I have been thinking about learning skills.

Not Mathematics skills.

Not English skills.

Not Science skills.

The skills underneath those skills.

The things a learner does when they meet something they do not understand.

And somewhere in the middle of thinking about this, I became slightly annoyed with the phrase:

critical thinking skills.

Yes.

This is going to be a bit of a rant.

But hear me out.

What Exactly Is Critical Thinking?

We use the phrase everywhere.

Schools want students to develop critical thinking.

Universities want critical thinkers.

Employers want critical thinkers.

Parents want children who can think critically.

Excellent.

What exactly should the child do at 4:17 pm on Tuesday?

Think harder?

Be more critical?

Criticise the question?

Wait until the situation becomes critical and then start thinking?

To be fair, that is not what researchers mean by the term. A foundational expert consensus defined critical thinking as purposeful, self-regulated judgement involving things such as interpretation, analysis, evaluation and inference. (ERIC)

Fine.

That makes sense.

But I still have a teaching problem.

I cannot hand a ten-year-old:

PURPOSEFUL SELF-REGULATORY JUDGEMENT

and say:

Off you go.

It is a description of something sophisticated.

It is not yet a usable set of moves.

And perhaps that is where my irritation really sits.

Not with critical thinking itself.

With the way we sometimes take a very abstract destination and pretend we have taught the road simply by naming the destination.

Perhaps We Are Starting Too Late

Think about the word critical.

Again, I know what researchers mean by it.

But pedagogically, I wonder whether the phrase causes us to begin at the wrong point.

Because before I can critically evaluate something, I may have a much simpler problem.

I don’t understand it.

Before:

Is this claim valid?

perhaps I need:

What is this claim actually saying?

Before:

Which evidence is strongest?

perhaps:

What counts as evidence here?

Before:

Compare these two models.

perhaps:

I only understand one of them.

Before the sophisticated thinking begins, the learner has to locate themselves.

And that may be the skill we have not named clearly enough.

Nope. Let Me Start Again.

So for this reflection, I am going to call the larger thing:

Intelligence Skills

Not IQ.

Not whether somebody is “intelligent.”

Not a fixed ranking of children.

Not genius.

I mean something much more practical.

The skills we use to improve our position when we do not yet know what to do.

That is the working definition.

And immediately, this becomes much more interesting to me.

Because now intelligence is not:

I know the answer.

It can begin with:

I realise I do not understand the problem yet.

That is a skill.

Perhaps one of the most important ones.

The First Intelligence Skill May Be Detecting Ignorance

This sounds almost ridiculous.

Surely everybody knows when they do not know something.

I am not convinced.

Students regularly say:

I understand.

Then I change the question slightly.

Gone.

Or:

I studied this already.

Then I close the notes.

Gone.

Or:

I know how to do fractions.

Then the fraction appears inside an unfamiliar word problem.

Gone.

There is a difference between:

feeling familiar with something

and

being able to reconstruct and use it.

Research on metacognition has studied exactly this problem: learners need to monitor what they know, plan what to do, and evaluate whether their strategy actually worked. People can also become overconfident about material that feels familiar during study but cannot later be retrieved under test conditions. (tll.mit.edu)

So perhaps Skill 1 is not:

KNOW.

It is:

NOTICE WHAT I DON’T KNOW.

That is surprisingly difficult.

Imagine How Different Studying Becomes

Student A opens the book.

Reads Chapter 5.

Everything looks familiar.

Yes, yes, yes. I know this.

Study finished.

Student B does something different.

Closes the book.

Tries to explain Chapter 5.

Stops halfway.

Interesting.

Now the student has found something.

"I thought I knew this."
↓
"I cannot explain this part."
↓
"THIS is where I need to work."

The second student may temporarily feel less intelligent.

But they are actually in a much better position.

They have acquired a coordinate.

They know where the darkness begins.

That is leverage.

Maybe Intelligence Begins With Position

This is the word I keep coming back to.

Position.

When we meet a difficult situation, the first thing we often want is the solution.

But perhaps the first job is to improve our position relative to the problem.

Imagine being lost.

