws from Vygotsky’s sociocultural cognitive theory and creative imagination theory to explain the processes involved as young children generate new knowledge. Examples from children’s interactions in social learning environments are presented, demonstrating how children think creatively and critically as they solve problems and seek meaning through play and imagination.

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Collaborative problem-solving.

(Photography by Nicole Leggett).

Creativity is intelligence having fun. Albert Einstein

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Leggett, N. (2022). Creative and Critical Thinking in Early Childhood. In: Rezaei, N. (eds) Integrated Education and Learning. Integrated Science, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15963-3_7

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More Than a Foundation: Young Children Are Capable STEM Learners

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Two second-graders sit on their knees with quiet intensity, stacking unit blocks on a wide tower, higher and higher. A casual observer might think they’re simply enjoying the scale of their project and looking forward to knocking it down. Their teacher might see more, understanding that their activities are setting the stage for important spatial skills and physics concepts. Reaching as high as she can, one of the children drops a marble into the top of the tower, which is now over five feet high. Both children observe the tower intently. They hear a click, click, click, click, but no marble is in sight. The marble finally emerges from the bottom of the tower, rolling down a ramp and onto the carpet. The two children jump up and down, clapping and exclaiming, “Yay!” (The opening vignette is drawn from a video embedded in Revealing the Work of Young Engineers in Early Childhood, by Beth Van Meeteren and Betty Zan, available at http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/beyond/seed/zan.html .) 

What is easy to miss in this scenario is the engineering capacity already present in these two young children. The children had hidden in their tower a series of zig-zagging ramps—like the ramps in a parking garage—each placed at a precise distance from the previous one and stacked with care at alternating heights. In fact, the children had built and tested several smaller prototypes of the tower to determine the appropriate ramp distances. One of their key discoveries was that putting the ramps too close together resulted in too much marble speed (the marble would shoot out the sides of the tower), but putting the ramps too far apart resulted in the marble dropping straight down through the center of the tower. They worked collaboratively to get the design right, then they built the deceptively simple-looking tower on a larger scale with a complex, invisible inner structure (Van Meeteren & Zan 2010).

In the minds of these children, too, there was a complex inner process—one that is hard to see, which often results in adults underestimating young children’s current capacities. As new research shows, many people believe that “real” science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning doesn’t occur until children are older, and that exposure to STEM concepts in early childhood (birth to 8 years) is only about laying a foundation for the serious STEM learning that takes place later (McClure et al. 2017).

Many people believe that "real" STEM learning doesn't occur until children are older.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. A recent two-year research analysis found that young children are capable of engaging in, at developmentally appropriate levels, the scientific practices that high school students carry out (McClure et al. 2017). As one researcher explained, young children “can make observations and predictions, carry out simple experiments and investigations, collect data, and begin to make sense of what they found” (16). Even in the first year of life, babies systematically test physical hypotheses when they see something that doesn’t conform to their expectations (McClure et al. 2017). For example, researchers showed 11-month-olds a toy car going off the side of a table and appearing to float; the babies were more likely to observe the strange car for longer than normally behaving toy cars and to try exploring and dropping the car themselves (Stahl & Feigenson 2015). And, as the children building the tower demonstrated, young children are capable of using engineering habits of mind (e.g., systems thinking, creativity, optimism, communication, collaboration, supported persistence, and attention to ethical thinking) in their free-play activities (Van Meeteren & Zan 2010).

The research is clear: when we say children are “born scientists,” we’re not just being cute; they really are active scientists, right now, systematically and intentionally exploring their environments, even from the day they are born.

Never too young for STEM

The misconception about STEM being more meaningful for older students is important for several reasons. First, early STEM exposure is critical for later educational outcomes; when adults downplay its importance in the early years, they also diminish young children’s current and future potential. Research shows that among preschool-aged children, knowledge of math is a better predictor of later academic achievement than early reading or attention skills (Duncan et al. 2007). Some argue that early STEM is as critical today as early literacy exposure (McClure et al. 2017). STEM habits of mind—such as critical thinking, persistence, and systematic experimentation—are important across all subject areas and may be essential to how children learn to learn (Duncan & Magnuson 2011). This development is not just about the basics like counting and vocabulary, although these skills and background knowledge are important too; it’s about problem solving and other higher-level skills that transfer across many domains.

Think of it this way: as we learn new skills, our brains weave skill strands into ropes we use to solve problems, meet challenges, and, in turn, acquire new skills. When children have opportunities to practice framing questioning, collecting data, and solving scientific problems, they build strong ropes that can be used in many ways, now and throughout life (McClure et al. 2017).

Take, for example, the profound ties between STEM learning and language learning. Early STEM instruction leads to better language and literacy outcomes (Sarama et al. 2012), and exposure to more spatial language during block play in infancy and early childhood leads to improved spatial thinking abilities (Pruden, Levine, & Huttenlocher 2011). Furthermore, math skills and reading skills at kindergarten entry are equally predictive of reading skills in eighth grade (Business Roundtable 2016), and background knowledge about the world and how it works (much of which falls within the realm of STEM concepts) is critical for listening comprehension throughout life and for reading comprehension once children are able to sound out words (Guernsey & Levine 2015). So when adults do not fully appreciate the importance of STEM learning in early childhood, they do children a serious disservice, weakening their potential development across many other domains such as literacy and executive function.

But just because children are born scientists doesn’t mean they can do all this alone; they need adults to help them realize and expand their STEM capacities (Early Childhood STEM Working Group 2017). This leads to the second reason this misconception is so important: adults’ attitudes and beliefs about STEM learning often transfer to children. For example, one recent study found that the strongest predictor of preschoolers’ math learning was their teachers’ belief that math education was appropriate for their age (Seker & Alisinanoglu 2015). These beliefs also lead to concrete changes in the methods and amount of time teachers spend on STEM topics: when teachers hold negative attitudes toward early mathematics, for example, these feelings lead to avoiding math instruction, and teaching math in ineffective ways (McClure et al. 2017).

When we say children are “born scientists,” we’re not just being cute. Children really are intentionally exploring their environments.

Teachers come by these feelings honestly and may even be passing on what they themselves were taught. A recent study of teacher-preparation faculty members in California and Nebraska reported that they considered including early mathematics less important than other domains in the preparation of early childhood teachers. And the cycle may not end there—the faculty members also said that they themselves feel less prepared to teach math than they do other subjects (Austin, Sakai, et al. 2015; Austin, Whitebook, et al. 2015). In other words, there is a misconception about the suitability of STEM topics for young children that is passed from one generation of teachers and teacher educators to the next. It is time to break the cycle.

Parents’ beliefs also play a critical role in their children’s STEM success. For example, parents’ beliefs about their child’s ability in math are a stronger predictor of the child’s self-perception in math than the child’s previous math scores (Gunderson et al. 2012). In other words, when teachers and parents don’t think that young children are capable of real STEM learning, children believe them . This results in a self-fulfilling and detrimental STEM prophecy. But there is reason for hope: when the adults in a child’s life believe in and support a child’s STEM capacity, the child’s natural abilities are both acknowledged and then expanded (McClure et al. 2017).

Incorporating STEM into early learning

To appropriately bring STEM into early learning, teachers need support, including high-quality, proper preservice training and ongoing professional development. This will require an enormous investment from universities, school systems, funders, and society at large. Adults at every level of a child’s complex ecosystem will need to commit to the importance of early learning generally, and of early STEM learning in particular (for a framework describing the commitments necessary at each level, see McClure et al. 2017).

The role of a good STEM teacher is often to resist directly answering children's questions.

In the meantime, what can teachers do, without having to wait for systemic changes in the broader systems in which they work? Realizing that young children have enormous capacity for STEM learning now can go a long way. Understanding that supporting children’s growth is about encouraging STEM habits of mind, educators can incorporate engaging STEM practices in their classrooms in simple ways. Educators can start by recognizing three research-supported facts, each of which is explained in the following sections: you don’t have to be an expert; you’re not alone; and teaching STEM is not an either/or exercise.

You don’t have to be an expert

Many people believe that supporting STEM learning means having STEM expertise to offer students. This makes sense, given other common misconceptions: when adults are not aware of young children’s capacity to engage in real STEM practices, they tend to focus on expanding children’s content knowledge. But, as in other academic domains, STEM knowledge and skills grow together. Through experiential learning (combining hands-on investigations with informative read-alouds and discussions), young children develop their conceptual understanding, acquire new facts, and engage in essential skills such as observing, forming hypotheses, collecting evidence, revising hypotheses, devising experiments, and so on (NSTA 2014). They also develop STEM understandings and habits of mind from interacting with their everyday environments in curiosity-driven ways with support from teachers and other adults.

The role of a good STEM teacher is often to resist directly answering children’s questions. Teachers can encourage STEM habits of mind and facilitate learning by asking purposeful questions and then supporting children as they investigate for themselves. Classrooms that rely primarily on lecture-based instruction, in which teachers control decision making and discussion, are the least effective at fostering self-reliance and resilience, two characteristics that are foundational to STEM inquiry and practices (Van Meeteren & Zan 2010).

You are not alone

Some adults have the misconception that real STEM learning only happens inside classrooms, which may leave teachers feeling isolated and unsupported. But when adults recognize that even very young children are capable of meaningfully engaging in STEM inquiries anytime, anywhere, they can extend that STEM learning in multiple ways to many aspects of children’s lives. As with learning a new language, children become fluent  in STEM habits and more knowledgeable about STEM topics when they are immersed in them (McClure et al. 2017). The more opportunities they have to explore STEM—at museums, at libraries, and at home—the more fluent they will become.

