If you want to engage students in your class, then it is good to initiate a debate. With the debate activities, students get a chance to understand critical thinking skills and overcome the fear of public speaking. Critical thinking is not a skill that can be given as a subject to learn or fed in the mouth of students. It’s something which one gets to learn about when indulged in activities like debate discussion. Debates initiative a feeling of going into deep thoughts regarding the topic discussed. This helps students to initiate critical thinking over the debate discussion.
Critical thinking skills will help an individual to grow at every stage of life. Whether you’re starting an anonymous blog or covering any online content, thinking critically can help you attract more readers.
Do you think there’s a certain age limit on learning critical thinking skills? What are your opinions on it? It is not any age-restricted skill that one needs to learn. Often, people understand the depth of critical thinking at certain phases of life. When college students are given topics to research, the best way to get into critical thinking is to conduct a debate session on it.
What do you understand by critical thinking?
Critical thinking can be defined as a process involving disciplined conceptualizing, evaluation, observation, communication, and active presence to understand a particular subject or topic. Among the crucial skills for the development of students, critical thinking is also one of them. It helps students to widen the aspects of thinking. The critical thinking aspect which is not stated much but holds due importance is “cognitive development ability.” With the ability of cognitive development, students learn skills application in a certain situation considering relevancy and flexibility.
Writing on an anonymous blog becomes a success when you develop critical thinking skills. With the in-depth thinking ability, you can easily run a successful anonymous blog.
Is there any relationship between debate and critical thinking?
Often, people confuse debate as an argument activity. Though, it is not what exactly a debate is! In simple language, the debate is a form of activity wherein people discuss facts about a certain subject either by supporting or opposing it politely. No doubt, the debate is a good method to develop skills like critical thinking. Among students, debate regards as a process to improve the overall thinking approach of them.
Debating can be the best way of initiating the development of critical thinking skills among students. It enables the students to find reasonable thoughts over certain subjects. When students develop critical thinking skills, it indicates a bright future. With debates as the right tool, students get an environment to develop critical thinking skills. Critical thinking makes an individual curious to explore new facts, irrespective of the subject.
- Developing metacognitive skills
For developing skills like critical thinking, itis a must to focus upon the development of metacognitive skills among students. Metacognition regards as a vital aspect in ensuring students to transform into self-learners, self-starters, and self-managers. It develops their thinking to handle all the dynamic complexities and find interest in creativity.
If you want to driver metacognitive skills among students, which are an important part of critical thinking, then nothing is better than debating activities. In debates, students get involved completely and come up with enormous facts after thinking critically. Even if the topic is a complex one and doesn’t seem interesting, students will think critically over each aspect of it till the end.
- Meaningful learning
When students participate in activities like debate, it gives them an environment to develop meaningful learning. Even the non-interesting topics become crucial when students think about it critically and start developing meaningful opinions over it. In critical thinking skills, meaningful learning is an important aspect. If what you’re learning is not rich in meaning, then it doesn’t need to be learned. For developing critical thinking ability among students, it is a must to promote a meaningful learning approach.
- Peer interaction learning
In the active learning process, peer interacting learning is also an essential part. Often, schools are promoting peer learning activities in the world. This type of learning initiates students to make peer interactions and learn new things. With such type of learning, an open communication environment is created for the students. In certain researches, it was revealed that students who participate in open communication get good scores in academics too. Creating groups for peer learning initiate students to find, gather, analyze and review information as per their thinking ability. In such a way, debating with each other helps students reach a situation where everyone agrees or disagrees. With an open environment to communicate, students get to enjoy deep learning. When learning critical thinking skills, students must develop deep learning ability. This can be helpful by conducting debate sessions or creating peer debate groups.
Conclusion
Being the well-sought method, debate works as an excellent tool to develop critical thinking skills among students.