Helping Your Child Develop their Critical Thinking*

Critical thinking skills can help you to understand, analyse and formulate arguments better. This is a vital life skill needed to make decisions at all levels and can help your child to think like a leader. There are 3 main parts of critical thinking – problem-solving, research and analysis. We have teamed up with a boys school in London to explore how you can build these skills and develop your child’s critical thinking ability.

Brainstorming

Presenting problems to your child that are open to interpretation can help them to exercise their creativity and problem solving by getting them to explore different perspectives. For this, you might use riddles, although you might need to carry out a device search to ensure that there’s no cheating taking place!

Repeat the Process

Now for the analysis. To build your child’s analytical skills you can do the same. Create a table of pros and cons. If you want to, you can also add a column for severity but the premise of this is to get your child to weigh up their ideas using the same technique as before. This will help them to make educated decisions and by repeating this process they can begin to make those decisions much more quickly too.

Fact-Finding

Along the way, your child will need to establish some facts which is where you can introduce them to different tools. This can be books, search engines or people by using effective questioning techniques or demonstrating how to use a glossary. You can also introduce your child to the concept of credibility by getting them to look into their sources by using the same investigative skills.

These are skills that can serve your child well throughout their education and make completing essays a breeze. Through the process, it’s important to be present and use prompts when your child is stuck.