Promote Critical Thinking

How To Promote Critical Thinking Inside the Art Classroom?
Jonathan Pleitez
Texas State University

From my educator experience, I have learned a lot about the role of a teacher. One of a teacher’s role is to provide knowledge to their students and to incorporate that acquired knowledge into the world. A strategy teachers use is critical thinking. Critical thinking is crucial in the learning process. As an inspiring art educator, I 've begun to ask myself the question: How do teachers promote critical thinking in an art classroom? The main goal in art classrooms is perceived as just producing art. However, where does the critical thinking skill fall into an art lesson? To begin answer this question, we must understand what is critical thinking, the value of critical thinking in art, and then some strategies to use critical thinking in the art classroom. Let 's discuss first about what is critical thinking. According to Teaching Critical Thinking Skills: Ability, Motivation, Intervention, and the Pygmalion Effect by Larry Howard and Thomas Li-Ping Tang:
Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection,

Garcia and Smith writes, “The challenge was to encourage students to brainstorm around their subject matter of interest, which helped them to become aware of their own thinking, and to document their thinking through writing and making (p. 104). Through brainstorming, the students began to think critically and then recorded their thoughts and ideas in writing. Writing down thoughts is can be as effective as discussing out loud with the class. The teacher has many different strategies to choose from and learn to discover which strategy is