FAQ

The Critical Skills Classroom is a comprehensive model that creatively and effectively integrates four powerful teaching methodologies into a coherent strategy:

• Collaborative Learning
• Experiential Learning
• Problem-Based Learning
• Standards-Driven Learning

The versatility of the Critical Skills Classroom model has made it highly adaptable and successfully implemented at all grade levels and in all subject areas.

Working together, these methodologies provide teachers and students the means to simultaneously and intentionally:

• Build and sustain a strong, supportive classroom learning community
• Target the curriculum in ways that provide both a depth of understanding and meaningful learning
• Develop the critical skills and fundamental dispositions
• Meet or exceed the demands of district and state frameworks and standards

Students in a Critical Skills Classroom:

• Frequently work as learning teams and groups.
• Actively solve academic problems, scenarios, and real-world problems.
• Make public presentations and exhibitions of their learning
• Systematically reflect on what they are doing and learning
• Focus on standards of quality for their work
• Take shared responsibility and ownership of their learning and for the classroom community

“Critical Skills has become the measuring stick for every learning opportunity—in my life and my classroom—and my benchmark for quality learning and assessment at all levels!”—Debra Susi, Theater Arts Teacher, Warsaw Middle School

Teachers in A Critical Skills Classroom:

• Model, guide, coach, and support the learning process
• Design learning activities that are carefully connected and built on one another
• Incorporate targeted learning standards to guide the classroom culture, curriculum, and assessment

No. Critical Skills is an approach to teaching and learning, but it’s not a model. That means that we don’t expect “fidelity of implementation.” We recognize (and celebrate!) that teachers innovate, modify, and adjust what they’ve learned so that it better serves their individual classroom settings best, and we hope that teachers will share their successes (and growing edges) so that the CSC can continue to evolve and grow.

The Critical Skills

• Problem-Solving
• Decision Making
• Critical Thinking
• Creative Thinking
• Communication
• Organization
• Management
• Leadership

The Fundamental Dispositions

• Ownership
• Self Direction
• Quality
• Character
• Collaboration
• Curiosity and Wonder
• Community

Critical Skills teachers know that community is the key to everything. We connect informally using social media (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) and formally via Zoom and face-to-face meetings. Emerging Critical Skills teachers can expect to be supported by the Antioch faculty as well.

Under the guidance and leadership of practicing classroom teachers with expertise in Critical Skills, participating educators experience all dimensions of the approach firsthand. Educators explore problem-based, experiential, collaborative, and standards-driven learning and examine how these methodologies can be successfully integrated, focusing on the role of the teacher in designing curriculum, guiding students, and assessing performance. You will develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to build and maintain a dynamic and responsive classroom.

Critical Skills Institutes are offered in three ways: in your school during the summer or during the school year (for teams of teachers) and during the Critical Skills Immersion held in July at our Keene, New Hampshire Campus (visit our available classes page for more information and to register for the summer immersion)

School-based Institutes are typically arranged by a single school or district and are supported throughout the year through coaching by our master teachers. We also offer Institutes during the school year, utilizing the existing in-service days scheduled by the district or school and supported by additional coaching between sessions. If you’re ready to arrange your own Institute, contact Laura Thomas at [email protected]. It’s helpful if you know the dates that you’d like your institute to run. 

Yes! There are many ideas, approaches, theories, and techniques in the world of education, big ideas that are associated with a vast set of techniques.

Since 1985, the Critical Skills Classroom has been bringing the most powerful ideas together into a coherent and workable plan for teachers. Examine the diagram. The core concepts have been condensed into three fundamental ideas:

1) connected problem-based challenges that are

2) experienced in a collaborative learning community, and

3) designed to achieve standards of understanding, knowledge, and skills

Associated with these three ideas are many of the theories and initiatives that have gained attention in modern educational practice. The shading illustrates how these are linked to one or more of the core concepts of Critical Skills.

Critical Skills draws from this broad foundation and translates theory into practice. Specifically, the CSC supports:

• Equity Centered Trauma Informed Education
• Universal Design for Learning
• Open Source 
• Experiential Learning
• Constructivism
• Social Emotional Learning
• Design Thinking
• Differentiated Instruction Theory
• Problem–Based Learning
• Situated Learning
• Neurodevelopmental Learning
• Inquiry-Based Instruction
• Criterion-Referenced Instruction
• Social Learning
• Cooperative/Collaborative Learning

For more information, download our ebook, The Research Behind the Critical Skills Classrooms.

Critical Skills Master Teachers are active contributors to the Master Teacher community, participating in the ongoing evolution of the Critical Skills Classroom model and the Critical Skills Institute; developing an advanced understanding of the CSC model leading to advanced application in participant’s classrooms/ work; gain theoretical and practical knowledge and skills in working with adult learners; appropriately utilize new technological tools in advancing the outcomes of Critical Skills Classrooms and Institutes/ Coaching, and crafting and publishing interconnected, coherent units of study driven by essential questions, specific curricular frameworks, and broad interdisciplinary perspectives. 

The title “Critical Skills Master Teacher” is earned through a rigorous process of implementation, reflection, and observation. An individual who has gained this status is imbued with the authority to train others in the use of the Critical Skills Classroom and to participate in the Leadership Community’s continued development of the approach. Master Teachers are typically selected from MEd and Certificate students based on their enthusiasm and their work in implementing Critical Skills in their own classrooms.