TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING AND WHY IT MATTERS:

A TRANSDISCIPLINARY PEDAGOGY FOR TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING

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Peter Ellerton, Adam Kuss, Kara Vaughan, Yael Leibovitch, Deborah J. Brown
University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project
University of Queensland, Australia

Corresponding Author: Peter Ellerton peter.ellerton@uq.edu.au

Keywords: Critical Thinking, Cognitive Skills, Teacher Expertise, Pedagogical Leadership,

Inquiry, Virtues

Abstract

Critical thinking is an educational priority, a foundational 21st century skill and essential to
building cultures of innovation and responsible citizenship. While critical thinking is often
incorporated into curricula—for example, as “general capabilities” (Australia), “common
core” (USA) or “core competencies” (Canada)—little guidance is provided to regular
classroom teachers about how to teach critical thinking or how to embed it in classroom
practice. This paper outlines the theoretical and practical approach to teaching critical
thinking developed by the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project (UQCTP), a
professional learning program that has for the past decade assisted thousands of teachers
across hundreds of schools, nationally and internationally, in developing pedagogical
expertise in ‘teaching for thinking’. In this paper research findings from one Australian
secondary school’s ‘whole-of-school’ commitment to pedagogical transformation are
presented as proof of concept that the UQCTP’s pedagogy assists teachers in developing
praxis for embedding the teaching of critical thinking across disciplines and year levels.

1. Introduction

Critical thinking is an educational priority, a foundational 21st century skill, and increasingly
prized by governments and employers as essential to building cultures of innovation and
responsible citizenship. While critical thinking is often incorporated into curricula—for
example, as “general capabilities” (Australia), “common core” (USA) or “core
competencies” (Canada)—little guidance is provided to regular classroom teachers about
how to teach critical thinking or how to embed it in classroom practice. This paper outlines
the theoretical and practical approach to teaching critical thinking developed by the
University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project (UQCTP), a professional learning
program that has for the past decade assisted thousands of teachers across hundreds of
schools, nationally and internationally, in developing pedagogical expertise in ‘teaching for
thinking’. In this paper research findings from one Australian secondary school’s ‘whole-of-
school’ commitment to pedagogical transformation are presented as proof of concept that the
UQCTP’s pedagogy assists teachers in developing praxis for embedding the teaching of
critical thinking across disciplines and year levels.

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2. Understanding critical thinking and its pedagogical implications

Not all thinking is critical thinking. Critical thinking, as opposed to free association, is
governed by norms of reasonableness. It is responsive to norms and methods of reasoning
that lead to critical reflection on the foundations of one’s and others’ beliefs and actions.
Being normative, its norms can be violated, for example, when our thought is subject to bias
or fallacious reasoning. A minimal condition for being a critical thinker is that one is able to
distinguish between better and worse kinds of reasoning. This fact has pedagogical
implications in so far as the development of critical thinking is not a matter of simply
acquiring content knowledge, but a continuous process of developing increasing sophisticated
reasoning. As thinking can be evaluated according to norms of reasonableness that are non-
discipline specific, it follows that where critical thinking can be taught—i.e., across
disciplines and year levels—it should be taught. Defining what this looks like and how best
to support teachers in embedding the teaching of critical thinking in their practice is the
challenge the UQCTP set for itself.

Our view contrasts with descriptive approaches to critical thinking, which tend to start from
definitions consisting of lists of cognitive skills. Consider, for example, Willingham’s (2008,
p. 21):

In layperson’s terms, critical thinking consists of seeing both sides of an issue, being
open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately,
demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions
from available facts, solving problems, and so forth.

While we accept that a critical thinker is one who can do all this and more, such statements
do not capture the essentially normative dimension of critical thinking. Curiously missing, for
example, is the central role of justification and evaluation in the critical thinker’s toolkit
(Ennis 1962, Siegel 1988, Facione 1990, Weinstein 1993) and the motivating force of the
truth. It is because the critical thinker values maximising the truth of their beliefs and
minimising error that explains why these and other cognitive skills are valued and practiced.