Children become more knowledgeable about STEM topics when they are immersed in them.

Understood in this way, early STEM learning is a communitywide effort, with many individuals outside of schools who can be tapped for guidance and ideas. Ideally, the community forms a network of learning, engaging young children in a variety of STEM experiences and, as needed, offering teachers and parents reviews of concepts as varied as the attributes of levers and pulleys, why mold forms, or why rainbows appear. Informal learning environments like museums are very effective at helping adults engage children’s interest in STEM with thoughtful questions and conversations (Haden et al. 2014). In fact, many museums and libraries offer free resources for teachers, sometimes even including STEM professional development programs.

Teachers can encourage family engagement by sharing local STEM resources with parents. Since parents may feel anxious about supporting their child’s STEM learning, it is important to communicate to them the enormous capacity of their child for STEM inquiry and the impact parents can have by modeling curiosity and asking wh questions— who , what , when , where , and why —throughout the day. Technology can be a powerful partner when extending children’s learning at home. For example, teachers can encourage parents to use the Bedtime Math app ( http://bedtimemath.org/apps/ ), which aims to make math part of families’ everyday routines, just like a bedtime story. Using the app at home, even as little as once a week, has been shown to put children ahead by the equivalent of three months in math achievement by the end of the school year; and it is most effective for children whose parents are anxious about math (Berkowitz et al. 2015).

Teaching STEM is not an either/or exercise

Many teachers feel burdened by overwhelming curricular requirements and are skeptical about adding instructional blocks to their days. But recall that STEM habits of mind are transferable and that STEM knowledge encompases essential concepts and vocabulary; they strengthen all kinds of skills ropes, including literacy and attention development. When early STEM learning is understood as the development of both knowledge and inquiry-based habits of mind, teachers can begin to discover ways to infuse STEM practices and concepts into their existing curriculum. For example, a teacher may notice that many of the books she reads aloud include these STEM-like features: a problem to be solved, an evidence-driven solution that is attempted (and often iterated and reattempted), and the discovery of a method that works. Even simple books, like the lift-the-flaps board book Where’s Spot? , by Eric Hill, contain this progression: the mother dog looks in many locations for her puppy, and to the delight of children who search along with her, she finds other silly creatures hidden along the way—a bear behind the door, a monkey in the closet. By noticing and emphasizing the mother dog’s use of the scientific method, the teacher can show that STEM is everywhere and that there is an inherent drama to STEM exploration. She can also highlight the mother dog’s persistence in her systematic search, the joy in the error of the trial-and-error-laden journey (children love finding the wrong animal behind each door), and the evidence the mother collects and uses to eventually find Spot.

Teachers can begin to discover ways to infuse STEM practices and concepts into their existing curriculum.

Explicit STEM-based activities can be used to enhance other curriculum blocks as well. For example, one preschool class was engaged in a segment on the book Lost and Found, by Oliver Jeffers, about a lost penguin finding his way home on a boat. Teachers asked the 3-year-olds to build and test boats made from aluminum foil to transport a small penguin figure across the water table. The children were deeply engaged in the activity, which enhanced their experience with the book and encouraged them to talk at length about the story, while providing an immersive and meaningful STEM experience (Draper & Wood 2017). 

Fully embracing the enormous capacity of young children to engage in real STEM learning will take time and focused effort. Early childhood program directors and elementary school principals will need to provide space and flexibility for their educators to experiment with new ways of investigating STEM concepts together with young children. But once early educators start to embed these approaches to teaching, they will be in a prime position to help each other—and the wide public—see the remarkably sophisticated, and often hidden, STEM capacity of young children in the present, and to see how powerful early STEM experiences can be in shaping the minds of the next generation. 

Professional development information

• Foundations of Science Literacy http://foundationsofscienceliteracy.org
• Early Childhood STEM Conference (annual) www.ecstem.org
• PBS STEM Alive https://whut.pbslearningmedia.org/collection/stemalive/#.WYR8odPyui4

Curriculum information and STEM activities

• Ramps and Pathways https://regentsctr.uni.edu/ramps-pathways
• STEM from the Start http://stemfromthestart.org
• PEEP and the Big Wide World www.peepandthebigwideworld.com/en
• Boston Children’s Museum, STEM Sprouts (Teaching Guide and Parent Tip Sheets) www.bostonchildrensmuseum.org/stem-sprouts
• National Science Teachers Association blog “Early Years” http://nstacommunities.org/blog/category/earlyyears/
• Science Is Simple: Over 250 Activities for Preschoolers, by Peggy Ashbrook (Gryphon House)
• Young Scientist Series curriculum guides: Exploring Water with Young Children, Discovering Nature with Young Children, and Building Structures with Young Children (Redleaf)
• Making and Tinkering with STEM: Solving Design Challenges with Young Children, by Cate Heroman (NAEYC)
• Ramps and Pathways: A Constructivist Approach to Physics with Young Children, by Rheta DeVries and Christina Sales (NAEYC)

Austin, L.J.E., L. Sakai, M. Whitebook, O. Bloechliger, F. Amanta, & E. Montoya. 2015. “Teaching the Teachers of Our Youngest Children: The State of Early Childhood Higher Education in Nebraska, 2015.” Berkeley: CSCCE (Center for the Study of Child Care Employment), University of California, Berkeley. www.irle.berkeley.edu/cscce/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/NebraskaHighlight... .

Austin, L.J.E., M. Whitebook, F. Kipnis, L. Sakai, F. Abbasi, & F. Amanta. 2015. “Teaching the Teachers of Our Youngest Children: The State of Early Childhood Higher Education in California, 2015.” Berkeley: CSCCE. http://cscce.berkeley.edu/files/2015/California-HEI-Narrative-Report.pdf .

Berkowitz, T., M.W. Schaeffer, E.A. Maloney, L. Peterson, C. Gregor, S.C. Levine, & S.L. Beilock. 2015. “Math at Home Adds Up to Achievement in School.” Science 350 (6257): 196–98.

Business Roundtable. 2016. Why Reading Matters and What to Do About It: A CEO Action Plan to Support Improved US Literacy Rates . Washington, DC: Business Roundtable. http://businessroundtable.org/sites/default/files/BRT_Why_Reading_Matter... .

Draper, C.L., & S. Wood. 2017. “From Stumble to STEM: One School’s Journey to Explore STEM with its Youngest Students.” Exchange (Infants and Toddlers) January/February 2017, 61–65.

Duncan, G.J., C.J. Dowsett, A. Claessens, K. Magnuson, A.C. Huston, P. Klebanov, L.S. Pagani, L. Feinstein, M. Engel, J. Brooks-Gunn, H. Sexton, K. Duckworth, & C. Japel. 2007. “School Readiness and Later Achievement.” Developmental Psychology 43 (6): 1428–46.

Duncan, G.J., & K. Magnuson. 2011. “The Nature and Impact of Early Achievement Skills, Attention Skills, and Behavior Problems.” Chap. 3 in Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances , eds. G.J. Duncan & R.J. Murnane, 47–69. New York: Russell Sage.

Early Childhood STEM Working Group. 2017. Early STEM Matters: Providing High-Quality STEM Experiences for All Young Learners . Policy report. Chicago, IL: UChicago STEM Education; Chicago: Erikson Institute. http://d3lwefg3pyezlb.cloudfront.net/docs/Early_STEM_Matters_FINAL.pdf .

Guernsey, L., & M.H. Levine. 2015. Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in a World of Screens . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gunderson, E.A., G. Ramirez, S.C. Levine, & S.L. Beilock. 2012. “The Role of Parents and Teachers in the Development of GenderRelated Math Attitudes.” Sex Roles 66 (3–4): 153–66.

Haden, C.A., E.A. Jant, P.C. Hoffman, M. Marcus, J.R. Geddes, & S. Gaskins. 2014. “Supporting Family Conversations and Children’s STEM Learning in a Children’s Museum.” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 29 (3): 333–44.

Hoisington, C. 2010. “Picturing What’s Possible—Portraits of Science Inquiry in Early Childhood Classrooms.” ECRP: Beyond This Issue , Collected Papers from the SEED (STEM in Early Education and Development) Conference. http://ecrp.illinois.edu/beyond/seed/Hoisington.html .

McClure, E.R., L. Guernsey, D.H. Clements, S.N. Bales, J. Nichols, N. Kendall-Taylor, & M.H. Levine. 2017. STEM Starts Early: Grounding Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education in Early Childhood. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/wpcontent/uploads/2017/01/jgcc_stemstartsea... .

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Pruden, S.M., S.C. Levine, & J. Huttenlocher. 2011. “Children’s Spatial Thinking: Does Talk About the Spatial World Matter?” Developmental Science 14 (6): 1417–30.

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Seker, P.T., & F. Alisinanoglu. 2015. “A Survey Study of the Effects of Preschool Teachers’ Beliefs and Self-Efficacy Toward Mathematics Education and Their Demographic Features on 48- to 60-MonthOld Preschool Children’s Mathematic Skills.” Creative Education 6 (3): 405–14.

Stahl, A.E., & L. Feigenson. 2015. “Observing the Unexpected Enhances Infants’ Learning and Exploration.” Science 348 (6230): 91–94.

