Critical Thinking and Productive Struggle Across the Curriculum

In today’s classrooms, fostering critical thinking skills and encouraging a productive struggle are essential for student growth and deeper learning. This engaging workshop empowers educators with strategies to challenge students across disciplines while providing the right level of support to build resilience, problem-solving skills, and intellectual curiosity. Participants will explore the role of productive struggle in developing critical thinking skills, strategies for scaffolding challenging tasks without removing rigor, techniques for creating a classroom culture that embraces mistakes as learning opportunities, cross-curricular approaches to fostering inquiry, analysis, and problem-solving, and practical tools to engage students in meaningful discourse and independent thinking. Through interactive discussions, real-world examples, and hands-on activities, teachers will leave with actionable strategies to integrate critical thinking and productive struggle into daily instruction, preparing students for success in and beyond the classroom.