Coming Soon: “Scams, Schemes, and Advertisement”

I’m about half-finished with preliminary development on a KTC module I’m calling “Scams, Schemes, and Advertising,” which is a four-part lesson in general consumer awareness and wise money management. It covers everything from common street scams to pyramid schemes, and goes into depth about the tactics and techniques that shady (and not-so-shady) marketers use to entice people to buy their products (i.e. buzzwords, weasel words, vague claims, inflated value, etc.).

The goal of “Scams, Schemes, and Advertising” is to open kids’ eyes to the ways in which they can be separated from their money for dubious products or purposes. It offers a practical, everyday context in which they can exercise their critical thinking skills with a tangible benefit. It is not based directly on the Thinking Errors approach, and as such can be easily used in any educational setting provided the students already have a basic grasp of reason and critical thinking.

Kids Thinking Critically in West Lafayette

West Lafayette resident Hilary Nelson has been approved to teach a four-lesson critical thinking course at the Beacon Academy charter school, and he’s going to base in in part on the KTC model. A dash of KTC, a pinch of Richard Saunders’ Mystery Investigators, and he’s got himself a lesson!

I will attempt to procure his teaching materials and make them available here on the site to broaden the context in which the KTC model can be used.

Good luck, Hilary!

Up and Running!

Hello, everybody! I have completed all of the major informational content of the first phase of the Kids Thinking Critically website and it is now officially good to go! Use the top menu or the sidebar to navigate and find out all about my methods and practices for teaching critical thinking skills to at-risk youth.

The program can be easily adapted to suit many different contexts, and I invite you to do so under the constraints of my Creative Commons License. This is only the beginning, however; there is much more to come.

I also hope to make this more than just my show. This means that anybody who adapts the program in any way should feel free to send me their adaptation and I will post it here with all credit given. The more approaches we have, the better a resource we offer the critical thinking and educational communities.

Thanks for dropping by, and thanks for taking an interest in teaching critical thinking to our youth!

Welcome, JREF Visitors!

Greetings to anyone stopping by from Bart Farkas’s Swift post at the James Randi Educational Foundation website. Like I said in my post there, the site is under heavy construction but will probably be finished by the end of the month. Please feel free to send feedback or questions through the contact page.

Thanks for stopping by and taking an interest in educating our youth in critical thinking!

Welcome to Kids Thinking Critically!

Kids Thinking Critically is an educational program designed to contextualize necessary critical thinking skills to adolescents and young adults. It was originally designed to target at-risk and underprivilged kids, but can be easily adapted to other contexts.

You can navigate the site with the links above or in the sidebar. It might help get started to read the Overview first, and then move on to the meat of the program. Right now there’s not much here, but I’m working on finishing up the initial information and lesson plan in the next week or so.

Thanks for taking an interest in educating our youth!