Van Meeteren, B., & B. Zan. 2010. “Revealing the Work of Young Engineers in Early Childhood Education.” ECRP: Beyond This Issue , Collected Papers from the SEED (STEM in Early Education and Development) Conference. http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/beyond/seed/zan.html .  

Photographs: p. 83, 84, 85, 87, courtesy of Beth D. Van Meeteren

Elisabeth McClure, PhD, is a research specialist in creativity and learning at the LEGO Foundation. She is a former research fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the lead author of the 2017 report STEM Starts Early: Grounding Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education in Early Childhood. Elisabeth conducts research on families, young children, and digital media. [email protected]

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Developing critical thinking skills in kids.

Developing Critical Thinking Skills

Learning to think critically may be one of the most important skills that today's children will need for the future. In today’s rapidly changing world, children need to be able to do much more than repeat a list of facts; they need to be critical thinkers who can make sense of information, analyze, compare, contrast, make inferences, and generate higher order thinking skills. 

Building Your Child's Critical Thinking Skills

Building critical thinking skills happens through day-to-day interactions as you talk with your child, ask open-ended questions, and allow your child to experiment and solve problems.  Here are some tips and ideas to help children build a foundation for critical thinking: 

• Provide opportunities for play .   Building with blocks, acting out roles with friends, or playing board games all build children’s critical thinking. 
• Pause and wait.  Offering your child ample time to think, attempt a task, or generate a response is critical. This gives your child a chance to reflect on her response and perhaps refine, rather than responding with their very first gut reaction.
• Don't intervene immediately.   Kids need challenges to grow. Wait and watch before you jump in to solve a problem.
• Ask open-ended questions.  Rather than automatically giving answers to the questions your child raises, help them think critically by asking questions in return: "What ideas do you have? What do you think is happening here?" Respect their responses whether you view them as correct or not. You could say, "That is interesting. Tell me why you think that."
• Help children develop hypotheses.  Taking a moment to form hypotheses during play  is a critical thinking exercise that helps develop skills. Try asking your child, "If we do this, what do you think will happen?" or "Let's predict what we think will happen next."
• Encourage thinking in new and different ways.  By allowing children to think differently, you're helping them hone their creative  problem solving skills. Ask questions like, "What other ideas could we try?" or encourage your child to generate options by saying, "Let’s think of all the possible solutions."

Of course, there are situations where you as a parent need to step in. At these times, it is helpful to model your own critical thinking. As you work through a decision making process, verbalize what is happening inside your mind. Children learn from observing how you think. Taking time to allow your child to navigate problems is integral to developing your child's critical thinking skills in the long run. 

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How Parents Can Teach Kids Critical Thinking

A research-based guide to help highlight the importance of critical thinking..

Posted February 21, 2020

Recent controversy over the role of social media “ swarms ” in the 2020 election have served as a new reminder — as if we needed one — that public discourse is in bad disrepair. In the last few years have seen countless incidents of people — including many who should know better — weighing in on issues prematurely with little nuance and unhelpful vitriol, being duped by badly biased information or outright fake news , and automatically attributing the worst intentions to their opponents.

Liberal democracies have always relied on flawed sources to inform the public, but not until now have we been confronted with an online medium seemingly designed to play on our biases and emotions; encourage knee-jerk reactions, groupthink , and superficiality; and distract us from deeper thinking.

Better critical thinking skills are needed to help us confront these challenges. Nevertheless, we still don’t have a good handle on what it is and, especially, how best to foster it among children of all ages.

The stakes are now higher than ever.

To address this deficit, Reboot Foundation recently put out a Parents’ Guide to critical thinking. I work for Reboot and helped on the guide that attempts to give parents and other adults the tools and understanding they need to help their kids cope with technological upheaval, acquire the skills they need to navigate an ever more complicated and information-rich world, and overcome the pitfalls of biased and emotional reasoning.

1. Starting Young

As researchers have noted for some time now, critical thinking can’t be cleanly separated from cognitive development more generally. So, although many people still think of critical thinking as something that is appropriate to teach only in college or late high school, parents and educators should actually devote attention to developing critical thinking skills at a young age.

Of course, it’s not necessary or even possible to start teaching 4-year-olds high-level logic . But there’s a lot parents can do to open up their children’s minds to the world around them. The most important thing to foster at this young age is what researchers call metacognition : awareness of one’s own thinking and thought processes.

It’s only with metacognition that children will learn to think more strategically, identify errors in their thinking patterns, and recognize their own limitations and the value of others’ perspectives. Here are some good ways to foster these habits of mind.

• Encourage kids’ curiosity by asking them lots of questions about why they think what they think. Parents should also not dismiss children’s speculative questions, but encourage them to think those questions through.
• Encourage active reading by discussing and reflecting on books and asking children to analyze different characters’ thoughts and attitudes. Emphasize and embrace ambiguity.
• Expose them as much as possible to children from different backgrounds — whether cultural, geographical, or socio-economic. These experiences are invaluable.
• Bring children into adult conversations , within appropriate limits of course, and don’t just dismiss their contributions. Even if their contributions are unsophisticated or mistaken, engage with children and help them improve.

2. Putting Emotions in Perspective

Just as children need to learn how to step back from their thought processes, they must also learn how to step back from their emotions. As we’ve seen time and again in our public discourse, emotion is often the enemy of thinking. It can lead us to dismiss legitimate evidence; to shortchange perspectives that would otherwise be valuable; and to say and do things we later regret.

When children are young (ages 5 to 9), fostering emotional management should center around learning to take on new challenges and cope with setbacks. It’s important children be encouraged to try new things and not be protected from failure. These can include both intellectual challenges like learning a new language or musical instrument and physical ones like trying out rock-climbing or running a race.

When children fail — as they will — the adults around them should help them see that failing does not make them failures. Quite the opposite: it’s the only way to become successful.

As they get older, during puberty and adolescence , emotional management skills can help them deal better with confusing physical and social changes and maintain focus on their studies and long-term goals . Critical thinking, in this sense, need not — and should not — be dry or academic. It can have a significant impact on children’s and young adults’ emotional lives and their success beyond the classroom .

3. Learning How to Be Online

Finally, critical thinking development in these challenging times must involve an online component. Good citizenship requires being able to take advantage of the wealth of information the internet offers and knowing how to avoid its many pitfalls.

Parental controls can be useful, especially for younger children, and help them steer clear of inappropriate content. But instilling kids with healthy online habits is ultimately more useful — and durable. Parents should spend time practicing web searches with their kids, teaching them how to evaluate sources and, especially, how to avoid distractions and keep focused on the task at hand.

We’ve all experienced the way the internet can pull us off task and down a rabbit hole of unproductive browsing. These forces can be especially hard for children to resist, and they can have long-term negative effects on their cognitive development.

As they get older, children should learn more robust online research skills , especially in how to identify different types of deceptive information and misinformation . Familiarizing themselves with various fact-checking sites and methods can be especially useful. A recent Reboot study found that schools are still not doing nearly enough to teach media literacy to students.

As kids routinely conduct more and more of their social lives online it’s also vital that they learn to differentiate between the overheated discourse on social media and genuine debate.

The barriers to critical thinking are not insurmountable. But if our public discourse is to come through the current upheaval intact, children, beginning at a young age, must learn the skills to navigate their world thoughtfully and critically.

Ulrich Boser is the founder of The Learning Agency and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He is the author of Learn Better, which Amazon called “the best science book of the year.”

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Critical thinking: what it is, how it is formed and how it helps children

What is critical thinking.

• How does crithical thinking develop?

Why is critical thinking important?

How does critical thinking develop?

Critical thinking is one of the most important skills children will need in the future. As society changes and the access to information is unlimited, children need to be able to do more than just repeat what they hear or read. They need to be able to make sense of information, analyse, compare, evaluate and come to conclusions. Most of the time in school, children learn by repeating either what the teacher says or what is written in the textbooks. In many educational institutions, active learning is completely lacking. So children learn to follow certain steps, which they think are the right ones, in a certain order, so that they get the right answer and therefore a grade or mark. Children learn more about how to memorise information rather than how to think.

Parents play an important role in developing critical thinking. Although it is often difficult to teach critical thinking, parents can help children to form critical thinking skills and to be always curious, to seek more information about specific topics in order to solve problems or situations they face. 

Activities that help stimulate children's critical thinking

• Young children should be encouraged to ask questions . Stimulating young children's curiosity is one of the best ways to teach them to think critically. "Why?" is one of the most common questions children ask. The answer to this question should not be a fixed one ('it must be so') but a starting point for a wide-ranging discussion, with arguments and conclusions.
• It is recommended that children be challenged. Children are constantly learning through repetition, mistakes and experimentation. Playing is an excellent activity that helps young children to think. Moreover, playing is the foundation of critical thinking. That's why children should be challenged to try as many stimulating activities as possible and parents should not limit their freedom. Even if it is harder for some children to solve certain games, they should be allowed to try and think up solutions for themselves.
• It is helpful for children's development to learn to solve problems. To help them develop critical thinking skills, parents can teach young children to find explanations and alternative solutions to different situations. It is satisfying for both adults and children to find the right answer, but in many cases some problems or situations in everyday life may have more than one solution. When children consider more than one solution, they can become more flexible in their thinking.
• Building hypotheses is another activity that can bring many benefits to children. Pausing play for a few moments to encourage your child to develop hypotheses is a critical thinking exercise that helps develop this essential life skill. Simple questions such as "If we do this, what do you think will happen?" during playtime will help young children.
• It is a good idea to expose young children to as many situations as possible. Interacting with other people, discovering unfamiliar places and engaging in new activities are important for children's development. The more they are exposed to different situations, the more open and curious children will learn to look at the world.