Rejecting these more descriptive definitions of critical thinking, the field has swung more
towards recognising the interdependence of cognitive and metacognitive capabilities, as well
as the values and virtues of inquiry, as definitive of the activity of a critical thinker (Ellerton,
2015, Kuhn, 2000). ‘Virtue argumentation theory’ (Bailin and Battersby 2016, 358; 2007;
Bailin et al. (1999a); see also Cohen 2009; Paul 1990; Burbules 1995), for example, places
the capacity to assess an argumentative structure according to standards of logical correctness
(e.g., the truth-preserving rules of logic) and values of good inquiry at the heart of critical
thinking. Embracing values such as accuracy, precision, coherence, breadth, depth, relevance,
significance, etc., enhances the inquiry process and enables students to develop
corresponding virtues—inter alia, open- and fair-mindedness; resilience; integrity;
persistence; intellectual humility (see section 3.2-3 below for more detail).

The UQCTP approach to critical thinking falls within the scope of these more normative
approaches. It takes critical thinking to be the activity of metacognitive evaluation, where
both the premises and principles of drawing inferences are subjected to critical examination.
As with virtuous argumentation theory, the ability to identify, analyse, construct, and
evaluate arguments, is core, and critical thinking is best conducted collaboratively (Cohen
2013, 475; Bailin and Battersby 2016, 370) where one’s assumptions can be safely

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questioned, doubt and uncertainty tolerated, and the practices of justification normalised. The
question then for educators is what is the best way to teach critical thinking?

The UQCTP attempts to provide an answer to this question. Although there exist assertions
that critical thinking is unteachable, for example, by proponents of cognitive load theory
(CLT) (Sweller, 2019; Willingham 2008), a core assumption of that view is that critical
thinking is just more content that a student has to process and thus that interferes with the
processing of discipline content knowledge (for a critique, see Ellerton, 2022). Within the
UQCTP, the quality of critical thinking is understood as something which can be made the
object of focus and improvement in the classroom. It is this latter position that resonates with
the syllabi and goals of most educational jurisdictions and with well-established thinking
programs such as Philosophy for/with Children movements (Haynes and Murris, 2017).

The core idea undergirding the UQCTP is that problems of practice in teaching critical
thinking require a pedagogical rather than curriculum solution, one that makes the practice of
students’ reflection upon their thinking itself an object of study. It concerns how the
curriculum is taught rather than what is taught. Moving away from the usual focus on
providing definitions of critical thinking or hierarchically structured taxonomies of cognitive
skills, the UQCTP supports teachers to develop a schematic and normative understanding of
what teaching for thinking involves. The metalanguage that teachers acquire for organising
knowledge according to the structures, categories, and norms of argumentation, can be
adapted for any disciplinary context or year level.

Three key questions help frame teachers’ translation of this pedagogy, referred to as
Teaching for Thinking (T4T), for their own professional contexts:

1. How do I know students are thinking in my classroom?

2. How do I plan for thinking to occur?
3. How do I give students feedback on the quality of their thinking?

3. Connecting content knowledge, cognitive skills, and learner character

The UQCTP development of pedagogical expertise in teaching critical thinking begins with a
schematic representation of this expertise, connecting content knowledge, thinking skills,
values of inquiry, and students’ virtuous habits (Ellerton, 2019), outlined in Figure 1 below.
This reflects the role of schematic understanding as central to expertise in cognitively
complex domains. Without such a schema, or another like it, it is difficult to integrate
complex ideas and experiences or to develop shared understanding across teaching contexts.
The schema, its assumptions, and how it is used by teachers is explained below through a
brief outline of each section.

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Figure 1: UQCTP schema for pedagogical expertise in teaching critical thinking.

3.1 Connecting cognition and content knowledge

We begin by considering section A of the schema concerning content knowledge and

cognitive skills, recognising that there is no dichotomy between developing cognitive
(thinking) skills1 and learning content area knowledge. Indeed, following Dewey, we
consider that “thinking is the method of intelligent learning” (Dewey, 1966, p.152). The
relationship between thinking and content knowledge is, therefore, a space of pedagogical
focus where knowledge is assimilated, tested, constructed, and used. In this space, thinking is
understood as what we do with knowledge, including the creation and evaluation of it.
Teachers are encouraged to consider how their students will be using the curriculum to
deepen understanding, make connections, solve problems, and connect to past and future
learning. Common cognitive skills involved in this include analysis, justification, explanation
and evaluation. It is not a trivial observation that these skills are often signified as cognitive
verbs, reflecting the important pedagogical principle that thinking is action—something we
do and deliberately so rather than something that happens to us. Drawing again from Dewey,
we cannot see students as mere spectators of knowledge or learning as a passive affair (as the
word ‘pupil’ suggests the passive reception of light). We find rather that “knowledge is a
mode of participation” in the world, integral to what it means to be a learner (Dewey, 2005,
p.196). Just as an athlete participates in learning how to excel at the javelin, a student must
participate in acts of their own learning in the classroom.

