Building Critical Thinking Skills Through a Training Curriculum

Within the bachelor’s programme Linguistics, there was a need to explore what it actually means to be a “critical student” and how this critical attitude develops throughout the programme. In collaboration with the Educational Advice & Teacher Development team, we set up a structured process to create a clear training curriculum that supports this development.

We began with an extensive analysis of the existing courses and their learning objectives, aiming to identify where and how critical skills are taught. This process was supported by a newly developed curriculum mapping tool, created as part of the pilot: Een slimmer collegejaar (A Smarter Academic Year). The tool helped us gain insight into the distribution and balance of critical skills across the entire programme.

Together with lecturers and students, we organised sessions to refine the definition of critical skills and to determine where in the curriculum these skills could be further developed. Through this thorough process, we were able to create a model that not only reflects the current state of the programme, but also provides concrete steps for further improvement and implementation.

Thanks to this approach, we can now work in a targeted way on strengthening students’ critical skills, ultimately contributing to the education of even stronger academics. We worked closely with the programme’s initiator, provided extensive support and carried out a significant amount of preparatory work for the lecturer. This included the learning objective analysis, allowing the lecturer to focus on their core tasks while we took care of the rest.