Where will teaching take you next?
Join the learning journey: training courses and professional partnerships

Connecting Classrooms; a fully funded CPD programme that links schools in the UK with schools in over 30 countries. Giving both pupils and teachers new perspectives in the classroom through these international partnerships, Connecting Classrooms aims to take teachers on learning journey that includes various CPD courses, international partnerships, and fully funded travel. Find out more about international partnership opportunities here.

For more about Connecting Classrooms visit their website.

FREE training in Critical Thinking: working with SSAT, ACT and the HA, the GA is offering free training in Critical Thinking and Problem Solving for teachers of geography, history and citizenship, part of the new British Council Connecting Classrooms programme. The two-day course is focused on classroom application, with opportunities to share practice internationally - we can also bring the course to your school network. Click here to book.

The training is for fully qualified teachers working in maintained schools, Academies and free schools only.

Critical thinking usually means better thinking. In the classroom it is closely linked with geographical enquiry and developing pupils’ ability to think like geographers; as it develops geographical understanding, critical thinking helps raise achievement.

Critical thinking can involve:

• making better sense of information, knowledge and ideas, such as by examining evidence, considering alternative solutions and learning to distinguish fact from opinion. Critical thinking helps build geographical understanding and the ability to reach informed conclusions through practicing the three Rs: Rigor, Rationality and Reasoning.
• becoming a more open thinker, such as by challenging assumptions through debate and considering the ethical issues underpinning geographical change. Critical thinking helps pupils become more autonomous learners, so helping to avoid telling pupils what to think or do.

Some include a third aspect in critical thinking:

• becoming better at thinking, for example by reflecting not just on what has been learned, but also on how well: this is sometimes called metacognition, and is emphasised in Thinking Skills (see professional development links).

Critical thinking needs some care in curriculum planning and pedagogy. For example, when investigating fair trade or development in geography:

Globalisation and interdependence: fair trade

• without critical thinking: lessons that focus on the merits of fair trade, leading pupils to the conclusion that buying fair trade goods is the right thing to do.
• with critical thinking: lessons that investigate fair trade in the context of different kinds of trade, building understanding of the processes and connections involved so that pupils can examine each on merit, consider different views and perhaps decide whether to buy fair trade goods or not. Pupils might go further, for example comparing how evidence is presented by proponents of fair trade and free trade, considering the ethical issues involved in making such decisions or who has the power to influence them.

Development: classifying countries

• without critical thinking: lessons that teach pupils a singular view of developing countries, such as that countries can be classified in certain ways, for example rich/poor, North/South, MEDC/LEDC, and that countries in each group have particular characteristics.
• with critical thinking: lessons that investigate a range of evidence about development in different parts of the world, consider different ways to view and classify countries and debate the best way to do so. Planning takes into account the scale of study and how this can distort the way in which a place is perceived, for example, by making comparisons within as well as between countries: see Hans Rosling’s talk 'The Joy of Stats'. Pupils might go further, for example asking questions about how the evidence they examined was produced and selected, and by whom.

The GA considers that critical thinking is best applied to gain and deploy deeper geographical understanding, rather than practiced as a skill in its own right. Critical thinking is particularly valuable because of geography’s complexity and dynamism, and is relevant to pupils of all ages, supporting their current learning, future employment and lives as knowledgeable and active citizens.