This focus on action and participation demands consideration of what we want students to do
when they are thinking, identifying precisely what should they do when they justify or
evaluate, say, either generally or in specific contexts. As teachers, thinking about the
cognitive demands of a task—what students will do and the thinking experience they will
have—provides more pedagogical traction than simply providing definitions and examples of
cognitive skills. It also means that engineering learning experiences with the goal of
1
We do not suggest that thinking skills are exhausted by cognitive skills, only that cognitive skills make up an
essential part of the thinking we wish to improve through educational intervention.

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developing student thinking can be done at a higher resolution, with more intentionality and
precision, than if thinking is only seen as a by-product or emergent property of content
delivery.

To this end of planning for thinking, teachers working within the UQCTP pedagogy develop
skills in performing a ‘cognitive audit’ of learning experiences and assessment items,
allowing teachers to target the kinds of cognitive activity they wish to develop or assess. This
cognitive audit is not done using the principle of a hierarchy of cognitive skills such as in
Bloom’s taxonomy, since this relationship has been discredited both by Bloom himself and
by later researchers (Marzano, 2006, pp.8–9). In place of Bloom’s taxonomy is a ‘cognitive
web’ model, recognising the interrelatedness of cognitions and assigning them no inherent
hierarchy. This is represented in Figure 2, which is not meant to represent definitive
relationships but is rather a kind of diagram that shows how skills could be connected in a
particular task. For example, a task requiring students to nominally analyse and evaluate
could also require organisation, interpretation, hypothesising and justification. Being able to
recognise and map these connections is central to the process of a cognitive audit.

analyse

evaluate organise

hypothesise
interpret justify

explain

Figure 2: The UQCTP cognitive web model of skills.

One of the advantages of Bloom’s taxonomy was its focus on a smaller number of skills
within a potentially large range. These were the so-called ‘higher order’ skills, supposedly
offering a bigger cognitive reward if properly developed. In the cognitive web model, this
focus no longer exists, at least not as a function of advancement up the cognitive ladder. In
place of this, a clutch of skills has been identified though use with teachers as not only central
to critical thinking but also connected to a wide range of skills that might be auxiliary to a
task. They are four and are named the Golden Tetrad (GT) of cognitive skills for their value
in planning and lesson design. These skills are, (in no significant order), the ability to
analyse, explain, justify, and evaluate, and may be seen as occupying larger nodes on the
cognitive web model, as shown in Figure 3. ‘Analyse’ has been included as it is so often the
precursor for other skills (e.g., analyse and evaluate, analyse and identify, etc.); ‘explain’ as it
is the cognitive skill most closely associated with ‘understanding’ (not itself a verb but rather
a state to be attained); and ‘justify’ and ‘evaluate’ since they are at the heart of the process of

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giving and taking of reasons, which is the beginning of critical thinking. There is no
ontological claim being made here about the distinctiveness of this set of skills, only that the
GT is a useful device for targeting student thinking. Teachers within the network who plan
for a GT focus in their lessons report increased student engagement and more evidence of
thinking behaviours.

analyse
evaluate

organise

interpret

infer hypothesise

justify explain

Figure 3: The UQCTP Golden Tetrad of cognitive skills in teaching critical thinking

3.2 Giving feedback on student thinking

On the assumption that students are engaged in using and developing their thinking skills, it
pays to recall a maxim too easily overlooked in a T4T context: improvement requires
feedback (Hattie & Temperley, 2007). If students are thinking and wish to improve their
thinking, they require feedback on the quality of that thinking. But how do we understand
quality thinking and what concepts or language do we have to define this? Feedback is the
concern of section B in the schema.

