Giving Compass' Take:

• Helen Lee Bouygues explains how educators around the world are teaching critical thinking to protect their students from fake news and misinformation. 

• How can funders help to increase the depth and reach of critical thinking programs? What communities are most in need of this type of training? 

• Learn why critical thinking is essential for 21st-century career readiness. 

In a world full of conflicting, misleading, and even intentionally deceptive claims, there’s an urgent need for people to engage in critical thinking — and our schools need to teach thinking skills early.

Many schools and organizations have been working to develop students’ critical-thinking capacities in recent years, and across these efforts, educators have landed on a few core insights. The most important of these? Critical thinking does not come naturally. Better reasoning must be deliberately cultivated. In short, there’s growing consensus around the world around how to teach smarter thinking, as well as clear evidence that this improves student outcomes.

In the U.S. there’s a lot of talk about the value of critical thinking and its place among what are often called 21st-century skills. In our nation’s highly decentralized school system, however, efforts to actually teach critical thinking have been patchy, despite the fact that approaches are inexpensive and relatively easy to implement. Instead, a number of nonprofit organizations have stepped into the gap.

One powerful approach to critical thinking is How I Decide, an educational nonprofit based in Philadelphia. To help high school students make smarter decisions, the organization has created a series of three- to four-minute-long videos, each of which addresses a concept related to critical thinking. Available online, these videos teach students how to evaluate information, understand probability, and resist cognitive biases.

Teachers at Eltham High School in Australia have developed a structured curriculum organized around promoting critical thinking. Students at Eltham, a large public school northeast of Melbourne, are led through a five-part process as they engage in the interdisciplinary study of English, science, and humanities.

The real-world usefulness of critical thinking is at the heart of another program, the Informed Health Choices curriculum, offered to elementary school students in central Uganda. The ability to think critically about medical claims is important in a country where herbal concoctions and vitamin supplements are advertised as treatments for HIV/AIDS.

Read the full article about teaching critical thinking by Helen Lee Bouygues at The 74.