1. THE IMPORTANCE OF CRITICAL THINKING, ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS AND INQUIRY PROCESS TO STIMULATE BRAIN COMPATIBLE LEARNING
Research
By Daniela Katsarova
Bulgaria

2. What is Brain Compatible learning?
Learning by accomplishing different tasks
Comprehensive approach
Based on latest neuroscience research of the brain and the MI theory
Uses brain friendly instructional strategies and assessment practices
Provides biologically driven model for effective teaching and learning
Offers ways to approach all learners
Empowers students to understand how they learn
Addresses intelligences and learning styles that focus on the student as an individual

3. What is the Inquiry Process?
The Inquiry Process empowers students to be responsible for their own continuous improvement in studying and learning.
The inquiry process is based on these premises:
  Most of the time people already have the answers.  What's missing are the right questions.
People don’t want to be told what to do. They prefer to listen to questions and to decide for themselves.
  Something powerful happens in relationships when people ask questions of others instead of already "knowing all the answers."
In the Inquiry Process people ask and answer questions in order to discover what the barriers are to producing results, and what they need to do, or learn to get through those barriers.

4. What is Critical Thinking?
Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way. 
Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about any subject, content, or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully taking charge of the structures inherent in thinking and imposing intellectual standards upon them. (Taken from Richard Paul and Linda Elder, The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools, Foundation for Critical Thinking Press, 2008)

5. Essential Questions and why they are so important
Quality of Life
Quality of Thinking
Quality of Questions

6. How are Critical Thinking, Essential Questions and the Inquiry Process related to each other?
“The quality of our thinking is given in the quality of our questions. Questions define tasks, express problems, and delineate issues. They drive thinking forward.” (Richard Paul and Linda Elder, The Miniature Guide to the art of asking Essential Questions)

7. Attributes of Essential Questions
in the Classroom
Essential Questions require students to:
EVALUATE (make a thoughtful choice between options, with the choice based upon clearly stated criteria)
SYNTHESIZE (invent a new or different version)
ANALYZE (develop a thorough and complex understanding through skillful questioning).
2. Essential Questions make students feel interested and curious. They derive from some deep wish to understand something which matters to them.
3. Answers to Essential Questions cannot be found. They must be invented.

8. 4. Essential questions engage students in the kinds of real life applied problem-solving suggested by nearly every curriculum.
5. Essential questions are well used for multidisciplinary investigations, requiring that students apply the skills and perspectives of math and language while dealing with content from social studies or science.
6. Students need experience first with teacher generated questions, then they practice with trivial information-gathering questions and at last they learn how to frame their own essential questions.

9. Types of Essential Questions
What?
Which one?
How?
Types of Essential Questions
What if?
Should?
Why?

10. Essential vs. Traditional Questions
What is it like to live in Hong Kong?
What is AIDS?
What is a TV program?
Who is the main character of the story? Describe him.
What is a hero? What is a celebrity? Give examples.
What is a good friend like? Describe your best friend.
Essential
Which city in Southeast Asia is the best place to live?
Which serious disease most deserves research funding?
What kind of TV programs are healthy for us?
If you were the boy in this story, how would you handle the problem he faces?
How is a hero different from a celebrity?
Why do some friends stick by you even during the worst of times while others are quick to flee at the first sign of trouble?

11. What happens next?
The Teacher asks the Essential Question. Then the Student keeps wondering throughout the research process, considering the relevance of each new fact, clue or data and each discovery to the question. The researcher is preoccupied with the EQ and the questioning process is almost continuous. Many times the thinking may continue more or less unconsciously as an incubation process operating behind the scenes, but all of a sudden a thought may surface in the middle of a day, either at school or in the middle of a sport activity or during the leisure time.

12. Useful Websites
Richard Paul and Linda Elder, The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools, Foundation for Critical Thinking Press, 2008)