Critical Thinking Scenario

To The School Board,

As a curriculum specialist, I recommend that you add a critical thinking curriculum to the five- year plan with a few exceptions. Students would only be required to take the curriculum if their grades were suffering. This would allow students with failing grades to learn how to manage their time and improve their grades. Students with passing grades whose time would be wasted by a critical thinking curriculum would not be required to take it.

Having a separate curriculum would allow students to have a strong foundation in their critical thinking skills so they would know how to work around problems. Trying to integrate a skill as important as critical thinking into other lessons would never allow the student to fully

learn and understand the skill. Beyer writes, “It must also keep the focus on the skill by eliminating or, at least, minimizing interference from the use of complex or unfamiliar subject matter” (277). The curriculum I support would strongly inforce how to carry out the skill into their assignments but also into their daily life and future career.

I understand that various board members may have concerns regarding critical thinking being added to a five year plan as a separate curriculum.

I would like to inform you that I have taken those concerns into account. After thinking about them for some time, I have decided that a separate critical thinking curriculum would nonetheless be the most fitting choice.

A concern of board members I am aware is the teacher’s ability to keep focus on test preparation, worrying about loss of time to teach new content. This is a valid concern, yet not difficult to resolve. The time to teach students to properly use critical thinking skills would not be taken away from learning new content used for final tests, but the students in need of improving their critical thinking skills would have an elective replaced by the critical thinking curriculum, therefore not taking time away from important content.

The proposed curriculum would help to resolve the problem of many of our schools not meeting AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) because in order to carry out the knowledge of content into tests, students need critical thinking skills to understand how to analyze and show their knowledge of information. Setting aside the fundamental basis of learning and using knowledge to learn the content first is not an option. In order to use the knowledge they have, students need a solid understanding of critical thinking

skills.

If the district were to add the proposed curriculum, students would know exactly how to carry out their knowledge of important content into tests and other assessments. The AYP would be improved in every one of our schools, and no time would be wasted learning skills that some students already have. It focuses on helping the students in need of improving their grades and overall improve our district.

Reference:
Beyer, B. (2001). In Costa, A. (Ed.). Developing minds: A resource book for teaching thinking. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.