At our son’s high school, classes were small and students needed to be prepared each day to sit around a table to discuss their lessons using questions and answers to probe underlying assumptions–even math and the sciences were taught this way. The purpose was to get students thinking about the issues at hand and the problems they were trying to solve before attempting to try to solve them. On a thread in the prep school forum, a poster was describing the difficulty their freshman was having with a teacher whose methods in a physics-first curriculum were difficult to adjust to. My reply was relevant to this topic of teaching critical-thinking skills:
After four years of this method of thinking hard and discussing before doing, he got a sense of how to approach problems, consider them from many angles, and understand that there was often more than one way to solve a problem or more than one solution or, better yet, that the actual solution was trivial after the problem was well dissected. I remember being blown away in a math class one parents weekend watching three students go to the board and solve a problem correctly using three very different approaches and then spending the next hour discussing those approaches. Very different from the one-right-way method/formula I was taught in HS.
Our kid is now a college sophomore in a rigorous program. He was so well-equipped to hit the ground running due to well-developed critical-thinking skills. He’s breezing through and, for much of that, I thank his HS educators, and he does, too.