A bad question is:

Which way should I walk?

A better first question may be:

Where am I?

Then:

Where am I trying to go?

What information do I have?

What information is missing?

Which direction is definitely wrong?

What landmark can I identify?

Who could tell me more?

Now action becomes possible.

Education might work similarly.

A Student Does Not Always Need The Answer

Sometimes they need a better position from which an answer can become possible.

That may mean:

learning a missing word,

drawing the problem,

finding an example,

retrieving an earlier concept,

asking a better question,

breaking the problem apart,

looking for evidence,

comparing two possibilities,

testing an assumption.

Each move changes the student’s position.

LOST
↓
one useful distinction
↓
better representation
↓
one missing fact located
↓
possible route appears
↓
test
↓
movement

That looks like intelligence to me.

Not a mysterious quality floating above the learner.

A sequence of buildable moves.

The Problem With Telling Someone To Think Critically

Imagine a child cannot solve a Mathematics word problem.

I say:

Think critically.

What should happen next?

Nothing useful is specified.

But I could teach:

What do you know?

What don’t you know?

What is the question asking you to find?

Which information changes something?

Can you draw the relationship?

What assumption are you making?

What happens if that assumption is wrong?

Can you estimate what the answer should roughly look like?

Now “thinking” has handles.

The abstract thing is becoming executable.

Perhaps This Is Why Thinking Skills Sometimes Become Fanciful

We can invent wonderful words.

Critical thinking.

Creativity.

Problem solving.

Metacognition.

Resilience.

Higher-order thinking.

Adaptive expertise.

They may describe important things.

But a child cannot necessarily perform an abstraction.

The teacher has to decompose it.

Researchers studying self-regulated learning do something similar: broad successful learning is broken into processes such as planning, monitoring, strategy selection, adjustment and evaluation. (PubMed Central (PMC))

That is useful.

Because now we can practise the parts.

Intelligence Skill 1: Locate The Unknown

Start here.

What don’t I understand?

Not:

I don’t understand Mathematics.

Too large.

Where?

The equation?

The vocabulary?

The diagram?

Why this operation is being used?

What the question means?

The relationship between two quantities?

Now the fog has edges.

"I DON'T UNDERSTAND"
↓
too large
↓
"I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY
THESE TWO QUANTITIES
ARE BEING DIVIDED"
↓
workable

That is already an improvement in intelligence.

The student has transformed a vague failure into a specific problem.

Intelligence Skill 2: Break The Problem

Big problems are often unusable.

So break them.

What can I solve?

What cannot I solve?

What is certain?

What is uncertain?

Which part depends on which other part?

This is not particularly glamorous.

But it changes everything.

A student says:

I don’t understand this Science question.

Fine.

Which word?

Which sentence?

Which phenomenon?

Which relationship?

What do you understand?

Often the student discovers:

Actually, I understand almost all of it. I don’t understand this one part.

Excellent.

The monster just became smaller.

Intelligence Skill 3: Change Representation

This may be one of the most powerful.

Words are not working?

Draw it.

Diagram not working?

Use objects.

Numbers confusing?

Put them on a number line.

Science explanation vague?

Draw the mechanism.

A historical sequence confusing?

Build a timeline.

We already know learning can benefit when students actively generate explanations, and self-explanation has a substantial research history as a way of deepening understanding. (ScienceDirect)

But I think the larger principle is:

If one representation traps you, move the problem into another representation.

That is an Intelligence Skill.

Intelligence Skill 4: Retrieve Before Receiving More

This one is important.

When confused, our instinct is often:

read again.

Watch another video.

Ask the teacher to explain again.

Receive more information.

Sometimes that is exactly right.

But sometimes we should first ask:

What can I reconstruct without help?

Retrieval practice has repeatedly been shown to strengthen later retention; testing memory is not only measurement, it can itself produce learning. (PubMed)

And diagnostically it does something else.

It exposes the void.

Now I know what is missing.

Intelligence Skill 5: Ask Better Questions

“I don’t get it.”

Useful start.

But perhaps we can teach the learner to improve the question.