To give feedback, we must have a means of evaluating student thinking. Consider that the
root of ‘evaluate’ is ‘value’. Hence, we must understand what it is we value in student
thinking so that we can construct the criteria for its evaluation. To simply say “good
thinking!” does not seem particularly useful. The philosopher and scientist, Thomas Kuhn,
noted that scientists apply a range of values in their work, including accuracy, consistency,
simplicity and plausibility (1970, p.185), with effective inquiry demanding discerning
application of these values. The philosopher and educator Matthew Lipman named values
including “precision, consistency, relevance, acceptability and sufficiency” (2003 p.233) as
central to an education in thinking. Linda Elder and Richard Paul (2013) introduced the
concept of “intellectual standards” to describe these same values, although in more detail and
with more thought to their application in contexts. In the UQCTP pedagogy, these values,
designated ‘values of inquiry’, are placed within the schema as a means for feedback on
student thinking. Oft-mentioned values are accuracy, precision, clarity, relevance,
significance, depth, breadth, and coherence. To give some examples, an analysis (skill) might
be deemed broad but lack depth. Or perhaps it has depth but not in a significant area. An

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inference (skill) might be valid but not relevant. An interpretation (skill) might be accurate
but not precise. An explanation (skill) might be simple but lack clarity. And so on.

A teacher resource, the Critical Thinking Matrix,2 is provided to teachers. It has 17 rows
named for cognitive skills and 6 columns named for inquiry values. The matrix consequently
contains102 thinking behaviours showing the relationship between these skills and values.
For example, the skill of categorising is viewed through lenses including clarity: the criteria
for categorising are unambiguous and the common characteristics of elements within the
category are explicitly stated; precision: categorical distinctions are based on quantifiable
data, specific characteristics or clear logical definitions; depth: categorisations are made
using relevant and significant characteristics rather than superficial resemblances; logical
and causal relationships between categories are identified; and breadth: alternative
perspectives and criteria for categorising are explored; preferring one framework over
another is justified; potential taxonomies are considered. Other behaviour identified in the
matrix includes willingness to modify thinking through collaborative inquiry; self-correction
seen as progress; recognition of bias, erroneous thinking or fallacious reasoning in one’s
own thinking; collaboration sought for the purpose of testing own thoughts; nature of inquiry
appropriate to the problem with alternate strategies explored and evaluated.

The Matrix provides a means of understanding how values can be applied to thinking and is
entirely non-discipline specific, allowing teachers to do the important translational work of
instantiating these behaviours in their year level or subject area context. How these values are
best applied in a range of inquiry contexts—whether accuracy outranks precision in a
particular case or simplicity outranks accuracy, for example—helps develop the norms of
good inquiry and, hence, of good thinking. The values of inquiry provide a metacognitive
language shared by teachers and students that allows the quality of student thinking to
become a more focussed object of study and to relate this to their developing content
knowledge and skills development.

3.3 Developing virtues in the critical thinker

No educational focus on critical thinking can be optimally effective without serious

consideration of the characteristics of the critical thinker. Section C of the schema concerns
the development of a range of characteristics typically associated with the paradigmatic
critical thinker, including open-mindedness, resilience, persistence, curiosity, intellectual
humility, and honesty. It is a pleasant thing to generate and contemplate such a list, but
identification alone does not imply the ability to operationalise the development of virtues.
The problem of developing virtues in students is acute, but explicit solutions are almost
entirely absent from curricula.

Before outlining the UQCTP approach to this issue, some framing is useful. The language of
‘virtues’ is preferred to that of ‘dispositions’ because ‘virtue’ implies an intellectual
appreciation of why character ought to be developed along certain pathways rather than
others, an appreciation lacking in the common understanding of dispositions as tendencies.
The element of appreciation, on the part of both student and teacher, allows and encourages
self-regulation and self-development of student thinking and character. Indeed, students must
be “skilled and intelligent in their pursuit of these ends” (Baehr, 2013, p.250, italics in
original). How, then, can such virtue be developed daily through classroom learning? One

2
https://critical-thinking.project.uq.edu.au/files/833/CT%2520Matrix%2520Ellerton.pdf

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answer, inherent in the UQCTP approach, is that virtue can be developed through the self-
directed, self-regulated, and collaboratively moderated application of the values of inquiry.
To provide a mundane example, consider the student who wishes to check the accuracy of a
footnote as the information it relates to is significant to the argument they have constructed in
an essay. This student understands why one ought to care about the quality of their thinking,
why accuracy, in this case, matters. If this student also sees that breadth of treatment results
in unearthing views or ideas of which they were previously unaware, or considers the
limitations of their own thinking, they can begin to appreciate the importance of open-
mindedness and intellectual humility. A one-to-one relationship between values and virtues
does not seem sensible; it is rather a many-to-many relationship in which continual and
varied application of the values of inquiry across a range of inquiry contexts work towards a
range of inquiry virtues.

