By: Megan Prats

11/3/2015

Critical thinking can be applied to any part of the problem-solving process, including the question.

When the student conjures a question that requires her critical thinking skills, she’s asked an insightful question. Therefore, insightful questions are a critical thinking skill.

An insightful question would be a student who is learning English that asks how the summary on the back of a book should be written so it sells more. In this case, the student wanted to make a cross-disciplinary connection between writing and the laws of economics to understand the writing profession comprehensively so she had to use cross-disciplinary problem-solving even just to see the connection; thus, the student had used her critical thinking skills to make her question and thus asked an insightful one.

In order to develop this skill in the student, first explain to her the order in problem-solving – question, analysis, and answer. Then, let her know that critical thinking can occur even in the question phase. Once she has the right mentality about insightful questions, it is time to develop the student’s critical thinking skills so that she’ll have the tools to create insightful ones. Next, if the student asks an insightful question, make sure to reward her accordingly in her 2learn® Bank.

An insightful question will 99% of the time require critical thinking to solve because the student asked it so she probably doesn’t know the answer, nor how to solve it, and normally questions derived from critical thinking are not the most black and white kind. So, develop this skill in the student and you’ll be having the student doing some of your customized curriculum and critical thinking development work for you!

© Megan Prats 2015