Encouraging children to ask questions, stimulating them through engaging discussions and guiding them to discover as many alternatives as possible contributes to the development of critical thinking from an early age.

Activities that discourage critical thinking in children

Not having access to information is one of the reasons why some children do not develop critical thinking skills. However, there are many practices that are actually unhelpful in developing logical thinking:

• Children don't know why they have certain boundaries. Both parents and teachers should give children reasons when they ask them to do things in a certain way. Asking children to simply follow certain information and obey adults' orders is a way of discouraging the development of critical thinking.
• Children are punished if they ask uncomfortable questions. Curiosity is defining for children, and when it is not allowed to run free, young children can have cognitive problems.
• Children are offended. The answers to the problems children face may be obvious to adults as life experience speaks for itself. The fact that parents can more easily think of answers should not influence the child's ability to analyse. Children should therefore be left to work out the answers for themselves and should not be offended if the process takes longer.
• Children are discouraged. When they have an idea or a point of view about a problem or situation, children should be encouraged to follow their own beliefs. If they are discouraged from engaging in different activities or expressing certain views, young children will eventually stop expressing themselves, which will affect their ability to think critically.
• Children come into contact with the ideas and assumptions of others. Developing critical thinking refers to children's ability to form their own ideas and find the best solutions. When young children are forced to read and retain certain information without being given the opportunity to analyse and question it, they may find it difficult to express their own beliefs in the future.

Therefore, children should not be restricted in their ability to think and express themselves and should be allowed to express themselves freely, without feeling any pressure.

Some of the benefits of critical thinking are:

• Developing leadership skills. A leader leads by example and one of the tools they need to excel is critical thinking.
• The ability to have a clear vision on certain issues. People who have the ability to think critically have a clearer view of the situations they are put in, which allows them to see the essence of a problem and find solutions to it more easily.
• Ability to find ways out of difficult situations. Critical thinking involves analysing problems and finding solutions. A critical thinker sees possibilities in problems, thus identifying ways out of any difficult situation, no matter how difficult it seems at first.
• Ability to make good decisions. People who think critically deal with problems as they arise, thanks to their ability to find different angles to approach and solve them. Ultimately, they make the right decisions.
• Developing creativity. When a person thinks critically, they don't focus on a particular idea or solution. Critical thinking involves a lot of ideas from which to select the one that best fits the needs of the moment.
• Developing persuasive communication. As they develop critical thinking skills, young children learn how to construct logical arguments with which they can be persuasive.

In conclusion, critical thinking is a skill that children should develop as soon as possible, as it will benefit them throughout their lives, and parents and teachers play an important role in this process. Kinderpedia, the comprehensive communication and management platform for schools and kindergartens, supports school-family dialogue, facilitates feedback and strengthens the school community. Children learn in a friendly environment based on listening, empathy, respect and trust, which encourages the development of critical thinking.

How Kinderpedia supports active learning and the transition to a modern classroom

https://www.parentingforbrain.com/critical-thinking-for-kids/#

https://www.brighthorizons.com/family-resources/developing-critical-thinking-skills-in-children

https://www.verywellfamily.com/how-to-teach-your-child-to-be-a-critical-thinker-5190765

https://parentingscience.com/teaching-critical-thinking/

https://www.theschoolrun.com/how-help-your-child-develop-critical-thinking-skills

https://www.greenchildmagazine.com/think-it-through-helping-your-child-develop-critical-thinking-skills/

https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/the_importance_of_critical_thinking_for_young_children

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-thinking/history.html

https://www.theblacksheep.community/benefits-of-critical-thinking/

https://criticalthinkingacademy.net/index.php/ct/benefits-of-critical-thinking#

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Prekindergartners Can Be Critical Thinkers, Too

Making Sense of Their World

Critical thinking in prekindergarten.

Premium Resource

Children are capable of—and in fact need—critical thinking and intellectual rigor. As educators, we must be proactive about how we engage their developing minds.

Investigations that allow [students] to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, to debate ideas and reflect on what they are learning, to attempt ambitious projects that interest them, and to receive feedback they can act on to improve their work.

Taking a Project Approach

As part of an investigative project, students in Rebecca Wilson's class identify deer tracks and discover a trail made by the deer. The project was designed to help students explore their own questions and gain critical thinking skills.

Following Through on Questions

At the science center, one student conducts research on how different animals make different tracks.

Using Technology to Gather Evidence

Providing access to experts, the children learned that many people had information that they could access by asking questions and listening to their answers., representing learning.

Engel, S. (2021).  The intellectual lives of children . Harvard University Press.

Helm, J. H., Katz, L. G., & Wilson, R. A. (2023).  Young investigators: The project approach in the early years , 4th Ed. Teachers College Press.

Immordino-Yang, M. H., Darling-Hammond, L., & Krone, C. (2018).  The brain basis for integrated social, emotional, and academic development: How emotions and social relationships drive learning . Aspen Institute.

Rowe, M. L., Leech, K. A., & Cabrera, N. (2017). Going beyond input quantity: Why questions matter for toddlers' language and cognitive development.  Cognitive science ,  41 , 162–179.

Judy Harris Helm provides educational consulting services through her company Best Practices Inc.

Rebecca Wilson teaches preK in a state-funded program in Van Meter, Iowa. She also trains teachers on the Project Approach and received an Iowa STEM Teacher of the Year award in 2021.

ASCD is a community dedicated to educators' professional growth and well-being.

Let us help you put your vision into action., related articles.

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More Than ABCs: Building the Critical Thinking Skills Your Child Needs for Literacy Success

What Is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking happens when a child draws on her existing knowledge and experience, as well as on her problem-solving skills, to do things like:

• Compare and contrast
• Explain why things happen
• Evaluate ideas and form opinions
• Understand the perspectives of others
• Predict what will happen in the future
• Think of creative solutions

During book reading, you can help your child develop all of these skills so she fully understands the stories she hears.  

How to Build Critical Thinking Skills – It's All About Conversation!

If your child just listens to a story and says very little, she won’t have much opportunity to build and use the critical thinking skills she needs to understand stories. That’s because this kind of thinking happens during back-and-forth conversations in which your child can draw upon her own experiences and problem-solving skills to talk about the story. So remember to add a little conversation to every book you share with your child. Pause several times during the story to talk about what interests her, and take a few minutes after the reading to keep the conversation going.

E’s and P’s – How to Get Your Child Thinking Critically             

As you and your child talk about the story, keep the “E’s and P’s” at the back of your mind. These are the things your child needs to think about to exercise her critical thinking skills and deepen her understanding of the story:

E xperiences — Connect the story with your child's knowledge and experiences

When you relate what you’re reading to something your child already knows or has already experienced, you help her better understand the characters’ perspectives and why they think and act the way they do.  

E xplain — Why things happen

It’s important for your child to understand not only what is happening in a story, but why it’s happening. This builds her understanding of cause-and-effect, as well as her understanding of what motivates the characters in the book.  

P roblem-solve — How to solve the problem in the book

To understand a story, your child needs to understand the problem that must be solved. Recognizing the problem and thinking of possible solutions builds the problem-solving skills she’ll need later when analyzing texts on her own.  

P redict — What will happen in the future

A good reader uses her knowledge and experience to predict what will happen in a story. When you encourage your child to think about what will happen next, you get her into the habit of searching for meaning, which is really what reading is all about.  

By helping your child think critically now, you’re laying the foundation for her to make judgements, solve problems, think creatively, empathize with others and communicate effectively – skills she’ll need not only for literacy, but for lifelong success.  

Greenberg, J. & Weitzman, E. (2014). I'm Ready! How to Prepare Your Child for Reading Success . Toronto: Hanen Early Language Program.  

The Hanen Centre is a Canadian not-for-profit charitable organization with a global reach. Its mission is to provide parents, caregivers, early childhood educators and speech-language pathologists with the knowledge and training they need to help young children develop the best possible language, social and literacy skills. This includes children who have or are at risk for language delays, those with developmental challenges such as autism, and those who are developing typically.

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An approach to developing critical thinking abilities in early years

by Dr Mary Roche

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A lot has been written about critical thinking – what it is, how to do it, who should do it and why. There have been many different definitions and explanations as to its reasons and purposes. These can include pragmatic reasons such as the need for workers with critical thinking skills in the new knowledge economy.

Other reasons are to do with how the ability to think critically can lead to living a meaningful life or more social cohesion resulting in increased equality, inclusion and democratic values. So, what is critical thinking, and when should we begin the process of becoming critical?

For me, critical thinking means thinking for yourself, examining all possible sources and making your mind up in the light of the evidence. It is the opposite of passively receiving knowledge or mindless herd-thinking. It means being able to sift through information and arguments, recognising that there can be several legitimate perspectives and stances. It involves being able to express one’s ideas coherently and logically. It means knowing the difference between opinion and fact and being able to support and explain the position taken after critical reflection.

