SESSION ABSTRACT

The 21st century confronts us with a new paradigm of knowledge - a complex and variable one. This challenge should be addressed by the educational community to ensure students are effectively trained to develop a critical mindset. In order to support educators to introduce transferable skills in their classrooms, in particular, critical thinking, over the past years we have been working on the project Transferable Skills for Students and Early-Career Researchers (https://www.ucm.es/siim/transferable-skills-for-students-and-early-career-researchers).

From the research group SIIM-Studies on Intermediality and Intercultural Mediation in collaboration with the Language Center at Francisco de Vitoria University, we are pleased to present the Basic Interdisciplinary Toolkit for the Teaching of Critical Thinking Skills entitled ""Show me your evidence"". The toolkit – in the form of a downloadable booklet in pdf format – is intended to provide a practical application of how to teach and assess Critical Thinking Skills in an interdisciplinary and creative way, giving examples of specific activities and their structured assessment, which can be easily applied in the language classroom. It guides the teacher and the student through the different stages in the development of a critical opinion on any topic, which can enrich classroom debates and discussions and convert them into something more than a mere fluency exercise. In addition, it aims at formulating a basic definition of Critical Thinking within the European Education Area from the perspective of a world in which speakers are bombarded with information and need to know how to manage it.