Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Mistakes are a natural part of learning, but students cannot develop into critical thinkers if they regularly freeze out of the fear of making a mistake. As educators, we can shift the culture of our classrooms to embrace mistakes, and one way to do this is through mistake analysis, one of several powerful but practical strategies I share in my book, Thinking Like a Lawyer: A Practical Framework to Teach Critical Thinking to All Students. As a math-teacher-turned-attorney, I wrote this book and started my organization, thinkLaw, to help educators seamlessly incorporate critical thinking into their curriculum.

Here are some interesting ways of teaching critical thinking skills with any of your students, and in any classroom subject.

Bloom’s Taxonomy’s verbs–also know as power verbs or thinking verbs–are extraordinarily powerful instructional planning tools.

In fact, next to the concept of backward-design and power standards, they are likely the most useful tool a teacher-as-learning-designer has access to. Why?

Critical thinking is the heart and soul of learning, and–in our estimation anyway–ultimately more important to than any one specific content area or subject matter.

It’s also an over-used and rather nebulous phrase — how do you teach someone to think? Of course that’s the purpose of education, but how do you effectively optimize that concept into lasting knowledge and the ability to apply it broadly?

This question is what inspires the creation of seemingly endless learning taxonomies and teaching methods: our desire to pin down a clear definition of what it means to think critically and how to introduce that skill in the classroom. This makes critical thinking questions–well, critical.

In our guide to teaching with analogies, we offered ideas, definitions, categories, and examples of analogies.

This post is a more specific version of that article where we focus specifically on types and examples of analogies rather than looking at teaching with analogies more broadly. Below, we offer more than 20 different types of analogies and examples of type of analogy as well–which results in nearly 100 examples of analogies overall.

Note that because an analogy is simply a pattern established by the nature of a relationship between two ‘things,’ there are an infinite number of kinds of analogies. You could, for example, set up an analogy by pairing two objects only loosely connected–brick and road, for example: a brick is to a road as…

As a culture, we have a thought crisis–namely, a harmful and enduring refusal and/or inability to think well and think critically.

This is just an opinion but I hope not a radical one. To clarify why this crisis exists–or even why I believe it exists–would require a sweeping analysis of cultural, societal, political, and other anthropological terms beyond the scope of TeachThought.

For starters, skim through almost any social media ‘discussion’ about any culturally critical issue. If you disagree that such a crisis exists, the rest of this article will likely not be worth your time. If we can assume that statement to be at least partly true though, we can see that as an industry, then, we have a crisis in education that is both a cause and effect of the above.

Education both causes and is an effect of thought. Education and thought, at least conceptually, are as connected as the architecture of a building and the building itself.

Everybody needs a hobby, so it’s said. But even if you’re busy enough as it is (and what teacher and student isn’t), you can still benefit from exploring this list of creative hobbies for building critical thinking skills. Some of them you may already be doing. If not, consider starting out with one that interests you. Learn about it as much as possible before you dive in—creative hobbies can grow to be more than just a hobby if they resonate with you.