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This month we are featuring the Critical Thinking Consortium's new suite of resources for supporting transformative thinking habits. As learners continue to face intersecting challenges of climate crisis, systemic injustices, and misinformation, they require thinking habits to help them navigate with clarity and compassion.
The seven essential thinking habits provide a framework to support young peoples' critically minded engagement with complex issues.
The goal of the suite is to support educators in building cultures of quality thinking within their classrooms, families, and communities. The suite supports educators and learners in growing communities of quality thinkers and strengthening quality thinking competencies.
The first resource, Thinking Habits for a Challenging World: Nurturing Transformative Thinking for Flourishing Futures, introduces the seven foundational thinking habits. Thinking habits are inclinations, attitudes, and dispositions that shape young peoples' approaches to navigating challenges. The habits include critically minded, inquiry minded, accepting of discomfort in learning, holistically minded, visionary, thinking relationally, and courageous.
Each concept if fully defined. For example, the thinking habit accepting of discomfort in learning refers to an openness to sitting with tension, uncertainty, and complexity as part of growth, transformation, and seeking truth. The thinking habit holistically minded refers to thinking that connects intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical dimensions of wellbeing.
Critical Thinking Consortium's Resources
Continuing Teacher Education Course Connections
Check out these courses to learn more about how to support critical thinking habits in young people:
Submitted by
Rebecca Evans, OCT, Academic Manager, Continuing Teacher Education, Queen’s University. Rebecca teaches history of education and outdoor and environmental education to pre-service teachers. Her research interests include civic learning in community organizations; youth climate action; and outdoor learning.