This schematic representation of pedagogical expertise in teaching for thinking connects

content, cognitive skills, and intellectual values and virtues. It therefore provides a line of
sight for teachers from classroom learning experiences through to the kind of character they
wish to develop in their students for years to come. Importantly, it lays the foundations for
student self-regulation, autonomy, and collaborative engagement through a focus on virtue
development, an essential component of growth through life-long learning. Zone D of the
schema recognizes that virtuous inquirers, nurtured through their schoolyears by teachers
with appropriate expertise, will go on to become the knowledge makers of the future.

3.4 Pedagogical Imperatives

Consequent to this schematic understanding of expertise in teaching critical thinking are three
key pedagogical imperatives, each of which acts as a focal point for practice. These
imperatives are:

1. Shift the focus in the classroom from knowledge to inquiry

2. Think and plan in the language of student cognition
3. Work collaboratively where thinking can be shared

Imperative 1 is not a call to diminish the value of content knowledge but a salute to inquiry as
the means of production of knowledge. To create knowledge-makers of the future,
classrooms need to be focussed on developing critical thinking and inquiry skills. Imperative
2 seeks to make student thinking as much an object of study as disciplinary content
knowledge. Imperative 3 speaks to the need for others to act as mediators, evaluators, and
arbiters of our thinking. If critical thinking concerns the giving and taking of reasons, the
presence of those to whom we are accountable is essential. It also speaks to collaborative
inquiry as the mechanism through which the norms of critical thinking are established.

The case study that follows demonstrates how such a schematic understanding and its
pedagogical imperatives can be instantiated in a whole school context.

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4. A case study of school-wide transformation through a focus on teaching for
thinking

4.1 Background

Helensvale State High School (HSHS) is an independent government school, located on the
Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. HSHS has approximately 2200 students and is situated
in a medium ICSEA band (1025). The school prides itself on catering to the diverse needs of
its students and views pedagogical development as crucial to fulfilling this aim. Commencing
in 2018, HSHS partnered with the UQCTP to implement a program of pedagogical renewal
centred on the UQCTP schema for pedagogical expertise in teaching critical thinking. This
partnership involves regular professional learning for teachers and leaders, advice and
feedback on school plans, classroom observations, co-presentation at conferences, and
extensive professional dialogue. By this means, as one school leader described it, the school
aims to ensure that all students “have the skills and knowledge to be able to approach
anything and to think for themselves [because] getting A's and B's is…no longer going to get
them the future that they deserve.”

4.2 Methodology

The data shared in this paper draws on a 2019 co-designed (Pieters & Jansen 2017) case
study located at HSHS, in which teachers and the leadership team served as co-investigators
alongside UQCTP researchers. Through a case study methodology, researchers investigated
how ideas and abstract principles fit together and shape teaching decisions (Yin, 2009 p. 72-
73). More specifically, the intention in this project was to explore how teachers incorporated
the T4T schema into their practice within the professional context in which they operate. This
‘praxis’ approach, in which expertise is seen as socially constructed, is represented in Figure
4 below.

Figure 4: Socially constructed expertise

As one teacher succinctly noted in relation to this approach, “I like the way it's making me
think about what I do and why I do it.”

Over a 10-month period, qualitative data was collected through: ethnographic observations of
professional learning team (PLT) meetings, where participants shared their experiences in
adapting the pedagogy for their individual/team contexts; mentoring sessions involving
experienced ‘pedagogy coaches’; semi-structured interviews; classroom observations; student

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focus group interviews; curriculum and planning documents; and student artefacts. The
findings reported upon in this paper draw on an amalgamation of this data.