Instead of:

I don’t understand fractions.

Try:

Why does the value increase when I divide by a smaller fraction?

Or:

Why do we need the same denominator before adding?

Now somebody can actually help.

Question quality changes access to knowledge.

The learner has moved from:

HELP ME

to:

HELP ME HERE

That difference is enormous.

Intelligence Skill 6: Test What You Think

The student says:

I think this is because…

Good.

Now test it.

What would we expect to see if your explanation were true?

Can you find a counterexample?

Can we change one thing?

Does the rule survive?

Now we are getting closer to what people usually call critical thinking.

Analysis.

Evaluation.

Inference.

But notice how many moves came before it.

The learner first had to understand enough of the object to have something meaningful to test.

Critical thinking is important.

I just don’t think it owns the whole journey.

Intelligence Skill 7: Know When A Tool Has Failed

This one might be surprisingly advanced.

Students often persist with the first method they know.

Question difficult?

Use formula.

Doesn’t work?

Use formula harder.

Still doesn’t work?

Panic.

But intelligence may include:

This route is not producing progress.

Change.

Remember our hammer.

If every problem is a nail, the only response is:

WHACK.

But learning needs a toolkit.

TRY
↓
observe
↓
not working
↓
change tool

That change is not failure.

It is regulation.

Intelligence Skill 8: Use Strength To Route Around Weakness

This connects directly to the pothole.

Reading route blocked?

Use diagram, conversation, observation or demonstration while repairing reading.

Language weak in the Mathematics problem?

Use the mathematical representation to help reconstruct the words.

A student does not need to solve every weakness before movement can continue.

They need to know how to use what is available.

That is leverage.

And maybe leverage is a better word than brilliance.

Intelligence Skill 9: Compare Reality With Expectation

I predicted this.

What happened?

Different.

Interesting.

Why?

That gap is information.

Students often treat wrong answers as endpoints.

Red cross.

Move on.

But perhaps an intelligent learner asks:

What did I expect?

What actually happened?

What assumption created the difference?

Now error becomes telemetry.

The world has answered back.

Listen.

Intelligence Skill 10: Update

This may be the hardest skill of all.

I thought X.

Evidence now suggests Y.

Can I change my mind?

Can I change the method?

Can I abandon something I spent twenty minutes building?

Can I admit:

That route was wrong.

This is partly critical thinking.

Partly metacognition.

Partly emotional regulation.

Partly intellectual humility.

But whatever label we use, it is buildable through repeated practice.

A classroom can normalise:

CLAIM
↓
TEST
↓
RESULT
↓
UPDATE

That is an extraordinary habit to give a child.

So Intelligence Skills Might Be A Loop

Perhaps something like:

NOTICE
What don't I understand?
↓
LOCATE
Where exactly is the gap?
↓
REPRESENT
Can I make the problem clearer?
↓
RETRIEVE
What do I already know?
↓
CONNECT
What might be relevant?
↓
SELECT
What should I try?
↓
ACT
Run the attempt.
↓
OBSERVE
What happened?
↓
COMPARE
Did reality match expectation?
↓
UPDATE
Keep, repair, change or abandon.
↓
TRANSFER
Can I use what I learned somewhere else?

Now intelligence looks less mystical.

It is still enormously complicated.

But at least we have components.

And components can be practised.

This Is Where Research Gives Me Some Confidence

I don’t think we can simply declare:

Here are ten universal Intelligence Skills and science has proven them.

No.

That would be another fanciful leap.

There is an active research literature around metacognition, self-regulated learning, retrieval, self-explanation, critical thinking and transfer. These provide evidence that important parts of this loop can be taught and improved. (PubMed Central (PMC))

But transfer is the difficult part.

Knowing how to think well in one domain does not guarantee effortless thinking everywhere else. Knowledge of the domain matters, and researchers emphasise that transfer needs to be deliberately supported rather than assumed. (Cambridge University Press)

That actually fits what I see as a teacher.

A student can be an excellent strategic thinker in a computer game and still be completely lost in fractions.

They possess some useful machinery.

But the machinery does not automatically know how to plug into every new world.

