Before taking a critical look at critical thinking, it may be useful to come up with a clear definition of the concept. One way to think about it is to focus on the type of thinking required: “Critical thinking is thinking that is clear, logical, open-minded, and based on evidence.”
We hope you can join us at TESOL 2018! Check out the videos below to hear National Geographic Learning TESOL presenters speak about their upcoming sessions at TESOL 2018 in Chicago. Make sure to sign up for email notifications for daily reminders from National Geographic Learning during TESOL and stop
The idea that, as teachers, we need to foster learners’ creative thinking is something I’m sure you have heard before. So why is there so much attention in our current learning and teaching context on ‘being creative’ and developing thinking skills in the classroom? And are we only talking about
Critical thinking is often associated with teaching students at higher language levels. Perhaps it’s because the kinds of problem-solving tasks which are associated with critical thinking require a level of English at Intermediate or above. Maybe it’s also that the kind of language used to describe critical thinking skills includes
Last time, we examined the psychological need to complete things and make them whole, and how that can be exploited to help students stay motivated. The word ‘need’ is a key term when we’re looking at students’ motivation, of course. At its most fundamental level, motivation is all about wants
When I first started teaching English, there were almost no published materials to teach from. I was teaching academically oriented students, and sadly, focusing a lot on grammar and sentence structure because that was the assigned textbook. Today we are all fortunate to have a wealth of excellent materials to
As many teachers who use ELT titles from National Geographic Learning will be aware, critical thinking is a key feature of the materials and informs our approach to English Language teaching. Now, Life authors Paul Dummett and John Hughes are carrying out research into how critical thinking is applied and
In the last post on memorization, I talked about the role of emotion, stories and personalization. All of these things gave language a better chance of reaching longer-term memory because of their impact on the student – the way they resonated with them on a deeper level. In this post I
In my previous post in this series on quick and simple ways to motivate our students, I looked at setting measurable targets for tasks and classroom activities, the idea being that giving students a specific outcome to aim for leads to a sense of achievement. Part of meeting a measurable
In my previous post, I wrote about playing TED Talks without the sound as a simple hack to control language level. But what happens if we leave the sound on and turn off the pictures? Does that have the opposite effect and raise the level of the input? Not necessarily.