Loading tweets...
Living a purposeful life has a lot to do with decision making skills. We are where we are right now because of our past decisions. Therefore, why leave this area of your life or your children’s lives to chance? School systems may carry one or two courses in critical thinking, and if a student is lucky, he will come across a teacher who can develop critical thinking in his students naturally.
If no attention is placed on a student’s method of reaching conclusions and making decisions, “he may use words and ideas, but not know how to think ideas through, and internalize foundational meanings. He may take classes but cannot make connections between the logic of a discipline and what is important in life. Even the best students often have these deficiencies.” quote from Critical thinking.org
“Critical thinking is important, because it enables one to analyze, evaluate, explain, and restructure our thinking, decreasing thereby the risk of acting on, or thinking with, a false premise.” quote from Wikipedia
Critical Thinking Community. This resource offers plenty of books to buy for home study, from elementary to college level.
Critical Thinking essay at Wikipedia.
Critical Thinking on the Web. This is a huge directory of resources for developing critical thinking and logic skills.
Critical Reading This is a list of ways to tell if your student is a critical thinker.
Developing this skill takes some time and attention. I don’t think I’m going to leave it up to the public schools to turn my middle school student into a critical thinker – I’d rather supplement his education on my own. Some moms decide to homeschool, and there are plenty of resources online to help you develop thinking skills in your student. I learned from Charles Fay, of the Love and Logic Institute, that a great way to respond to your children is to ask, “and how would that work out?” Then leave it up to the child to answer. This forces thinking about differing outcomes for the same event. Here are some other ideas from the Love and Logic Institute:
- Hope they make a poor decision. Children learn to make good choices by making poor ones and experiencing the consequences.
- Let empathy and logical consequences do the teaching. Empathy is the key! By being sad for our kids rather than being angry at them, they are allowed to focus on their poor choice rather than our anger.
This brings up a good point in reference to purposeful parenting. When our children make choices based on whether Mom or Dad will be angry, they are missing valuable chances to learn how to think critically. If anger is the motivating factor in any relationship, the communication suffers on both sides. So parents, think again before saying things like “just wait till your father gets home.” “Don’t make me angry!” and “If you do that, I’ll be so angry with you.”
Try to turn it around like this: “are you ready for the consequences?”, “I’m so sad you decided to do that, because now you will have consequences,” and “how will that work out for you?”
Try delving further with some of the resource links above for more information.
5 comments
Mckay K says:
October 27, 2008 at 5:04 pm (UTC -7 )
I like the idea of letting children learn by the decisions they make. Giving them the chance to chose the outcome of “If I chose this, this will happen and If I chose that, that will happen” challenges their brain and makes them responsible for the end result.It certainly teaches them to think a problem all the way through.
Jessica says:
October 27, 2008 at 5:17 pm (UTC -7 )
Thanks, Mckay. This approach tends to create children who can think for themselves. Mr. Fay at Love and Logic has a phrase, “helicopter parents”, to describe the types of parents who like to rescue children from their own mistakes (because they are always hovering over the kids like helicopters). This teaches the children to depend on mommy to fix it!
Christina Crease says:
October 28, 2008 at 11:34 pm (UTC -7 )
Decision making is a very thoughtful task. And before taking any decision you should have to thought about that, so that you could make it in the right sense as it can influence your future also
Jessica says:
October 29, 2008 at 8:10 am (UTC -7 )
I would certainly love to be able to carefully consider every decision I make! But it sometimes turns out that I make the decision too quickly. It’s the ‘teaching ourselves to stop and consider’ that’s the trick! For instance, if one is used to gossiping, then the hardest thing to do is catch oneself BEFORE opening one’s mouth!
www.apaju-tuerkei.de says:
March 13, 2009 at 4:58 am (UTC -7 )
I found your topic “Living On Purpose » Blog Archive » Critical thinking” when i was searching for critical illness quote and it is really intresting for me. If its OK for you i would like to translate your topic and post it on my german blog about critical illness quote. I link back to your topic of course!