That connection itself has to be learned.

So Intelligence Skills Cannot Replace Knowledge

This matters.

I do not want to create another fashionable argument that says:

Facts don’t matter anymore. Just teach thinking.

No.

Thinking needs something to think with.

A student cannot critically evaluate a scientific claim while knowing no Science.

They cannot analyse a historical argument while knowing no history.

They cannot choose an efficient mathematical representation if they possess very little Mathematics.

Knowledge builds the terrain.

Intelligence Skills help the learner navigate the terrain.

We need both.

KNOWLEDGE
without navigation
=
large warehouse, poor routing
NAVIGATION
without knowledge
=
excellent driver, empty map

Education needs content and movement.

Perhaps We Have Been Teaching Subjects Without Teaching Navigation

This is where I think the idea becomes interesting.

English teaches English.

Mathematics teaches Mathematics.

Science teaches Science.

Fine.

But who teaches:

What do I do when I don’t understand?

How do I locate a gap?

How do I test whether I really know something?

How do I choose another representation?

How do I recover after a failed method?

How do I decide what to learn next?

How do I know whether a correction actually worked?

Perhaps some excellent teachers do this constantly.

But it may remain invisible.

The student learns the behaviour without anybody naming it.

Maybe we can make more of it visible.

The Learning Skill Is Abstract

You cannot hold:

metacognition

in your hand.

You cannot point at:

adaptive problem solving

on a worksheet.

That is the difficulty.

These are abstractions over many behaviours.

But abstraction does not mean unbuildable.

Walking is also an abstraction if we describe it as:

coordinated bipedal locomotion.

The child does not learn the abstract phrase.

They learn:

balance,

stand,

step,

fall,

correct,

step again.

Eventually:

walking.

Perhaps thinking skills have the same problem.

We keep naming the walking.

We need to teach more of the steps.

Maybe That Is The Rant

When someone says:

We must teach children critical thinking skills.

I increasingly want to reply:

Wonderful. Show me Tuesday’s lesson.

What does the student do?

What changes?

What does the teacher observe?

How do we know the skill improved?

What does it look like one month later?

Can the student use it in Science?

Mathematics?

A disagreement?

A bad internet claim?

A completely unfamiliar problem?

If we cannot answer those questions, perhaps we have an aspiration rather than a curriculum.

A good aspiration.

But still an aspiration.

Intelligence Skills Might Give Us Smaller Objects

I am beginning to prefer questions like:

Can the student identify what they do not understand?

Can they separate known from unknown?

Can they ask a discriminating question?

Can they change representation?

Can they retrieve without prompts?

Can they generate an explanation?

Can they test an assumption?

Can they notice a failed strategy?

Can they choose another?

Can they explain why the new route is better?

Can they update after contradictory evidence?

Can they transfer the move into another problem?

Now I can teach something.

And observe something.

And perhaps build something.

This Also Changes What A Wrong Answer Means

A wrong answer can still contain good Intelligence Skills.

The student:

identified the problem,

formed a model,

selected a method,

tested it,

observed failure,

located the incorrect assumption,

updated.

Wrong first answer.

Excellent learning episode.

Another student might produce the correct answer because they copied the teacher’s method without understanding anything.

Correct answer.

Very little independent navigation.

Marks matter.

But education needs to see both.

Maybe Intelligence Is Not Always About Being Right

Perhaps it is partly about becoming better at getting yourself into a position where right becomes more likely.

That is a different formulation.

I like it.

You may begin completely ignorant.

Fine.

Can you detect that?

Can you find useful information?

Can you decide what matters?

Can you build a model?

Can you test it?

Can you learn from the return?

Then your state changes.

You may still not have the final answer.

But you are no longer where you began.

That is progress.

This Is What The Teacher Can Build

The teacher cannot install intelligence like software.

But we can repeatedly create situations where these moves are required.

Student says:

I don’t know.

Instead of immediately answering:

Which part don’t you know?

Student gives an answer.

How could we test it?

Student gets stuck.

What other representation could we use?

Student makes the same error.

What pattern do you notice?

Student asks for help.