Another way is to begin asking open-ended questions. Closed questions only have a right or wrong answer, for example ‘How many hours in a day?’ or ‘How many buttons does your coat have?’ Open-ended questions, however, allow for speculation, evaluation and leave scope for more than one answer being correct. For example, we could ask open questions about favourite traditional stories. Was Goldilocks silly or rude to go into the bears’ house uninvited? Why, I wonder, were the Little Red Hen’s friends so reluctant to help her? What would you have done if you were Cinderella? Is the wolf always a baddie?

I argued in Roche (2015) that critical thinking is necessary for reflecting on and making sense and meaning of our lives and our world. Without it we risk being mere receivers and consumers of others’ knowledge. In an age of powerful digital knowledge distribution, being able to think for oneself is crucial for an enlightened and active citizenry. Artificial intelligence (AI) is all around us and can be of huge benefit to humankind, but we are also only just beginning to understand some of the risks associated with the misrepresentation of truth and facts via contemporary digital media. This brings us to recognising that critical thinking is essential for critical literacy.

For example, Noriko Arai, a mathematician at the National Institute of Informatics in Japan, conducted a multiple-choice reading skill test on 15,000 high school students. The results indicated that many of the students tested ‘lacked the ability to visualise an image from a written sentence, essentially to think for themselves’. Arai argues that these results are concerning as AI is weak at tasks that humans could easily excel at, including reading comprehension, interpretation and meaning making. Young people place their future employment prospects at risk if they do not excel in these human strengths. This is a global concern and Australia is not immune, as demonstrated by the recent debates over declining PISA scores. 

While critical thinking is not new, all students will now need to develop increasingly sophisticated higher order thinking skills to thrive in a world of smart technologies. For this to occur, children need to start developing critical thinking skills from their earliest years. This can begin very simply.

Small children can be encouraged to give reasons for their answers to questions. If we ask a toddler whether she wants a red or a yellow lollipop, she might say ‘yellow’. When asked why, if she replies with something like ‘Because I like yellow – my teddy is yellow’, then she has backed up her choice with a valid reason. This kind of interaction could be seen as a simple example of practising early critical thinking. 

It would seem, then, that children need to be helped to develop healthy scepticism and critical engagement with all kinds of texts. Teaching children to think for themselves can begin as early as toddlerhood and can continue into primary school and beyond. That’s where, I believe, an approach called ‘Critical Thinking and Book Talk’ (CT&BT, Roche, 2010) can play a role. It is premised on the idea of developing young children’s ability to make meaning from the texts and images of picture books as they discuss them together. 

Developing the Critical Thinking and Book Talk approach

Since the mid-1990s I have been discussing picture books with children at all levels of primary school, as well as with teachers at in-service courses and with parent groups. One thing is common to all groups: everybody loves a read aloud. Whether the audience is composed of the smallest kindergarten children, the senior classes, teachers, parents or grandparents, a calm atmosphere – a sense of tranquillity and relaxation often descends when people are engaged by a good story and visually stimulated by wonderful artwork. 

Listening to literature being read aloud is probably one of the most valuable and pleasurable experiences beginning readers and writers can have. The process has many advocates: literacy experts like Michael Rosen, Teresa Cremin, Mem Fox and Jim Trelease support read alouds as a part of every child’s day both at home and at school.

Neuroscientists and paediatricians like Hutton et al (2015) suggest that interaction and discussion during or following read alouds stimulate high levels of brain activity. Promoters of the Philosophy for Schools movement have also discussed the benefits of doing philosophical and critical thinking with children.  

Read alouds offer adults a chance to model good reading and thinking strategies and to expose young learners to a rich variety of literature. When this exposure is accompanied by supportive and engaging discussions, children can extend their world view and develop important critical thinking skills.

Read aloud and CT&BT are not the same thing, however. A read aloud is simply that – the teacher or adult reads a story aloud. CT&BT (Roche, 2010) takes that process a stage further. We finish the read aloud and immediately discuss the book. This process is grounded in the idea that a read aloud can be a powerful entry point into classroom dialogue, discussion and critical thinking.

I call my approach Critical Thinking and Book Talk to distinguish it from Circle Time (Mosley 1998), the Philosophy for Children (P4C) movement in Australia, the US, the UK and elsewhere, and from the Irish process known as ‘Thinking Time’ (Donnelly 1994).

I focus solely on picture books as discussion starters. But all these programs share some features, such as democratic practice and social construction of knowledge.  

The concept of CT&BT is grounded in values of reciprocal care, courtesy and respect for others’ views. No conclusions are sought. Children are expected to listen to each other with attention, contribute to the discussion if they wish and provide reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with others. 

When they are engaged in the process of listening to a story being read aloud, looking closely at the images and then engaging in discussion together about the story, children are not just developing their literacy or their critical thinking. They are developing cognitively, socially and emotionally. They are learning to be part of a community of enquiry; to be reflective; to co-construct knowledge with their peers and teacher; to make meaning, to develop moral judgement. 

Fisher (2006: 33-4) speaks about how engaging in this form of classroom discussion develops in children ‘the habits of intelligent behaviour’. The children negotiate the rules with the teacher. They basically follow the golden rule of ‘treat others as you would like to be treated’, i.e. listen actively and respectfully, think hard, don’t interrupt, speak respectfully, agree and disagree with courtesy, always providing a reason for why you agree or disagree. These are all essential skills for their future lives, particularly an AI-influenced future in a knowledge economy.

I have given examples from my own work with very young students during my teaching career (Roche 2000, 2007, 2011, 2015) where the children saw problems with some traditional stories very quickly.

Some 5-year-olds said: 

• ‘The little red hen needs to get new friends. Simple.’ 
• ‘Goldilocks is so stupid. She shouldn’t have gone into the house: worse things than bears could have been in there.’ 
• ‘There’s a lot of violence in them stories.’ 

As my research advanced, I chose several sophisticated picture books for discussion. These included Mike and Dosh Archer’s ‘Yellow Bird Black Spider’, as we will see below. My approach to teaching critical thinking positions it as the opposite of receiving information passively which is, sadly, what happens in many didactic classrooms. Because it involves active engagement with ideas, there is some effort involved. It does not automatically mean that you reject the thinking of others. Instead, you look at the issue and evaluate their responses and arrive at your own conclusions as to whether you agree or disagree with their ideas. But you must be prepared to provide reasons for your judgements. 

Sometimes, more than one answer is acceptable. I have had many experiences where children could not reach consensus on something and realised that several people could hold a correct or partially correct view. This happened, for example, when discussing ‘Yellow Bird Black Spider’, in which an anarchic yellow bird flouts convention and is reprimanded by a conservative black spider (Roche, 2007, 2015).

Most children are happy when the bird tires of the spider’s nagging and eats him. They argue that the bird has the right to be different, to be himself. However, one day a young girl in my group said, ‘but what about the spider’s right to be himself?’ And, suddenly, we all realised that perhaps this was a contest of two rights where the problem could have been resolved by dialogue. Each had to accept that the other had rights. This is a very empowering realisation for children.

The idea that the teacher does not hold all the answers is equally liberating for the teacher. As I reflected on this incident, I realised that I had been uncritically siding with the yellow bird group all along. The children had taught me to think more critically. This happened more and more often as we continued with the work. 

This is just one example of what critical thinking looks like in practice, and these are the types of thought processes that teachers can look out for to see if their students are beginning to think critically. Watch out for (and model) tentative suggestions such as ‘well maybe’, ‘what I wonder is’ or ‘what if’.

Teachers need to be careful too, that they don’t tell children what the book is about. I discussed ‘Yellow Bird’ with several groups of 8-year-olds. Only one group felt that the dominant message in the book was about freedom. Their explanations were stunningly sophisticated. It was very tempting to take the book into the next group and say ‘X class said they think this book is all about freedom. Do you agree?’ However, that would have been a denial of the principles underpinning the teaching approach. That would have involved me imposing the views of another group on the children – essentially telling them what to think. It is important that each class group can think in ways that are appropriate for them and make their own meaning of the book. If they wish, after several readings with different groups, teachers could discuss various interpretations with different classes.

Planning for the session 

There are many factors to be considered when organising a CT&BT session. 

A list is provided below, however it is far from exhaustive and you can create your own as you go along. 

Bear in mind the outcomes you are hoping for

These include engagement, pleasure, active NSW Department of Education 19 Future EDge thinking, co-construction of knowledge and active dialogue. What we are seeking to achieve has to do with ‘promoting meaningful interactions among people’ (Hoffman, 2010: 13) and ‘learning to be curious, sceptical, engaged, and noncomplacent’ (Luke, 1991: 143). Sipe’s and Bauer’s (2001) work with young children showed that kindergarteners can respond very knowledgeably to traditional fairy tales told in picture books. They suggest that literary understanding emerges as the young readers make both intertextual and real-life connections during interactive read alouds. 

We need to keep in mind that readers are positioned by texts, and so texts need to be interrogated for any assumptions and underlying agendas. Hilary Janks (2010) argues that from the writer’s point of view the ideal reader ‘is the one who buys into the text and its meanings’. Teachers and parents can assist children to be critical about texts before buying in completely by engaging dialogically with it and them.

Choosing which book to use is important 

The best picture books have relevance for the child’s life. This prompts them to think and talk about issues that have meaning for them. They are the kinds of books that are open to a variety of interpretations and responses: books that leave ‘gaps’ for readers to fill. Iser (2010) spoke of the virtual space created between the reader and the text and maintained that texts should have gaps in characters and events that engage readers in the kind of dynamic process of reading that leads to revealing the text’s meaning (Khrais, 2017). 

