Cultivating a Community of Critical Thinkers
What Does It Mean to Think?
What currently drives the operation of your classroom? Standards? Assessment? Relationships? Classroom culture? You probably check all of these boxes and then some. As a teacher, you know that the classroom experience is multifaceted, with many forces at play. Technology is one of them and it has been for some time. But with AI now reshaping how we approach learning and thinking, schools face an urgent question: how do we ensure AI isn't completing work at the expense of student learning and development?
Students now have a study buddy who never sleeps. Teachers are drafting lesson plans with a few keystrokes. Administrators are running AI-powered surveys to check in on "school culture." This AI thing, which came so fast, is doing a lot of the hard thinking for us. Maybe some of it necessary, maybe some of it not
In my recent discussion with Timothy Cook on the betterthinkers podcast, we parsed out what we should use AI for and what it should not do. We agree that above all, as I'm sure most readers do, that AI should not replace our thinking, that we should still do the hard cognitive work.
So while AI cranks out slick essays in seconds, how do we keep students engaging in their own cognitive capacities? How do we know if we're responsibly developing what it means to think?
The Real Problem Isn't AI
I would argue that this isn't actually an AI problem. Many schools have been asking students to regurgitate facts—meaningful or not—for many years. If you're one of these schools stuck in a paradigm of fact-in, fact-out regurgitation (in text form) for the sake of demonstrating "knowledge", then AI has you beat. AI has already taken the baton for passive engagement with content knowledge.
As Tim points out in our conversation, students have been gaming the system long before AI arrived. Remember SparkNotes? When assignments lack authentic purpose or connection to students' lives, they find shortcuts on the internet. "You can't blame a kid for cheating on something that offers no value to them," Tim observes.
The issue runs deeper than AI usage—it's about what we value in education. When standardized assessments and efficiency metrics drive our decisions, we're already operating in AI's domain. AI excels at passing tests. According to Sloan (2023), GPT-4 scores in the "90th percentile of actual test takers and is enough to be admitted to practice law in most states". DePeau-Wilson (2023) shares examples of how AI in many instances has passed US medical licensing exams.
But does that mean lawyers and doctors have no value? Absolutely not. Their value was never about memorizing content; it was about their ability to execute in real time—communicating, persuading, and adapting to clients' needs as a lawyer, or evaluating what course of action to take given a patient’s symptoms. Administering medicine or performing a medical procedure requires expertise.
This reveals something crucial: the real value lies in the messy, relational work that can't be automated. And this points us toward what education should prioritize—the kind of thinking that thrives in complexity and ambiguity.
Defining Critical Thinking: Moving From Buzzword to Framework
Internationally, in programs like the IB, critical thinking is at least a buzzword for classrooms to aspire to. Yes, critical thinking is a nebulous term—the kind that's messy and ambiguously defined and therefore difficult to pin down and articulate.
Although difficult to measure quantitatively, critical thinking represents one of the most valuable skills we can give developing thinkers: the ability to navigate gray areas and determine how best to move forward. It is precisely these gray areas that make critical thinking resistant to automation by AI. While AI can serve as a helpful partner in the process, it is ultimately the human who must weigh all the facts, conditions, and contexts to decide how to proceed meaningfully or reach a conclusion.
To move beyond buzzwords, it helps to articulate what critical thinking looks like in both local and global contexts.
By local, I mean considering what it looks like in your particular subject, grade level, community issue, problem, or cultural context. Every aspect of your community should have a meaningful view of where critical thinking can be applied even if initially, it is ill-defined. A Grade 12 English Teacher can understand what it is to think with and about language and share that with a Grade 1 teacher who does the same but with 6 year olds.
When rich understandings of language emerge within school contexts, thinking can be developed in the most intentional and supported way for students. Connecting across contexts allows schools to define what critical thinking looks like for them and their community. It isn't just written in curriculum documents, it lives and breathes within and beyond the bones of the school.
For the global framework, I rely on Peter Ellerton's critical thinking matrix. When I interview guests on betterthinkers about what thinking looks like in their profession, I use Ellerton's framework as a guidepost, asking them for examples that exemplify what thinking means to them or after the episode, analyzing their examples through his framework.
Ellerton breaks critical thinking into six cognitive skills: interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation. Each of these contains sub-skills. For instance, interpretation includes categorizing, decoding, and clarifying meaning. And he also defines what value they achieve in general terms.
