From the Assistant Principal - Teaching and Learning

Why is Critical Thinking Essential for Your Child’s Success?

How easy is it to just ask ChatGPT to provide the answer for you? This time-saving strategy outsources your thinking, bypassing the deep learning skills required for true success and learning growth. Students offload their thinking when they obtain these quick answers from an AI chatbot. If a student is not engaging in their learning materials, then how are they learning?A continued reliance on AI doing the thinking for us hinders our ability to develop our problem-solving and analytical skills. Students become more focused on interacting with the Chat Bot than the content they need to be learning, and this has a significant impact on their motivation to engage in learning.

When AI does the heavy lifting for our thinking processes, we no longer develop our understanding of complex issues, we struggle to make informed decisions and our capacity for independent critical thinking is diminished. These skills that we are offloading to AI are essential for our success at school, university and in the workplace. In an ever-increasing competitive world, we need to develop our critical thinking as a habit of "genuine analysis—evaluating sources, comparing perspectives, and questioning assumptions.

Parents need to join teachers in encouraging our children to dig deeper and actively challenge, accepting superficial information. We need to ask probing questions such as:  Why is this true? What evidence supports this? Are there alternative viewpoints? We need to support our children in developing the habit of learning that focuses on cultivating consistent analysis rather than simply seeking quick answers.

When we review our child’s results in these upcoming reporting periods, perhaps question your child on their reliance on AI and how it helped or hindered them in their classwork and assessment tasks.

The College’s Strategic Learning Goal for 2025 is focused on Critical Thinking and ensuring our students have the key skills to become thinkers of the future. We will continue to pursue these skills throughout their learning and assessment tasks, to ensure that our students achieve learning gain throughout their time at St Andrews College.

Mrs Josilin Kalifa

Assistant Principal - Teaching and Learning