You must like the story yourself or find it intriguing or puzzling or attractive in some way. Read it to make sure and to make yourself familiar with the ideas and concepts. Your enthusiasm will be infectious. Remember that a picture book is unique in that the pictures and the written text work together to tell the story. Sometimes they even tell different stories, such as Pat Hutchins’ ‘Rosie’s Walk’.

Make sure everyone can see the pictures

Use a visualiser if your school is lucky enough to have one. Alternatively scan or photograph the pages of the book and beam them onto the whiteboard via the data projector. 

Set aside at least thirty minutes to allow engagement with the story 

You cannot rush through a story and then expect children to engage seriously with it. Allow time for discussing the cover, the ‘peritext’ (endpapers) and predicting what the story might be about. Allow time also for reading the images. Children need to see the pictures, and they often see far more in them than adults do.

You could decide to read the entire story aloud first, and then perhaps reread and provide opportunities for the children to examine the pictures, encouraging what Jane Doonan called ‘close looking’. Many experts advise that children need adequate time to examine both text and images. For example, Goodman (1998) suggests that often teachers privilege the act of decoding text over the need for closely examining and making meaning from the pictures. A parent in a one-toone situation would find this step of ‘looking closely’ much easier. 

As the children get used to being free to articulate what they think about a book, you could begin to nudge them to look beneath the surface more and more.  

Can we tell what the author thinks about friendship/inclusion/home/ beauty/war/peace? How do we know? Is the author trying to tell us something or trying to get us to think in a certain way? How do we know that? These kinds of questions encourage children to look for underlying ideologies both covert and overt – the beginnings of critical literacy.

The messages are continued in the artwork. Do the colours in the illustrations convey meaning? How? Think of the opening spread in Anthony Browne’s ‘Gorilla’ (1983). At breakfast, Hannah is wearing red, but the rest of the picture is rendered in cold blues and black. Her suit-wearing Dad, seated opposite, is remote, emphasised by the newspaper he is reading. Contrast that with another image towards the end of the book. They are together, both wearing red, and the room is depicted in a warm yellow glow. What is Browne asking us to think and feel?

Every part of the book matters 

Whichever approach you decide to use, do let the children have time to closely examine all of the pictures – including the covers front and back, the endpapers and the introductory pages. Many people skip over the opening pages in order to get to the ‘story’. If you search for examples of people reading stories aloud on YouTube, you will see what I mean. The readers rarely pay any attention to the cover, endpapers or front matter. Yet this peritextual, or paratextual, material often provides hints and clues about the story and frequently provides interesting areas for prediction and inference and animated discussion. The peritext is very important for setting the scene and providing clues and cues as to what the story is about. The covers and endpapers and title pages have been carefully chosen and considered by the design team in conjunction with author, illustrator and the publisher. 

Prepare to document the session

For teachers, it might be useful to record what is said either by audiotaping or videoing (both of which need permission from participants and/or parents) or by writing down what is said very quickly. This allows you to later enjoy the ‘nuggets’ you may have missed in the heat of the moment. It also helps with assessing and evaluating the process. There is no requirement to do formal assessment on CT&BT in Irish schools, however good practice would include assessment for progress. In my resources section for the Irish National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) I provided some advice on assessment, for those who wish to do this.

Here is an example from practice with pre‑schoolers  (This episode is available on the NCCA’s Vimeo page) In the clip I read ‘Penguin’ by Polly Dunbar (2007) to a group of 3-year-olds. I began by identifying new words like cover, front/back, author, illustrator, blurb, spine, endpapers and dedication. I pointed to the ‘front cover’ and we discussed what we saw. Lily was very excited and told me gleefully she had that book at home. Based on our discussion around the peritext, Evan was able to predict and even summarise quite a lot about the story before we even started to read it.   You might be wondering just what this has to do with critical thinking. It is all to do with creating an invitational approach. In Roche (2015) I explained that by suggesting to these young children that they might listen to the story and look at the pictures and then decide for themselves afterwards if they considered that Polly Dunbar’s blurb worked well, or if the understanding they had in relation to the stars on the endpapers were probable, they are being invited into a dialogue. It is open ended and there are several possibilities for being ‘right’.   When a parent or teacher says ‘I wonder why Polly Dunbar chose stars for the endpapers’ children can offer guesses, opinions and explanations. By the time they come to discuss the pictures and the story they are confident that their thoughts and ideas matter. They realise that artists and authors and publishers make choices and that everything they see in the book has been deliberately put there by someone. This is a very important lesson and could provide the foundation for critical and visual literacy.    Yes and no answers can be avoided by carefully posing open-ended questions. Even where they occur you can gently nudge the child into providing a reason. This is important especially when children start a discussion with ‘I liked the part where’ because, by asking them for reasons, they are encouraged to think critically.  

The children may not always respond to a story 

They might be tired. There might be too many interruptions – roll call, milk delivery, ‘my teacher wants a loan of a black marker, please’, the intercom. They might not have got out to the playground because of the rain. If this happens, acknowledge it and try again another day. 

How to do a Critical Thinking and Book Talk session

Simply seat the children in a circle and re-read or ask the children to recall the main points of the story. Invite questions or reactions. Then sit back and listen to what the children say. Wait your turn to talk.

Donnelly (1994) advocates the use of a ‘tip-around’ to allow all children to participate in the discussion. A child volunteers to begin the discussion and then ‘tips’ the next child lightly on the shoulder. The ‘starting’ child has the power to choose in which direction the discussion goes. I usually remind the participants at the end that if the discussion had started somewhere else, or had gone in the opposite direction, it would have been very different and completely new knowledge would have been created.

This idea of the creation of new knowledge, thinking thoughts that no-one has thought before, connecting new ideas with old and building up insights from listening to others is a very powerful experience for children. So is having the power to speak or not. In didactic classrooms silence is expected or even demanded. Here, in this dialogical setting, it is permitted. It can mean ‘I’m still thinking’ or ‘I’m happy to just listen’. 

This involves recognising the child as a knower who has thoughts worth listening to. It also means recognising knowledge construction as a process. If we reify knowledge and see it as a ‘thing’ that can be transmitted or delivered from a knowing expert to a non-knower – in the sense of Freire’s (1972) ‘banking model’ – then we will be very unlikely to see any value of discussing picture books with children as a means of generating knowledge.  

Such a stance would also mean that we would find it difficult to imagine teachers learning from what their pupils say. Yet the idea of ‘teacher as learner’ dates right back to Socrates. If we see knowledge as an always incomplete, partial, evolving and dynamic process that is socially constructed then we can engage in discussion as a form of ‘problemposing’ (Freire, 1972) and see our discussions as a way of becoming a community of enquiry. It is not just about having skills. This kind of work embraces knowledge, skills and dispositions – the cognitive and the affective domains. It encompasses the idea of working together to construct knowledge and make meaning together. Each group of children brings their own ways of knowing to the process. 

Some focus more on making meaning from the story as a whole; others engage wholly with images. 

For example, in Roche (2015) I described how Deirdre, a teaching friend, used a visualiser and a whiteboard as she read Anthony Browne’s ‘The Tunnel’ (1992) aloud. She said her class of 8 and 9-year-old boys took nearly two weeks to digest the book.  

They actually only paid cursory attention to the story. The real engagement for them was studying the illustrations. They spent ages examining each picture, discussing it, going back to check details on previous pictures, explaining to me and to each other what they thought the various elements of the pictures meant. It was a real eye-opener for me. Up to now I always focused almost exclusively on the text and the narrative … the CT&BT approach has given us permission to linger! (extract from conversation with DL, 6 July 2013)

In a research review on using picture books in classrooms, Wolfenbarger and Sipe (2007) state that ‘our society is inundated with visual images. Sport team logos, automobile emblems, yellow arches, and other product packaging have become symbols to which children and adults attach recognition and meaning’ (citing Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). They suggest that visual images such as these logos ‘signal meaning without requiring an accompanying verbal text because they are linked to other visual media (television) and highly contextualized places and experiences (such as ordering fast food, eating cereal, attending sporting events).

Children have learned to expect pictures to have personal and social meaning’ (2007: 274). Wolfenbarger and Sipe (2007) also speak about Carger (2004) who worked with 8- and 9-yearolds in Chicago. Carger provided opportunities for the children to talk about picture books she read aloud. She found that the children developed as art critics and their command of English language flourished. She writes that the ‘students engaged in divergent thinking … [A]rt provoked them to reflect and to engage in authentic inquiry’ (2004: 280). 

Most teachers have had training on decoding text during their courses on teaching reading. I doubt that most get anything like the same training in decoding images. Yet it is a vital part of critical literacy. Our society is bombarded with images through advertising, social media, television, cinema and packaging. Children need some skills in deciphering and decoding the constant stream of visual imagery coming at them. They can make a start in early years classrooms by examining picture book images with a knowledgeable teacher. Teachers could read work by Moebius and Doonan as a starting point for examining the picture book codes of line and shape, colour, positioning, size, perspective, viewpoint and framing. The more that teachers know about image construction, the more they can encourage children to examine images intelligently and critically. I have listed some of these resources in the appendix.

