QuickTips: Promoting Critical Thinking Skills in Young Learners

Happy Thursday, readers! For today’s post, I want to share a helpful infographic with some great tips on supporting the development of preschoolers’ thinking skills–the foundation of their future academic success. Created with information from the book Engaging Young Engineers: Teaching Problem-Solving Skills Through STEM, this free printable gives you easy-to-implement strategies for helping young learners become:

• Curious thinkers who actively explore people and things, especially the new and novel, and eventually abstract ideas.
• Persistent thinkers who actively take risks and repeat their experiments over and over to verify results and look for new outcomes. They remain with an activity for a sustained period of time to try to solve the problem or understand the problem better.
• Flexible thinkers who pause and decide what to do next rather than simply reacting immediately to something perceived in the environment.
• Reflective thinkers who acknowledge what actions they have already taken and what data they have already gathered to make a decision. They evaluate those actions and data to determine whether or not they are a step closer to answering a question or designing a solution.
• Collaborative thinkers who work together effectively, asking questions, pooling information, contributing to and critiquing concepts and ideas, and jointly testing solutions.

Click the image below to see the full infographic, and please share it around if you like it!

Want more QuickTips? Visit the archive here.