During our podcast conversation, Timothy demonstrated this beautifully when I asked him about "clarifying meaning." Without preparation, he drew on his classroom experience to explain how dialogue and Socratic questioning help students develop deeper thinking. This wasn't rehearsed or scripted, it was a live, authentic application of critical thinking principles.
And for me, just hearing someone else interpret one small aspect of what critical thinking looks like, helped draw out meaning and understanding for myself. Thinking and speaking about thinking and speaking, tends to enrich one's own understanding beyond frameworks and descriptions.
Building Vertically Aligned Thinking
The Six Cognitive Skills
interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation
With these frameworks in mind—both local understanding and global structure—I suggest we take this framework and have all teachers, from kindergarten through the highest grades—whether in English, science, social studies, or general classroom community—build a vertically aligned curriculum that maps what's appropriate at each age level and within each disciplinary context.
This isn't about creating another assessment rubric. It's about recognizing that critical thinking looks different across disciplines and developmental stages, while maintaining common threads. The lawyer working through financial policy gray areas, the fourth-grader learning to paraphrase classmates' ideas, and the high school student deconstructing opposing arguments are all engaged in critical thinking—just at different levels of complexity.
From Performance to Participation
This approach requires shifting our focus from what AI can do well to what humans do uniquely. Schools often focus on "performance" through grades, test scores, and polished presentations. But AI is poised to outperform us in those areas. True participation, real engagement with people, ideas, and ethical complexity, cannot be automated. That's where schools should dig deeper. Prioritizing efficiency metrics is playing AI's game. And we'll lose.
This doesn't mean abandoning rigor; it means broadening our understanding of knowledge to include perspective, empathy, and participation. This emphasis on human elements embraces what Tim and I kept returning to in our conversation: messiness.
The Choice Ahead
Schools can chase efficiency metrics and lost to AI at its own game or they can claim the territory AI can't touch: the messy, relational, perspective-shifting kind of learning that turns intelligence into wisdom.
This requires a fundamental shift in how we think about assessment and community engagement. Instead of asking "How can we measure this?" we should ask "How can we create conditions for authentic thinking?" Instead of seeking tools that streamline our work, we should seek connections that deepen our students' engagement with their world.
Connected Classroom exemplifies this approach. Rather than creating tools that isolate teachers, Tim is building platforms that connect educators across disciplines and link classrooms with community organizations. The goal isn't efficiency—it's authentic engagement.
Conclusion
AI is here to stay. The question isn't whether we use it—it's whether we use this moment to remember what human learning is for. We can either retreat into our separate subject silos, continuing to prepare students for tests that AI can already pass, or we can step into the beautiful mess of developing human thinkers who can navigate complexity with wisdom, empathy, and authentic engagement.
The choice is ours, but we need to make it intentionally and collaboratively—as educators, administrators, parents, and community members. Because cultivating critical thinkers isn't just about classroom relevance, it's a civic responsibility that requires all of us to engage with the messy, essential work of developing human potential.
Author Bio
Jamie House is a Grade 5 teacher at Bishop Mackenzie School in Malawi and the creator of betterthinkers, a newsletter and podcast dedicated to transforming educational practices in the age of artificial intelligence.
Through betterthinkers, Jamie explores innovative approaches to reframing schooling practices and reimagining our relationship with knowledge—developing educational frameworks that not only survive but thrive alongside AI's rapid advancement. His betterthinkers projects serves as a vital resource for parents, educators, and aspiring youth seeking to navigate the evolving landscape of learning and thinking.
Jamie's insights bridge the gap between traditional educational values and the demands of an AI-integrated future, offering practical guidance for those committed to nurturing better thinkers in our rapidly changing world.
References:
DePeau-Wilson, M. (2023, January 19). AI passes U.S. Medical Licensing Exam [Special report]. MedPage Today. Retrieved from https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/102705
Ellerton, P. (n.d.). The critical thinking matrix: A high-resolution reference source for mapping critical thinking skills [PDF]. University of Queensland. https://critical-thinking.project.uq.edu.au/files/833/CT%20Matrix%20Ellerton.pdf
House, J. (2025, August 2).# 009 — Thinking with Timothy Cook. betterthinkers. https://betterthinkers.substack.com/p/009-thinking-with-timothy-cook
Sloan, K. (2023, March 15). Bar exam score shows AI can keep up with human lawyers, researchers say. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/bar-exam-score-shows-ai-can-keep-up-with-human-lawyers-researchers-say-2023-03-15/