One of our new subjects in St. Peter’s School is Critical Thinking and is taught in the Secondary stage. Its goal is to enable students to approach any challenge they meet and thus, improve their ability to understand, analyse and resolve problems.
And just how do we do that?
Critical Thinking Skills is a part of maths. It is based on logical- mathematical thinking. Our methodology is basically hands on. That means experiencing, experimenting, exploring, discovering, investigating, researching and finding new perspectives to old and new problems.
The students handle real materials to acquire maths concepts. They manipulate objects to learn, work cooperatively in dynamic groups and participate in what we call active learning. As they work together they share strategies to understand and improve their self-directed learning.
What kind of activities are they doing?
The activities can be maths challenges, logical tasks, problem solving, or hypotheses that awaken the students’ curiosity. Inevitably, they become competent in maths.
A visit to MMACA Museum (Maths Museum of Catalonia)
Last Monday the students in 2nd of ESO went to the MMACA and had the opportunity to explore similar material that they use in Thinking Skills classes.They loved the challenges and Fun Maths from the museum.
Each of them freely chose the activity to do, exchanged ideas with their classmates and teachers and expressed their opinion during the tasks. Finally, they enjoyed the mathematical talking and communication in small group discussions during the visit and succeed in finding the solutions of the tasks.
