# QuickTips: Promoting Critical Thinking Skills in Young Learners

February 11, 2016

Happy Thursday, readers! For today’s post, I want to share a helpful infographic with some great tips on supporting the development of preschoolers’ thinking skills–the foundation of their future academic success. Created with information from the book **_[Engaging Young Engineers: Teaching Problem-Solving Skills Through STEM](http://products.brookespublishing.com/Engaging-Young-Engineers-P860.aspx),_** this free printable gives you easy-to-implement strategies for helping young learners become:

- **Curious thinkers** who actively explore people and things, especially the new and novel, and eventually abstract ideas.
- **Persistent thinkers** who actively take risks and repeat their experiments over and over to verify results and look for new outcomes. They remain with an activity for a sustained period of time to try to solve the problem or understand the problem better.
- **Flexible thinkers** who pause and decide what to do next rather than simply reacting immediately to something perceived in the environment.
- **Reflective thinkers** who acknowledge what actions they have already taken and what data they have already gathered to make a decision. They evaluate those actions and data to determine whether or not they are a step closer to answering a question or designing a solution.
- **Collaborative thinkers** who work together effectively, asking questions, pooling information, contributing to and critiquing concepts and ideas, and jointly testing solutions.

### **Click the image below to see the full infographic,** and please share it around if you like it **!**

## Want more QuickTips? [Visit the archive here.](https://blog.brookespublishing.com/category/quick-tips/)