Part of the Academic English online conference with Cambridge, Chris Sowton gave a popular talk on Strategies for teaching critical thinking more effectively.
In recent years there has been a growing understanding of the importance of critical thinking within EAP, but many teachers still find it difficult to translate this into the classroom. This webinar looked at ways in which critical thinking can be embedded within ‘regular’ EAP activities, and how students can be fully empowered with these crucial 21st century skills.
Chris discussed the challenges in embedding critical thinking in the classroom stating that only 65% of teachers felt confident in their ability to develop their students’ CT skill. He went on to offer his top ten tips on embedding critical thinking in the classroom:
- Maximize the CT in every speaking activity
- Acknowledge what students say
- Get students to show their workings
- Push the students to see the world from different perspectives
- Make tasks more collaborative
- Don’t do things which are conceptually hard and linguistically hard simultaneously
- Personalize and show relevance of CT to students’ lives.
- Explicitly deconstruct the critical thinking in your lesson
- Flip the learning
- Teachers – and managers – should be more critical of their own practice.
Find out more about Academic English with Cambridge
You can watch the next webinar in the series; Synergistic Speaking Tasks: Ways to manage successful end-of-unit tasks for the oral communication classroom by Dan Newbury