AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Park Ridge State High School has embarked on a journey to become a centre of excellence in the teaching and learning of critical thinking. Teaming up with the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project, a project that blends insights from Philosophy and Education to provide a unique, pedagogical approach to teaching critical thinking in the classroom.

Park Ridge SHS teachers are rethinking what classroom practice looks like. First and foremost, this involves a shift in focus in the classroom from knowledge transmission to students’ cognitive and metacognitive development. Secondly, it involves students owning and driving the inquiry process. Thirdly, it involves students and teachers sharing a common metalanguage around thinking and argumentation that helps students understand the cognitive tasks teachers are asking them to perform.

This kind of pedagogical transformation takes time and space for teaching staff and has required investing in extensive professional learning and mentoring. Creating a thinking school requires a cultural shift within the school so that it can remain focused on the important work—teaching and learning. Teachers are actively co-designing research projects that focus on what teaching for thinking looks like in the classroom, results from this research feed back into the teacher’s pedagogical development through a sequence of action research cycles.