Welcome to the critical thinking portion of the Performance Pyramid. This part of this website is dedicated to helping teachers understand the importance of critical analysis instruction in the classroom. We are living in exponential times and we will be preparing our students for careers that may not exist yet. We will need to impart critical thinking skills to our students so they will have the ability to work through questions that haven’t been asked yet or problems we haven’t discovered yet.
Classrooms of yesterday focused on mostly finite answers found in a book written by people who were taught these same topics in the same way with very little change. Today our knowledge base is growing more in a single year than it had grown in the last few hundred years. The advent of the printing press by Johann Gutenburg around 1439 made knowledge accessible to the masses. Literacy became more important in the following centuries. This accessibility of knowledge fueled critical thought and invention exploded.
It took us thousands of years to get to this point in our development and every golden age has been fueled by critical thinking by a few select people. Today we all have the resources available to make this the most productive golden age our world has ever seen. Today the availability and interactions due to the internet has made it a necessity for critical analysis because of the exponential growth of our knowledge base. Critical thinking is the cornerstone of Inventive thought and should be used as a tool during classroom instruction. We are facing many environmental, industrial, societal and technological problems that will need to be solved by our students and critical thought is essential in developing solutions for these problems.
The links and resources found here will help you as a teacher prepare your students for this exciting future and critically think our society onward and upward for the betterment of all.
