The Importance of Skill-Driven Learning
Why become a Circa student and study with our skill-driven courses? Read below how critical thinking can help you in high school and college.
History—while we usually use the word in the sense of ‘the past’—is far more than just the sum of all events that have happened. History offers a way of thinking: it tells us how to make connections, how to draw conclusions, and how to analyze the world around us. All of these skills individually are crucial to student success. Collectively, these skills add up to a way to think critically and to solve problems.
Critical thinking skills are important to student success. They form the foundation for the work that students do in the classroom. And they are necessary for national exams, like the SAT, ACT, and AP. Far beyond the discipline of history, the ability to make reasoned arguments and clear judgements sets students up for success in the classroom and beyond.
Critical thinking skills do not just come to students accidentally. They need to be actively learned. It is this active learning that most students miss out on in high school (and even in college). In many high schools, students are assigned a paper. They are expected to learn how to research, write, and make an argument through the process of doing the assignment. But they are never directly taught how to do any of these parts successfully. These kinds of assignments give students a tall order: to learn the expectations for these skills and then to learn how to execute these skills with little to no guidance. Furthermore, when students receive ambiguous comments from teachers (with corrections that they are not expected to implement), there is little reason to think that students will understand how to improve these skills for their next assignment.
At Circa, then, we take a skill-driven approach. Our goal is to teach students critical thinking skills. All of our courses and programs have been designed with this outcome in mind.
To teach critical thinking skills, we have broken these skills into 4 parts: analyze, argue, communicate, and explore. We have then taken these skills and further divided them into sub-skills. Analyze, for example, is divided into both a written analysis sub-skill and a visual analysis sub-skill.
These sub-skills form the teaching outcomes of our courses. Our courses are not based on learning information about a historical topic—they teach a component of a crucial critical thinking skill.
As students go through a course, they build their knowledge and ability to execute this skill from the ground up. Each in class, students learn another aspect of how to finetune how they approach a skill. In their assignments, students also practice building their skills. Their work is corrected once and then students revisit the comments to redo the assignment, refining their ability to implement the target skill. Afterward, the student and instructor discuss how the student approached the task the second time and articulate specific areas for continued improvement in the next assignment.
These sub-skills build across an entire program. By the end, students have a tool kit of skills that allow them to think critically about ideas and arguments.