4.3 Results

Findings from this study suggest that implementing ‘whole of school’ pedagogical
transformation requires extensive changes: in curriculum and assessment; leadership
structures; professional learning pathways; teaching and learning frameworks; and even
financial management. Nonetheless, despite the scale and complexity of the pedagogical
shift, leaders and teachers reported that T4T had a unifying and coalescing effect on the
multiple agendas operating within HSHS, with one leader asserting that T4T “has actually
tied everything together.”

Below, a snapshot of some of the work being undertaken to realise the pedagogical
imperatives of T4T at HSHS is presented.

4.3.1 Shifting focus onto student thinking (Imperative 1)

A thinking focus (or lack therefore) was a clear concern for teachers. As a teacher noted, “I
think people are so worried about the kids knowing it, knowing it, knowing it, that I’m not
sure that everyone's teaching them the actual thinking process.”

A successful shift in this direction was commented on by a school leader: “…teachers

understanding the real difference between how to model and scaffold the thinking behind
something to lead to independence rather than the task is something we talked about.”

HSHS’ focus on engaging students in critical questioning is one way in which they actualised
T4T. Literature on questioning shows educators are frequently unaware that teacher questions
often dominate classroom discourse with most questions typically designed to test recall or
comprehension of content, engaging few cognitive skills (Albergaria-Almeida, 2010). The
employment of a questioning tool (the Q Matrix) helped teachers transition from
conventional teacher-led recall questions to student-generated questioning. The Q Matrix
features verbs or auxiliaries along the rows and interrogative pronouns on the columns and is
designed so that moving from top left to bottom right moves from literal questioning towards
more inferential, modal and extended questioning.

Capitalising on students’ motivation to know creates a space to cultivate curiosity (Miller,

2018). It also provides occasions for the application of cognitive skills, including analysing,
inferring, justifying, explaining, and evaluating (Idek, 2016). Links can be drawn between
student questioning practices using the Q-matrix and the pedagogical schema when student
questions feature the metalanguage of cognitive verbs and values of inquiry. Student
questions can thus reveal much about how students are thinking.

Throughout the study, multiple teachers used the Q Matrix variably. This variability of
translation from schema to Q matrix was a result of deliberate pedagogical choices intended
to serve different purposes in different contexts. For example, in one instance students
collaboratively generated questions at the start of a unit to motivate future inquiry, whereas in
another instance, during assessment, Q matrix prompts were used to encourage inquiry into
the task at hand.

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The ease with which students adopted the Q-matrix belies the value of student questioning in
the T4T approach. This is exemplified in a student’s description of the Q-Matrix as useful
because “it does the thinking for me.” While this student perceived the task almost as
automated, they also justified their choices (in this example, questioning why the use of
ceramics in race cars was important) and to employ criteria for evaluating answers (e.g.,
which materials were more versatile). Even simple questions such as “Why is ceramics used?
Why is it versatile?” used in combination reveal much about a student’s thinking processes.
Here, the matrix was not doing the thinking for the student; it was enabling it.

The most difficult hurdle for teachers working with critical thinking pedagogies is the
translation of theory into practice (Hegazy et al., 2021). This study provides a window into
the deliberate translation of theory into practice, evidenced by the intentional incorporation
of student questioning in classroom activities. It is hypothesised that teachers’ unified
schematic understanding of T4T aided purposeful variations in translational work regarding
student questioning.

4.3.2 Speak and plan in the language of thinking (Imperative 2)

Teachers also demonstrated a commitment to Imperative 2—planning for thinking (using a

language of feedback). A teacher noted:

I like having that language that I can use to give feedback that the kids
understand. Before that, I'd be trying to think of a way to express succinctly to
the student what was wrong or what needed to be improved … and sometimes it
maybe wouldn't come across as clearly as it does now that I have that language
to use…so that would be how it's changed me.

A leader explained that this planning focus assisted student learning

…with increased understanding around the cognitive verbs, and the really
simple connection between those and the values of inquiry, to actually give
teachers and students a language to talk about whatever it is students are not
yet demonstrating and how to make that explicit

This was exemplified in a pre-observation classroom interview in which a Senior English

teacher outlined their planned classroom practices and intended learning outcomes, both of
which focused on student thinking and integration of the values of inquiry during a unit on
The Crucible. In this unit, students were tasked with drawing comparisons between literal and
implied interpretations of The Crucible and the historical events of the Hollywood Blacklist.
Meaningful engagement in this task required students to reflect on historical circumstances
from different perspectives, while also considering the key themes, characters, and tropes in a
literary text. In this learning episode, the teacher saw the generation of substantive questions
as essential.

