Critical thinking shouldn't just be a happy accident—it’s a skill that can and should be taught with purpose. In this session, participants will explore practical strategies for embedding critical thinking into daily instruction across content areas. We’ll unpack what “critical thinking” really means, examine its key components, and identify common misconceptions that get in the way of teaching it effectively. Educators will learn how to design lessons, questions, and tasks that challenge students to analyze, evaluate, and create—not just recall. Using the CHESS system, attendees will leave with a toolkit of techniques to foster a classroom culture where inquiry thrives, reasoning is valued, and students become confident, independent thinkers prepared for complex problem-solving in any field.
Executive functioning skills (EFS) are the building blocks to a successful person, and yet how purposeful are we in teaching these skills? When a student lacks focus, do we give them strategies for being more focused or do we simply tell them to be more focused? If a student is poor at organization, are we explicitly showing them what well organized looks like? As teachers, especially of the gifted, we need to be overt in teaching these strategies and make students aware of their own weaknesses and potential workarounds for these. EFS are skills that transcend the classroom because they are skills people will be using for the rest of their lives, no matter what line of work they go into. In this lab/workshop, learn about the core 10 EFS, how you can use micro-skills to build student capacity, and how you can intentionally teach these strategies to students.
SESSION REPEATED JULY 16, 9:55 am - 10:50 am, W2103
Learning can sometimes feel very passive in schools. Teachers are the ones with the knowledge, and their task is to pass this along to their students. Or is it? Wouldn't learning be more natural if we allowed the kids to ask the questions and to chase their answers? This is what inquiry learning allows students to do. They pose the question, they decide how they are going to answer it, they choose the product they will produce to show what they know.
Teachers can use four different strategies in order to structure their inquiry learning: · Service-learning •. Project-based learning · Problem-based learning · Case-based learning
Whichever one you choose, inquiry-based involves engaging students in active exploration, reflection, and problem-solving. This approach emphasizes curiosity, questioning, and investigation to deepen understanding and make connections with the real world. Following the inquiry cycle allows children to do this and become learners, not followers.
Particpants in this workshop will learn about all three of these strategies and choose one to design a unit they can use with their students.
