On Friday, Assistant English Director Sheila Curlin stopped by my desk to share an article that got her excited about something that we’re doing at LTF: teaching critical thinking.

Wait, what does that even mean? And how can we claim to be accomplishing that?

In Getting Specific about Critical Thinking, Daniel McMahon points out the ambiguous nature of the term “critical thinking.” Writes McMahon, “Everyone supports the idea of teaching students to ‘think critically,’ but I’ve met very few teachers and administrators … who have a clear idea of what they want students to do when they engage in ‘critical thinking.’”

McMahon, a world literature teacher, goes on to delineate what critical thinking means in his class. He breaks down critical thinking into four groups of skills—inferential, predictive-validity, observation and close-reading, and pattern-recognition—and then gives specific examples of how he uses flood stories to teach pattern recognition, and works by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Plato, and Shiga Naoya to teach predictive validity. In this model, critical thinking is not an objective but rather a goal. For each academic discipline, specific targets within the general goal are essential.

LTF lessons hit the nail on the head when it comes to detailing objectives and strategies for teaching under the umbrellas of critical thinking. Putting it All Together—Tone Analysis, a middle school English lesson, exemplifies this, particularly in an overview in the first two pages of the lesson. (An added bonus: the lesson shows how it’s tied to the Common Core State Standards!)

“After reading [McMahon’s] article, I know that teachers who embrace LTF and use the lessons and strategies they learn in training ARE teaching critical thinking skills,” says Curlin. “Nice to have some validation on a point that is sometimes vague.”