Rather than simply outlining possible perspectives, the teacher planned and directed groups
of students to use the Q-Matrix to define their research questions. This involved cognitive
tasks of collaboratively categorising, refining, and rating their questions in terms of relevance
and significance. Throughout, students were asked to apply the values of inquiry to evaluate
their questions and select ones to pursue. This activity enabled the teacher to enact Imperative

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2, planning the learning task in such a way as to engage students in hypothesising, analysing,
evaluating and justifying their design of research questions. By the end of the exercise,
students had generated research questions and hypotheses linking historical events to The
Crucible, enabling critical engagement with the topic. This use of the Q matrix demonstrates
the kinds of classroom learning experiences that are possible when teachers intentionally plan
for student thinking.

4.2.3 Work collaboratively when thinking can be shared (Imperative 3) and feeding back on
student thinking (Key Question 3)

Finally, an emergent theme from across the data was the increased opportunity for student
collaboration and consequent opportunities for feedback provided by T4T.

Throughout their units, teachers were observed setting aside time for students to enact a
range of integrated cognitive skills and receive feedback on the quality of their thinking
(peer and teacher-led). One observed outcome was an increase in collaborative student
talk, which appeared to have a positive impact on students’ learning experiences. As the
project progressed, the importance of student interaction became increasingly apparent
through classroom observations and participant interviews. As one school leader
commented “I actually like to see kids thinking outside the box … having that collaborative conversation
questioning each other.” Learning experiences were observed that allowed students to explain
their thinking, evaluate arguments, question alternative perspectives, work to promote and
foster cognitive development. The importance of being deliberate about when and how to
engage students in this cognitive development is crucial, as captured in the teacher
comment below:

I don't expect classrooms to be quiet, but I expect that there's productive

engagement, … problem-solving opportunities for kids to work in groups or small
groups…co-constructing … and then getting them to do it on their own.

The importance of a positive classroom culture to quality student collaboration came to

the forefront in student focus group interviews. In contrast to more conventional
transmissive learning environments, students described T4T classrooms as ‘safe spaces to
learn’ with much opportunity for verbalisation. The following vignette provides insights
what a T4T experience can be like for students.

Evaluator: I noticed through your lessons that [the teacher] does quite a lot of group
work. Do you think that's important for your learning?

Student A: Yeah… big time.

Student B: Because everyone just like bounces their ideas of everyone else and just
gains more understanding of everyone else's, like, views.

Student A: it just creates like that safe space that we know, okay, even if we're not a
hundred percent confident, we know that we can, like, still give it our all and we'll have
… others there to just support you. … And, like, actually share the ideas not just like
sitting there hiding.

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 Student C: And even if you say something that wasn't … completely right, someone else
might get an idea from that, which might be I guess better, which, like, makes everyone
better.

Student D: Yeah, [we feel] safe asking a question that might sound dumb in other
classes, you know, but we don't get shut down or anything like that. It's, it's encouraged
to …ask questions and to you know, participate.

Rather than hindering student autonomy, collaborative thinking—in the form of dialogic
exchange—is perceived by students to enhance learning. Through the shared participation
and testing of ideas, students became more independent and successful with their learning
(Chin and Osborne, 2008). At the same time, teachers shifted away from being
transmitters of knowledge to facilitators of collaborative learning—guiding, prompting,
and challenging students to expand their understanding—key pedagogical features of T4T.

5. Conclusion

HSHS’ experience with T4T suggests that a school-wide approach to critical thinking
pedagogy, built on the schema’s imperatives, can positively enhance students’ learning
experiences. It is not enough for educational jurisdictions to prioritise critical thinking as a
curriculum goal without thinking through the pedagogical implications for schools and
teachers. Nor is it enough to assume that critical thinking can simply be embedded as ‘more
content’ or acquired by osmosis as students navigate the content of a discipline area. More
pointedly, critical thinking should not be seen as a by-product of an immersion in content
knowledge but as a precisely targeted educational outcome. This paper has documented the
application of one pedagogical solution to the challenge of teaching critical thinking and
provided evidence of successful translational work in one school, offering a glimpse into the
promise, but also the challenge, of teaching critical thinking.

13
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