Be prepared to be amazed at the philosophical turn the discussion might take 

Timetable the discussion as ‘discrete oral language’, ‘comprehension’, ‘literacy’, ‘Social Personal Health Education’, ‘Nature and Environment’ or ‘Civics’. Be creative! Look at what a 9-year-old child in 3rd class said after I read ‘Yellow Bird, Black Spider’ aloud: 

I disagree with some people and I agree with others who said that freedom is doing whatever you want, but only in a way. You can only have freedom if you’re alone. Because if you were really free to think what you like and say what you like and do what you like it and there were other people around, it could be the baddest thing ever for them because you might want to do all bad things with your freedom … Freedom could be sometimes good but sometimes it could be the baddest thing ever. (7 February 2006)

That shows that the issues raised by the book far exceed a ‘literacy’ lesson. Bear in mind, however, that this class had been doing classroom discussions since Kindergarten. However, I did not tell them that the book was about freedom. I did not even think of linking with that concept at the time! This is really important. I used this book with several classes, yet only one group discussed freedom. I learned from listening to the children.  

One class discussed rights. They all agreed that the yellow bird had the right to be himself, but as we saw earlier, one girl thought that the black spider also had the right to be himself – and a fair old ding-dong of an argument ensued as to whether it was a contest of two rights. Another class, in true black spider mode, thought it was a ‘stupid story cos birds don’t wear stripy socks or eat ice cream’. 

Critical thinking is all about thinking for one’s self, challenging assumptions and stereotypes, asking questions and questioning answers. Philosophising is about pondering alternatives, asking ‘what if’, and ‘I wonder why’ and offering ideas such as ‘well, I think … because’. Try it out, the ‘read aloud’ factor alone makes it worthwhile. Remember that picture books are not solely for the infant classrooms. Properly chosen books can provide a stimulus for discussion to senior primary and beyond. These kinds of ideas are located within the notion of seeing literacy as more than decoding and encoding text. 

For example, Jewett and Smith define literacy as social practice and argue that: [E]ffective literacy draws on a repertoire of practices that allow learners, as they engage in reading and writing activities, to act as code breakers, meaning makers, text users, and text critics …the fourth component, text critic, is not as widespread, especially in elementary classrooms. In this domain, learners critically analyze and transform texts by acting on knowledge that texts are not ideologically natural or neutral – that they represent particular points of views while silencing others and influence people’s ideas. In other words, the reader learns to look beyond the words on the page and into the province of how the text ‘works’ – linguistically, politically, culturally, and socially – to position the reader (2003: 69).

Leland et al (2013) argue that critical readers, who are able to size up the situation and draw their own conclusions, become agents of text. This is because, they say, readers have the power to make their own rational decisions about what to believe. However, those who do not engage in critical reading are far more likely to become ‘victims of text’ since they passively accept assumptions (Leland et al., 2013: 4). Children will not become ‘agents of text’ without a real effort by teachers and parents.  

The why: recognising the other 

The CT&BT teaching approach rests firmly on the assumption that the adult will recognise the child as a real person who is likeable and who deserves respect for their uniqueness – not generally a problem for a parent. The CT&BT dialogical approach is premised on real people talking to each other face-to-face. Its success depends on the interpersonal pedagogical relationship between the children and the teacher, and also between the children and their peers. It is a deeply affective approach.

This was brought home to me recently when I met some of my former research participants. They are all now in their early twenties and finishing university. When describing their memories of the process they returned again and again to how they had felt. They spoke about being proud of being listened to and about realising with some surprise that the children who attended learning support were just as able – and sometimes better able – to think and speak as they themselves were. Some of the shyer people spoke about how discussing things together gave them entries into approaching the ‘cool gang’ in the yard.

One very shy young woman spoke about how, even though she had the option to remain silent and was very anxious, she made herself contribute because she had a lot to say. She is now completing a degree in Development Studies, during the course of which she visited war-torn zones and refugee centres where she was tear-gassed and detained. She said she felt that the grounding she got in standing up for her beliefs and continuously practising agreeing or disagreeing without losing her cool during the weekly discussions throughout primary school helped her in those very difficult situations later. The CT&BT approach therefore needs the actual interpersonal relationship of real people talking to each other and tentatively exploring their co-creation of new knowledge (Lundie, 2016: 282).

Children who are exposed to the CT&BT approach have their sense of self-worth developed as they realise that they are recognised in class as people who are knowers and meaning makers. They soon see that they are valued as being capable of forming opinions and articulating them. They are aware that they are being provided with opportunities to think critically, to listen and evaluate the responses of others and to engage in co-constructing knowledge with their peers. They see that there is an emphasis on respect, courtesy and care. The children are being encouraged to develop their habits of intelligent behaviour, as we saw earlier, as they learn tolerance, understanding and empathy towards others. I realised this when a group I had previously worked with were about to leave primary school. They were invited to present a display of memories of primary school and most of them chose their CT&BT sessions as the highlight of their primary school life. 

Teacher professional development

Teachers and parents must make themselves familiar with a wide range of picture books and be able to choose them with some discretion – especially if you have limited funds. Teachers will need to read and re-read the books themselves several times before introducing it to a class or child. You don’t just bring along a book, read it aloud and let the children have a chat. You will need to examine the pictures, doing what Doonan (1993) calls ‘close looking’, rather than merely skimming over the pictures so as to ‘get on with the text and the story’. 

You will need to think too. This is essential. It is also very hard work. You can’t encourage critical thinking in children unless you can think critically yourself. However, you will need to be keenly aware that by pre-reading the book and studying the pictures you will form your ideas about the book. It is difficult to refrain from imposing these ideas on the children. You need to guide and facilitate, not dominate. 

Developing the skill of listening attentively is important also. I am a talker, and the skill of staying quiet so as to really hear a child demanded huge effort and was something I struggled with for many years. Even when I thought I was being attentive to children, video evidence showed me that I was dominating the classroom talk. It took a lot of self-training to gradually change my practice. My PhD was a self-study action research project based on that process.  

Critically studying picture books supports students’ understanding of their own thought processes 

I have had experiences where children would frequently say ‘Hang on: I kind of disagree with myself now’ or ‘First I was thinking X and now I have kind of changed my mind and I think Y’. Sometimes children expressed surprise and they would say ‘Whoo! I never knew I knew that until I sort of thought it and said it at the same time’. One or two children have said ‘I’ll pass because I don’t really have any thought yet’ or ‘I don’t know enough yet. I need to think some more’. Sometimes, as I later transcribed my scribbled notes from discussions, I found myself intrigued by something a child said and I would type it out and discuss it with the child. They nearly always had an explanation. One of the practices I used in order to encourage reflection and metacognition was to type out several transcripts and present them to the children in booklet form for their perusal. This was often very enlightening. Some would hold fast to their views and others would say ‘Oh, I’ve been thinking about that since and I kind of disagree with myself now because now I know that …’.

In Roche (2007: 254) I described one such episode. The children were immediately engrossed and spent the first few minutes quickly scanning the pages for their own contributions. When they found their own name, they read their own contributions several times and eagerly showed them to each other. Only then did they read through the transcripts. The children then evaluated their own thinking. 

C: Actually, it’s kind of good to read these again. I wouldn’t say what I said there again now though, because when you read what other people said you’d kind of get different feelings about what to say.    K: I think the discussion on ‘Yellow Bird’ was pretty good. I’m kind of amazed at myself …at what I said. It’s actually quite sort of … grownup.    J: I remember after doing that Thinking Time I kept thinking about my feelings and my mind and my soul and wondering about it and stuff. I like what I said here. I’d still agree with it.  

Metacognitive activities that ask students to reflect on what they know, care about, and are able to do help learners develop an awareness of themselves. CT&BT helps to develop a culture of metacognition in a classroom. The very fact of having to justify their stances and explain their viewpoints, means that children are automatically being given opportunities to become metacognitive learners.

Maxine Greene suggests that activities that engage us in our own quests for answers and for meanings, also serve to initiate us into the communities of scholarship and, if our perspectives widen sufficiently, into the human community, in its largest and richest sense: 

Teachers who are alienated, passive, and unquestioning cannot make such initiations possible for those around. Nor can teachers who take the social reality surrounding them for granted and simply accede to them. (Greene, 1978: 3)

Critical thinking in an AI future: some concluding thoughts 

AI is here. It is all around us as we use the internet, hail taxis, check our smart watches or set the many devices in our homes to function in our absence. Whether it ultimately becomes a blessing or a curse for humanity remains to be seen. It will depend on how we understand its power and potential. 

In an article for Irish Tech News in May 2018, Alison McGuire wrote about those speaking out about the threats posed by applications of AI. She mentioned Stephen Hawking who expressed a concern (via his AI-enabled voice) that thinking machines ‘could spell the end of the human race’. She also quoted Anja Kaspersen – former Head of Strategic Engagement and New Technologies at the International Committee of the Red Cross, and former Head of Geopolitics and International Security at the World Economic Forum – who spoke about the threat posed by ‘AI potentially becoming weaponisable’, but balanced those fears against the idea that ‘many AI applications have life-enhancing potential, so holding back its development is undesirable and possibly unworkable. This speaks to the need for a more connected and coordinated multi-stakeholder effort to create norms, protocols, and mechanisms for the oversight and governance of AI.

According to McGuire, ‘now we have arrived at the point where governments have decided to release directives with the intentions to regulate AI. I believe ethical behaviour is going to become even more of an issue as technological intervention in daily lives increases.’ 

