20 Jan 22
I have given a little insight into my thought processes and my training philosophies thus far. Today, I am looking to give you a glimpse at how I personally take these processes out of the military context and have been applying them in my life with my own kids.
Now, if you have paid attention to my previous posts, you will notice that the majority of my practice has been with andragogy; that is the teaching of adult learners. The field of pedagogy was not something that I chose to do but when my wife and I started having kids it was obviously something I was forced in to. I have a few reasons why I have chosen andragogy as a profession vice pedagogy, but I’ll save that for another post.
So, the theme today will be, how do you teach critical thinking to children? Spoiler alert, I DO NOT use the same practices to the degree of severity I used with my adult students…
Some background first. I have three children. Amelia is my oldest and is almost 6-years old. John Junior is my middle child and he slides in at 4-years old. Finally, Mary is my youngest hopping around at just 2-years old. It is interesting around my house on a daily basis and that means there is no lack of lessons to be taught and learned.
Remember when I said that the best thing about being a teacher is being able to continue learning from all of your students? Well, I have three little students that are teaching me a ton about teaching!
Let’s set some ground rules here. While I don’t think there is a minimum age to start teaching critical thinking there are some obvious communication barriers that one would have to work through to teach a child critical thinking when you aren’t able to carry on a conversation. That being said, we taught our children very basic sign language when they were growing up so we could understand each other better and establish some sort of communication. I highly recommend this if you have little ones! So, where there is a will there is certainly a way. For me though, I didn’t worry about teaching critical thinking to my children until they were a little older. Roughly around 3-3.5 years of age for my children.
At this age my kids understood right from wrong, they were also very inquisitive and curious, and could carry on a more than basic conversation with us. (more than yes and no with actual full-on sentences) For me that is an important baseline as I did not have any interest in forcing things on them too young and still want them to have plenty of room to just be a kid.
Let’s start with a why. Why do I feel it is important to teach critical thinking to my children? Well, to be frank, I think there are way too many kids out there that just don’t have any of these skills at all right now. It is also a good survival skill to keep adapting over time. Most importantly, I want my children to understand it is okay to try new things but they need to think through it first in order to predict what the outcome is going to be. If you don’t think those things are important for your kids, you can just stop reading now because this blog won’t help you out at all.
Now that is out of the way, let’s get to the how. I choose to teach critical thinking to my children in small doses. Think of these as those little lessons that hopefully stick with them throughout life. (emphasis on hopefully) The key here, is trying to get ahead of them getting hurt in order to have them recognize the situation and then react appropriately. However, that isn’t always the case and sometimes kids get hurt and the lesson comes after the tears have subsided. With that, I’ll give you two examples on some approaches with scenarios using my kids.
Teaching after the incident:
I treat these incidents like a military debrief. Once we have the bumps and bruises tended to and the appropriate amount of hugs, cuddles, and kisses have been applied to subside the tears we usually get a chance to walk through the “what happened” part of the story. With my kids, I attempt to take a moment to remind them that they are not in trouble and that they aren’t going to be in any more trouble, if that was an issue, for talking through the “what happened.” This is a huge difference from the adult approach but the intent is still the same: reconstruct the event in order to find contributing factors and formulate a lesson learned (next week we will go into detail on this).
So, through reconstruction we get to pick out little clues about what happened and have tiny lessons on how to make that not happen next time.
Example:
Amelia is pretending to be a ghost and is chasing her brother. She took a blanket and covered herself from head to toe and began chasing him. Me, not really seeing a huge issue with their little game in the living room, enjoyed them running back and forth and Amelia scaring Junior as she unmasked herself with the blanket every now and then. It escalated to actual chasing at some point. Again, knowing that now the risk factor has gone up I gave a warning to Amelia that she needed to be careful because she couldn’t see where she was running. Of course, in her haste to make sure she could catch her brother and scare her, she probably ignored me. Within a span of about a minute, as she disappeared out of my eyesight I heard a classic thud, followed by an additional thud, then the crying started.
I slowly got up from my chair and went to go figure out what had happened. There was Amelia, laying on the dining room floor in a pile with her ghost blanket under her. I scooped her up as she was wailing at this point, saw the mark on her forehead from where she cut the corner from the dinging room into the kitchen a little too close. The wall didn’t move, if you were wondering. We tended to her wounds and sat for a little while before starting our “debrief.”