What have you already tried?

Student succeeds.

Would this still work if I changed this?

Now we are teaching the subject.

But perhaps we are also building the navigation machinery.

Eventually The Questions Should Move Inside The Student

At first:

TEACHER:
What do you know?

Later:

STUDENT:
What do I know?

At first:

TEACHER:
Can you draw it?

Later:

STUDENT:
Maybe I should draw this.

At first:

TEACHER:
How do you know?

Later:

STUDENT:
Wait. What is my evidence?

That transfer matters enormously.

The external teacher is gradually becoming an internal process.

Perhaps that is one form of education working.

And Now Critical Thinking Returns

After all that ranting, I don’t want to throw critical thinking away.

The research term is useful.

Interpret.

Analyse.

Evaluate.

Infer.

Explain.

Judge.

Excellent.

But I now see it as part of something larger.

Critical thinking becomes especially important when we already possess enough information to evaluate competing claims or possible actions.

But another intelligence skill may happen earlier:

I do not yet know enough to judge.

That sentence may sometimes be more intelligent than a very confident critical analysis.

Perhaps the student first needs to acquire.

Then represent.

Then connect.

Then test.

Then judge.

Different state.

Different move.

The Main Problem May Be Navigation

I think this is where I currently land.

Humans constantly encounter situations in which we do not know enough.

The problem is not simply lack of knowledge.

The problem is:

What do I do next?

How do I move from:

I DON'T KNOW

to:

I KNOW WHAT I NEED TO FIND OUT

then:

I HAVE A POSSIBLE MODEL

then:

I HAVE TESTED IT

then:

I HAVE A BETTER POSITION

then perhaps:

NOW I CAN ACT.

That entire movement is a capability.

And I think parts of it can be taught.

Learning Skills Are Abstract But Buildable

Perhaps that is the conclusion.

The big words are abstract.

Critical thinking.

Metacognition.

Intelligence.

Problem solving.

Learning to learn.

But underneath them are smaller behaviours.

Notice.

Ask.

Retrieve.

Represent.

Compare.

Test.

Correct.

Change route.

Reflect.

Transfer.

Those are things a student can actually do.

And if they can do them once, perhaps they can practise doing them again.

Then perhaps faster.

More independently.

Across more situations.

That is how an abstract capability begins becoming real.

So Maybe Intelligence Skills Begin With One Small Sentence

Not:

I am smart.

Not:

I am bad at this.

Not even:

I know.

Perhaps:

I don’t understand this part yet.

That sentence contains something powerful.

The learner has detected the unknown.

Now the unknown has a boundary.

And once we can see the boundary, we can start moving toward it.

Ask.

Probe.

Represent.

Retrieve.

Test.

Learn.

Update.

Continue.

That does not sound as impressive as:

21st Century Critical Thinking Competencies.

But I suspect it may be much more useful to the child sitting in front of me.

Because when the world eventually gives them a problem that nobody has taught them how to solve, the most important capability may not be having the answer.

It may be knowing how to begin when they do not.

Problems | Education | Reflective | Case Study: The Car Keys

Let me continue the thought with a simple analogy.

Imagine I give two people the keys to the same car.

One is a complete beginner.

The other has been driving for twenty years.

Then I say:

Drive well.

Same instruction.

Same car.

Same keys.

Completely different situation.

The expert can probably get in, start the engine and move almost immediately.

The beginner may look at me and say:

Where do I even begin?

And that, I think, is why critical thinking cannot be the starting point.

The Beginner Gets The Keys

Imagine a sixteen-year-old who has never driven before.

I hand them the keys.

The car is sitting there.

Everything they need appears to be available.

Steering wheel.

Pedals.

Mirrors.

Gear selector.

Dashboard.

Road.

Destination.

So I say:

Go ahead.

Drive critically.

Or perhaps:

Use good judgement.

That sounds ridiculous.

The beginner has a much earlier problem.

They may not even know which pedal is the brake.

What Does The Beginner Actually See?

The expert sees:

a car.