So, what ethical behaviour will be needed? How will we educate people to have balanced rational views on the role of AI in their lives? How will we teach children to be sceptical and critical and questioning? In the conclusion to my book ‘Developing Children’s Critical Thinking through Picturebooks’ (Roche, 2015) I stated that I believe that we owe it to our children to help them become critical and caring citizens. 

As caring parents and teachers in an age when AI – with all its benefits and risks – surrounds us, we want to help our children to be more aware of inequality and the risks of ‘fake news’. We want them to be tolerant, empathetic and courageous people who challenge injustice and are unafraid to speak out on behalf of those who are less fortunate. We would like our young people to engage creatively and morally with the world and so we encourage them to be people who think independently and who maintain their philosophical and intellectual curiosity throughout their lives. We want them to see literacy as empowering and liberating and to be competent and confident readers and writers. We want to gift them a lifelong love of reading that will provide endless hours of pleasure. And, thus, through reading and discussing picture books with them from their earliest days, we hope to provide them with what Luke (1991: 131) calls ‘equality of educational possibility’

… as teachers of literacy we need to look beyond a continual and exclusive concern with ‘new’ and better methods in order to rethink from a social and cultural perspective the consequences of our instruction, whether with elementary school children, secondary students, or adults and immigrant second language learners. Who gets what kind of competence from our teaching? To what ends? What kinds of literate subjects does our pedagogy produce? Fitted to what kind of society? 

These are the kinds of questions that keep me going in my work to promote CT&BT as a form of dialogic teaching for improving critical literacy. I hope I have managed to convince readers that simply promoting books and reading is not enough: for CT&BT to be successful, teachers, parents and caregivers must engage in critical discussion with children using picture books as stimuli.

Mary Roche PhD is an Irish education consultant and academic, and the author of ‘Developing children’s critical thinking through picturebooks’ (Routledge 2015).

This article originally appeared in Future EDge , a publication from the Education for a Changing World initiative in NSW Department of Education.

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Challenges in Early Years and Primary Education

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Challenges in Early Years and Primary Education focuses on the teaching and learning of children in early years and primary school settings and creates awareness and a deeper understanding of current and critical education issues such as wellbeing, global education, online teaching, and teaching and learning in a multicultural society.

This book encourages the development of the underpinning knowledge and understanding of teaching and learning, recognising good mental health and the solid principles of working with children, families and other professionals. Through discussions on a range of interrelated factors that contribute to children’s development, and learning and progressive participation, expert contributors explore ways to respond to and ameliorate the effects of the pandemic and other possible challenges that education professionals and children might face in the future.

Challenges in Early Years and Primary Education is ideal reading for educational practitioners including teachers and anyone working in aligned educational settings, as well as students in the field of early years and primary education.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter | 3  pages, introduction, part i | 60  pages, children and the curriculum, chapter 1 | 15  pages, child development and neurodiversity, chapter 2 | 12  pages, ‘i've just found some dragon snot, yay', chapter 3 | 17  pages, more than just dressing up in a sari, chapter 4 | 14  pages, ‘education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world' (mandela), part ii | 59  pages, professional practice, chapter 5 | 14  pages, walking the online learning tightrope, chapter 6 | 12  pages, harnessing reflexive practice for professionals, children and settings, chapter 7 | 16  pages, professionalism in practice, chapter 8 | 15  pages, ‘why should i worry…the senco will do it all', part iii | 61  pages, child protection and beyond, chapter 9 | 14  pages, ‘what are you going to do about it', chapter 10 | 15  pages, mental health, wellbeing, resilience and character, chapter 11 | 14  pages, adverse childhood experiences, chapter 12 | 14  pages, why do good children do bad things and how we can help them to stop, chapter | 2  pages.

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Indonesian university boosts Asia’s public health programmes through research training

Growing up in Bangladesh where several infectious diseases transmitted by helminths (worms) take a large health toll, Tilak Chandra Nath has always been fascinated with the challenges of addressing diseases of poverty.

After graduating as a biologist, Ezra Valido’s interest in infectious diseases took him to work in a rural, poor community in the eastern Philippines, where he headed public health programmes on tuberculosis, measles, dengue and chikungunya.

Valido’s community was devastated in 2013 by Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded. From that, he gained experience working in the aftermath of a disaster, including how to prevent waterborne diseases and sanitation-related illnesses.

As a TDR-supported fellow, also at UGM in 2017, Valido’s research project focused on how willing people were to take doses of the dengue vaccine in poor communities in the Philippines’ Quezon City. His initial plan was to focus on how the vaccines were rolled out. But this had to be shelved after community and media outrage based on misinformation about the vaccine led the government to cancel its vaccination plans.

TDR’s postgraduate training programme on implementation research

Both Nath and Valido were part of a special postgraduate training programme focused on implementation research, based at UGM’s Faculty of Medicine, Public Health and Nursing, located in Yogyakarta. 

The programme, involving students from both WHO’s South-East Asia and Western Pacific Regions, is supported by TDR, a global programme for research on diseases of poverty ,   hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, and co-sponsored by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), WHO and the World Bank.

UGM is part of TDR’s global postgraduate training scheme network , developed over the past eight years to boost the skills of future research leaders.  

The initiative focuses on building students’ skills in implementation research, a fast-growing field that supports the identification of system bottlenecks to delivering health services and approaches to addressing them. It is particularly useful in low- and middle–income countries where many health interventions do not reach those who need them the most.

One of the two partner institutions in Asia Pacific is UGM, where the initiative is co-ordinated by Professor Yodi Mahendradhata, Dean of Research and Development at the Faculty of Medicine, Public Health and Nursing. 

Involved from the start

Mahendradhata is proud of the fact that UGM was involved from the start - back in 2015 – in  TDR’s fellowship scheme as well as in the parallel development of course content for implementation research. So he feels considerable ownership over how it has evolved.

“It wasn’t just about receiving the tools and the toolkits, but being involved very early on in the development of the implementation research course, and that is what we particularly appreciate from TDR,” said Mahendradhata. “We learned a lot from participating in the development process, and that gives us a sense of ownership.”

His university has also developed and piloted lessons on implementation research as a part of a TDR-supported Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) , enabling researchers in places like Nepal and Myanmar to participate in virtual training, with UGM as the hub.

Critical and relevant

Valido is sanguine about how he had to shift the focus of his research on a new dengue vaccine from examining the standard parameters of mass rollout to focusing on the vaccine’s  acceptability in one city, Quezon, the biggest city in the Philippines.

Sanofi Pasteur’s Dengvaxia vaccine was approved in the Philippines in December 2015 , and the government started to roll it out to primary school children in 2016. However, in late 2017, Sanofi issued a statement reporting that, in rare cases, the vaccine could increase the risk of severe dengue illness in children who had never had the disease if they contracted the virus after being vaccinated. A public outcry followed , and the health department suspended the vaccine programme soon afterwards.

“While we were conducting the research, an update on the vaccine information caused a media frenzy which eventually led to its suspension and eventual cancellation,” he says. “We had to change the research and eventually looked at the change in the acceptability of the vaccine pre- and post-controversy.”

“The programme teaches you to be critical and relevant, and I had to change my research to remain relevant,” Valido says.“At the time, the Philippines was the only country implementing mass dengue vaccination in schools.”

Dengvaxia has since been approved in a number of countries, including the US – but only for people clinically proven to have had dengue in the past.

Valido enjoyed the opportunity to dissect the Filippino government’s plans for the vaccine’s implementation, focusing on “strategic actions, context and health system thinking.” 

New insights into managing parasitic diseases

Meanwhile, Nath’s research into parasitic diseases gave him new insights into how they can be both managed and prevented.

“In developed countries, most parasitic diseases have been either eradicated or controlled, but the scenario is quite different in lower-income countries, where many diseases remain a serious constraint to public health safety,” says Nath.

“Through the TDR training programme,” he says, “I learned to investigate the problems in preventing these diseases in greater detail and pave the way to find an implementable solution for policy-makers to mitigate the burden.”

Preparing for the future

Following his studies at UGM, Nath continued his research training, completing a PhD in Medicine from the Chungbuk National University, in Korea, in the area of One Health.  He is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Parasitology at Sylhet Agricultural University in Bangladesh.

 In a sense he has come full-circle - bringing knowledge amassed through years of study abroad back to his home country to ponder issues that he wondered about since his youth.  

“I am now actively engaged with helminthiasis elimination and biobanking of parasites projects,” says Nath, who is currently also the director of Bangladesh’s Parasite Resource Bank, where he is investigating the interactions between human, animal, and environmental parasites, following the One Health approach. 

Meanwhile, Valido is working on the biomedical aspects of infectious diseases as a post-doctoral researcher at Swiss Paraplegic Research, where he is exploring the interaction of microbiomes and the spinal cord. He started this work while completing his PhD in Health Sciences at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland. 

Few scientists understand the biomedical aspects of infectious diseases and “the complexity of public health designs to improve health programmes, guide health policies and identify key health infrastructure,” Valido observes. The TDR training helped him to build that interdisciplinary skill set.

This is the first article in a series on TDR’s research capacity strengthening programme - building skills of public health researchers, implementers, health practitioners and policy-makers in the fast-developing field of implementation research for improving uptake of effective health interventions.

TDR’s postgraduate training scheme