What Critical Thinking Means for Students
There are many ways to learn, but not all are created equal. There's no shortage of tools, techniques, and methods to use to teach and learn. Which is most powerful, though? Which has a lasting impact on students of all backgrounds, abilities, and interests? That lasting impact means critical learning has been achieved.
At The Wilson School, we embrace integrated learning as the primary method for teaching our students. From our founding in 1913 as The Wilson-Froebelian Kindergarten Institute, we've held certain principles at the core of our school - involved children in activities that have purpose and meaning; and develop capabilities of each child: creative, linguistic, mathematical, musical, aesthetic, scientific, physical, social, moral, and cultural.
What leads to critical learning?
Integrated learning has been shown time and again to not only help students learn information but more than that, truly understand it. It helps them develop a more intimate knowledge of the topic or content. For instance, our sixth-grade students don't just read and memorize information about the Civil Rights Movement as part of their curriculum. While exploring literature, art, history, and more, Wilson students learn what it means to identify injustices, inequities, and barriers in society. They develop ideas and hypotheses as to what may be causing such barriers and consider potential solutions.
It doesn't stop there. Wilson sixth graders then travel to Little Rock, Arkansas, and visit some of the specific sites that have made their way into textbooks. The students are physically in the places they've read about, discussed, and explored. While gazing upon the steps leading to Central High School the students' research, discussion, and experience coalesce for a critical learning moment. Touched with a truer understanding of the courage from the Little Rock Nine, Wilson students come away with a lasting commitment to equality.
Such learning experiences are so impactful because integrated learning maximizes student engagement.
How engagement increases the value of learning
By engaging students in their learning journey, student motivation increases and off-task, distracting behaviors decrease. They learn persistence, grow in confidence, and develop advanced social skills. Student engagement leads to understanding that sticks, those criticial learning moments which last a lifetime. At The Wilson School, our staff works to engage our students with regard to the desired outcomes that will equip them for life years after they've graduated.
Some ways our students at Wilson benefit from integrated learning approaches include:
-
Wrestling with mistakes and learning to persevere
-
Developing unique and individual thoughts
-
Learning to deliver ideas through public speaking
-
Building self-confidence and awareness
-
Understanding how social, moral, and cultural dynamics interact
-
Learning to use the tools available to them to accomplish their goals
-
Knowing what they’re doing will impact other areas of their life
Coding is a great example of how students develop through engagement. When building a program to animate something in a digital environment, a second grader may have difficulty getting it to perform like it's supposed to. This could be due to a grammatical error in their code, a missing tag, or the completely wrong formula to begin with. Instead of just copying and pasting a solution, the student has to try different solutions and come to understand why it's not working like they expect. When the student gets the right combination of code they've learned in class and have properly implemented it, they have an "aha" moment. This is another critical learning moment when they will have learned something for life: Not specifically the actual code itself, but more importantly, the process it took to understand their mistake, how it impacted their project, and what they did to achieve the success they desired.
Collaboration and community
Wilson students are engaged at every level and exposed to cultures and environments that they wouldn't experience in a school that doesn't embrace integrated learning and high engagement.
Third graders at Wilson go through a block of learning that lets them explore the natural water cycle. While this is something that has been taught in schools around the country for a very long time, our students partner on the project with a school in a different country. That school also explores the water cycle, but through a different lens as their access to water is drastically different than what our own students experience. This collaboration allows students from both schools to explore not only the water cycle, but ways to conserve water, how to produce and gain access to clean water, and how to educate others on the needs and benefits of clean water practices.
Students at The Wilson School learn very quickly they are not just being taught something; they themselves are the key to their learning. The more they engage, the more they learn. The more they learn through integrated learning, the more they develop other soft skills they will have with them for life.
In your own life as an adult, it's likely you've discovered you learn better in your job by experiencing a problem and having to develop a solution on your own, versus just reading a solution and then moving on to the next thing. Children are no different. When you watch your child learning, look for the critical learning moments that occur when they're exploring the topic at a deeper level rather than just hearing information and repeating it.
A student at The Wilson School is better prepared to tackle challenges and obstacles in all areas of their life because they're taught how to think, explore, and develop ideas and solutions that have real impact.