The beginner sees dozens of unfamiliar objects.

key
button
pedal
another pedal
mirror
gear
symbols
lights
steering wheel
road
other cars
people
signs

The expert has already compressed all of those things into one working system.

The beginner has not.

So before we ask for judgement, evaluation or sophisticated decision-making, the beginner first needs to construct the basic world.

What is this?

What does it do?

What happens if I press it?

What information matters?

What should I look at?

What can hurt me?

What am I controlling?

Those are much more primitive questions.

But without them, there is no intelligent driving.

The First Lesson Is Not “Make Good Decisions”

Imagine a driving instructor beginning like this:

Today we will develop your higher-order driving judgement.

The student asks:

Which one is the brake?

The instructor replies:

You need to think critically.

We would immediately see the problem.

The student does not lack critical thinking.

The student lacks a usable representation of the system.

So the first lesson is smaller.

This is the accelerator.

This is the brake.

This is what happens when you steer.

This is how you stop.

This is what the mirrors show.

This is what they do not show.

Now the learner has some objects to think with.

Then We Build A Small Capability

Perhaps the student learns to move the car forward five metres.

That sounds trivial to an expert.

But look at what the beginner is actually coordinating.

Foot pressure.

Steering.

Direction.

Speed.

Surroundings.

Stopping.

Perhaps anxiety as well.

The learner may be thinking:

brake off
slowly accelerate
too fast
brake
steer
not that much
look forward
stop

Everything is conscious.

Everything costs attention.

This is not yet driving expertise.

It is construction.

Now Compare The Expert

Put the twenty-year driver in the same seat.

They start the engine.

Check.

Move.

Turn.

Brake.

Watch traffic.

Perhaps talk to the passenger at the same time.

They appear to be doing one thing:

driving.

But underneath that smooth behaviour are thousands of earlier learning episodes.

They once had to learn the pedal too.

They once over-steered.

They once braked too sharply.

They once forgot a mirror.

They once misjudged distance.

The expert’s simple-looking behaviour is actually the compressed result of many smaller capabilities.

That distinction is important.

The Expert Sees Different Things

Imagine both drivers approaching a junction.

The beginner sees:

traffic light.

The expert may simultaneously notice:

the light has been green for a long time,

a pedestrian approaching the crossing,

a motorcycle in the mirror,

a car waiting to turn,

the road surface is wet,

their own speed is slightly high.

The expert does not merely possess more facts.

They know where to look.

That is a capability.

The important signals stand out.

The noise recedes.

And only now does higher-level judgement become possible.

Then We Can Talk About Critical Driving

Now suppose the road ahead is partially blocked.

There are two possible routes.

One looks shorter.

The other looks safer.

Traffic is building.

Rain is getting heavier.

Now we can ask the expert to evaluate:

Which route?

What risk?

What evidence?

What trade-off?

What might change?

This is genuinely a judgement problem.

But notice how late it appears in the learning chain.

The driver already knows how to:

control the car,

read the road,

identify relevant signals,

estimate speed,

interpret signs,

predict other road users,

recover from small mistakes.

Critical judgement sits on top of all of that.

It does not replace it.

Now Put The Beginner At The Same Junction

This becomes almost funny.

The beginner is still thinking:

Which pedal?

Am I too close to the kerb?

Why is that car behind me honking?

And now I say:

Analyse the strategic trade-offs between the two routes.

What am I doing?

I have placed a sophisticated cognitive demand on top of an unstable basic system.

The learner does not have enough spare capacity.

They are still trying to operate the machine.

This is exactly what can happen in education.

Critical Thinking Can Arrive Too Early

A student is reading a difficult Science passage.

We ask:

Evaluate the strength of the evidence.

Excellent question.

But perhaps the student does not understand three of the key words.

Or cannot explain the mechanism being discussed.

Or has misunderstood what the graph represents.

Then the critical-thinking question may be academically sophisticated but developmentally premature.

The child is still trying to find the brake pedal.

The Same Happens In Mathematics

We ask:

Compare these two solution methods and evaluate which is more efficient.

Very good.

But perhaps the learner cannot yet independently recognise which relationship the question contains.

Again:

the expert sees two routes.