As she sat with me I began my process. I asked her if she remembered me saying that she needed to be careful. Her reply was yes and then a ton of excuses followed about how she was trying to catch her brother or something. I paused her line of thought and reminded her of what I said. I then asked her a simple question. “Amelia, do you know why I told you to be careful?” Her response was surprising to me because I thought this was a rhetorical question but she replied, “No sir.” Oh, okay so now the teaching gets to start.
I explained to her that usually mommy and daddy give warnings because we have probably done the same things that they are doing before and it ended badly for us. I got a good nod out of that which meant that I could continue teaching.
So, I asked her if she has ever ran into the wall while just running around the house? I got a chuckle and a no for a response. I then inquired with her as to why she thought she had made it so long without running into the wall at that very spot. She paused and thought about it a minute which was awesome for me. What I see when this is happening are her little gears turning in her head. She reminded me at the end of a long pause that she didn’t see the wall this time. So that let’s me continue to dig deeper. “Do you know why you couldn’t see the wall sweetheart?” She replies, “because I had a blanket over my head.” I ecstatically respond, “YES! That’s’ right.”
Why is this important and how is it teaching her critical thinking? My little girl was able to reconstruct the event, with some coaching, and figure out why she go hurt. Not just that she ran into the wall, but why she ran into the wall. This is the foundation of her critical thinking toolset. Learning how to debrief the event in order to arrive at a root cause for the problem.
So, we then talk about the root cause that she discovered and come up with a fix together. For her, she came up with a rule to not run around the house when her eyes are covered anymore. Furthermore, her lesson learned was to make sure that if she was playing ghost that she would pull the blanket up over her eyes so she could see before running. That was all without any prompting at all.
Teaching before the events:
With children, I think this is probably harder than the debrief method mentioned previously. This involves you seeing a moment and being able get some of their attention in order to teach pre-event. To that, I say good luck!
When you do find one of these moments explaining the why in terms they understand is extremely important. You also have to relate it to things that they are going to understand.
Junior is probably the most curious of all of my kids. This little dude consistently asks 1000 questions a day and overall, just wants to know how things work. For him, critical thinking seems to come naturally and he has what I like to call “an engineer’s brain.” That doesn’t mean that he has nothing to learn though.
Junior and I were visiting the air park located on my base that has the historical, full-scale, aircraft flown by our base throughout history. There we had an F-16 on display and he was a little freaked out that it was a real airplane that could take off. I took this moment to teach him why that was an irrational fear. I walked him around to the back of the jet where the engine terminates and where the afterburners would be kicking out if it were real. To his amazement we could see all the way through the front of the plane and there was no more fear. So, I asked him if he knew why we could see to the front and he didn’t really know. So, I explained to him that the engine was taken out. That is what makes the plane have enough speed to fly through the air really fast. I didn’t think that would sink in too much but I did take it as a small lesson for him. He then asked about the big C-130 and couldn’t tell where its engines were. I pointed to the 4 propeller blades across the wings and told him those propellers are attached to the four engines and that is what makes it go through the sky. He was still amazed by it all and we left the lesson at that for the day.
Fast-forward almost six months later we are at Tyndall AFB with my Dad and were visiting their Air Park near the front gate. Junior, out of nowhere began explaining to his sister that “these planes are fake because you can see all the way through the engines.” WOW! This kid was able to take a small lesson from six months ago and apply it to a similar scenario down the road.
Take Aways:
While these two micro events in my children’s lives may seem pale in comparison to the events I shared previously with my adult students. They are still elements that help me continue to develop my kids brains to think through problem sets. Amelia, was able to think through a situation that just happened and put together a fix for how she was going to attempt to prevent it the next time it happened. Junior was able to discern the difference between a real plane and a fake plane to get over an irrational fear that the airplane was just going to take off while we were standing beside it.
These small lessons help my little ones’ brains continue to develop and think through things. We have had conversations about why the lights are different colors on a light tree while driving. We have talked about the different colored signs on the road and what they mean. We have talked about real guns vs fake guns. We have talked about why we leave lights on in the house when we leave for long weekends. We have talked about a ton of things that just keep their brains thinking and continuing to ask the “why” of both Liz and I.
The biggest thing to learn about teaching your kids or any child elements of critical thinking is that they will be encouraged to ask why a lot more. Instead of getting annoyed or upset that they are asking why, we choose to give them answers. Maybe they will understand them, maybe they won’t, but the important thing is that we are teaching them to think!
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