Getting a grip on anything worthwhile isn’t easy. Higher-order thinking isn’t easy, but it’s worthwhile. Engaging learners with it isn’t easy. Is it worthwhile? 

Critical thinking? If you’re a modern, hip, with-it, switched-on teacher (and who isn’t?), you’ve heard, seen, or workshopped something about critical thinking. It’s not a new concept. We’ve all participated in undergrad and postgrad degree courses. 

Organising is the key to becoming a critical thinker. We’re talking 21st-century skills here. Critical thinking, creativity, cooperation and collaboration underpin or should underpin modern teaching and learning.

There are many ways to gather data/information. If you’re a science teacher, you’ll be right across it. If you teach kindergarten, your students still gather information. It’s more of a teacher-directed process than a Year 10 student’s approach, but it is still called gathering.

Organising information is a discrete skill that needs to be explicitly taught. And, it is truly where the magic happens. I’ve had students who prefer organising over the other two. Of course, you can’t organise without information, so they accept that gathering is a necessary evil.

We could spend an entire school year with our students and do nothing more than gather information. What would we have at the end of it? Pages and pages of … not much.

Making sense of our world is something we do daily. As adults, teachers specifically, we not only make sense of our world, we unwrap the world so our students can get a handle on it.

Gather, organise, and communicate. As a process, we use it more than we realise. And we use it without thinking about it. Think weekly shopping–gather a list of items needed at the supermarket.

We humans are great at telling stories. We’ve told each other stories for as long as we’ve had language. Even before that–think of cave drawings and paintings.