The beginner does not yet see the road.

So before evaluating routes, perhaps we need:

What is happening here?

What do you know?

What is changing?

Can you draw it?

Which quantities are related?

Now a map begins to form.

Then comparison becomes meaningful.

And English Has The Same Problem

We tell students:

Analyse the writer’s perspective critically.

But perhaps the learner is struggling to understand the passage literally.

Who is speaking?

What happened?

What does this word mean?

Why did the character do that?

We have skipped several levels.

Again, the instruction itself is not bad.

It is simply sitting too high.

This Explains The High Throne Again

The teacher is often the expert driver.

We see the whole road.

So we forget how much has already been compressed.

We say:

Think critically.

Because from our position, all the lower moves happen automatically.

But the student may need those moves exposed.

The expert sees:

CLAIM
↓
evidence weak
↓
assumption questionable
↓
alternative explanation
↓
judgement

The beginner may see:

paragraph
↓
confusion

There is a large missing staircase between them.

So What Should The Beginner Learn First?

Perhaps something much more modest.

Before critical thinking:

What am I looking at?

What do I understand?

What don’t I understand?

Which part is confusing me?

What information do I already have?

What could I represent differently?

What should I ask?

What can I test?

These are like the first driving lessons.

Mirrors.

Pedals.

Steering.

Stopping.

Nothing glamorous.

But they make later judgement possible.

Then The Skills Begin To Combine

The learner becomes more capable.

Now:

NOTICE
↓
LOCATE
↓
REPRESENT
↓
RETRIEVE
↓
CONNECT

becomes increasingly fluent.

Then we add:

COMPARE
↓
TEST
↓
EVALUATE
↓
UPDATE

Now critical thinking has something to stand on.

This feels much more like a developmental sequence.

The Expert No Longer Notices The Components

This may be one of the biggest teaching problems.

Ask an expert driver:

How did you know that car was about to change lanes?

They might say:

I just knew.

But probably they did not “just know.”

Perhaps the other car changed speed.

Moved slightly.

The driver’s head turned.

The lane position shifted.

Years of experience compressed those signals.

The expert no longer needs to consciously enumerate them.

A strong thinker may be similar.

They look at an argument and say:

Something is wrong here.

But underneath that feeling may be:

missing evidence,

bad causal inference,

contradiction,

unsupported assumption,

ambiguous definition,

unrepresentative sample.

The expert has learned to see these structures.

The beginner has not.

Therefore “Watch The Expert” Is Not Enough

This is another important consequence.

Showing students excellent thinking is useful.

But if we only show the finished performance, they may not see the machinery underneath.

It is like watching Lewis Hamilton drive and saying:

There. Now you know how to drive.

No.

We saw expertise.

We did not necessarily acquire it.

Sometimes the expert has to slow down and unpack the invisible moves.

I noticed this.

That made me uncertain.

So I checked this.

This evidence did not fit.

Therefore I changed my explanation.

Now the student can see something buildable.

A Beginner Needs Feedback At A Different Level

The new driver stalls the car.

The instructor does not say:

Your overall road judgement is weak.

They say:

You released the clutch too quickly.

Specific.

Repairable.

Try again.

Education needs the same resolution.

Student gets an argument wrong.

Instead of:

You need better critical thinking.

Perhaps:

You accepted the claim without checking what evidence supported it.

Now we have a component.

That can be practised.

Then One Day The Beginner Becomes The Expert

This is the interesting part.

After enough driving:

the pedal is no longer a problem.

Steering is no longer a problem.

Mirrors become habitual.

Traffic patterns become recognisable.

Now attention becomes available for larger decisions.

Which route is safer?

Should I overtake?

Is the other driver behaving unpredictably?

Do I need to slow down before anything obviously dangerous has happened?

This is where judgement becomes richer.

Not because someone suddenly installed:

CRITICAL DRIVING SKILLS.

Because enough lower capabilities became stable that the driver could now operate at a higher level.

Maybe thinking develops similarly.

So Critical Thinking Might Be An Emergent Capability

This is where I think the analogy becomes particularly useful.

Perhaps critical thinking is partly what appears when enough lower-level intelligence skills become coordinated.

understand
+
retrieve
+
represent
+
compare
+
question
+
test
+
monitor
+
update
+
domain knowledge
=
increasingly sophisticated judgement

Now we can call some of that:

critical thinking.

Fine.

But starting there reverses the construction process.

We Would Never Teach Driving Backwards

Imagine:

Lesson 1:

Evaluate complex road-risk scenarios.

Lesson 2:

Critique alternative navigation strategies.

Lesson 3:

Identify biases in driver decision-making.

Lesson 20:

Here is the brake.

Absurd.

Yet perhaps education sometimes does a softer version.

We introduce the highest-level label:

critical thinking

and then expect the lower machinery to somehow appear underneath it.

Maybe we should reverse that.

Start With Intelligence Skills

So I think the sequence now becomes clearer.

Beginner

NOTICE
I don't understand.
LOCATE
This is the part I don't understand.
ASK
What would help me understand it?
REPRESENT
Can I make it visible another way?
RETRIEVE
What do I already know?
TRY
Use a possible route.
OBSERVE
What happened?
CORRECT
Change something.

These are basic intelligence moves.

Then later:

Developing Learner

COMPARE
Which explanation fits better?
TEST
What evidence could distinguish them?
MONITOR
Is my strategy working?
TRANSFER
Does this idea work somewhere else?

And later still:

More Expert Learner

EVALUATE
How strong is this claim?
INFER
What follows from the evidence?
CHALLENGE
Which assumption might be wrong?
JUDGE
What should I believe or do?
UPDATE
What changes if new evidence appears?

Now the levels make sense.

Same Car. Different Driver.

That may be the entire case study.

Give the beginner and the expert the same car.

Give them the same keys.

Give them the same road.

Give them the same instruction:

Drive well.

One performs.

One cannot.

The difference is not the keys.

It is the capability underneath the instruction.

So when we give students the phrase:

Develop critical thinking skills

we may have handed them the keys.

But we have not necessarily taught them how to drive.

The Keys Are Not Useless

I want to be fair.

The phrase has value.

It gives us a destination.

We want learners who:

analyse,

question,

evaluate,

reason,

judge,

update.

Excellent.

Keep the destination.

But do not confuse the destination with the driving lesson.

That is the correction.

This Changes How I Think About Teaching

Instead of asking:

How do I teach critical thinking?

perhaps I can ask smaller questions.

Can this student identify what they do not understand?

Can they separate evidence from claim?

Can they explain their assumption?

Can they compare two possibilities?

Can they construct a test?

Can they notice when their strategy fails?

Can they change route?

Can they update their belief?

These are things I can actually observe.

And if I can observe them, perhaps I can teach them.

From Beginner To Expert

Perhaps the path looks like this:

BEGINNER
"Tell me what to do."
↓
"I know which part I don't understand."
↓
"I know what I could try."
↓
"I tried it and it didn't work."
↓
"I know why it probably failed."
↓
"I can choose another route."
↓
"I can compare the routes."
↓
"I can justify my choice."
↓
"I can detect when new evidence changes the situation."
↓
EXPERT
"I know how to navigate when nobody has told me the answer."

That final state looks a lot like what we wanted from critical thinking in the first place.

But now we can see a plausible road toward it.

So Critical Thinking Cannot Be The Starting Point

I think that is where I land.

Not because critical thinking is wrong.

Because it is too compressed.

It describes the experienced driver.

The beginner needs the driving lessons.

The learner needs component capabilities that can be seen, practised, corrected and combined.

Only later does the smooth behaviour appear.

So perhaps instead of handing students the keys and saying:

Think critically.

we say:

Let’s learn how to operate this thing.

First:

notice.

Then:

locate.

Then:

represent.

Then:

ask.

Then:

try.

Then:

observe.

Then:

correct.

Then:

compare.

Then:

judge.

And one day, the learner may do all of that so naturally that we stop seeing the individual moves.

We simply say:

That person thinks well.

But now we know something important.

They did not start there.

Nobody does.