Prospective founding contributors: David A. Gann, Tophe Zuelke, Dennis Koyama, Ross Thompson, and Paul Consalvi
Open invitation to: teachers across proficiency levels, assessment specialists, curriculum designers, teacher educators, researchers, students, and material developers
Critical thinking is widely included in course descriptions and learning objectives, yet teachers and researchers often use the term to describe different capabilities. A task may look complex without requiring meaningful judgment. A learner may demonstrate careful reasoning in simple language, while an assessment may reward linguistic sophistication instead. Teachers need a usable way to connect what they mean by critical thinking with what a task actually requires, what learners observably do, and what classroom evidence can reasonably support.
We invite collaborators to develop and test a shared, adaptable framework connecting:
definitions → task demands → observable reasoning behaviors → learning evidence → practical assessment
To make critical-thinking expectations more explicit, teachable, observable, and assessable across diverse English-language-learning contexts without reducing critical thinking to one taxonomy, proficiency level, or standardized score.
Compare prominent definitions, taxonomies, and skill frameworks used in critical-thinking and language education.
Identify the reasoning demands that make a classroom task genuinely require critical thinking.
Distinguish cognitive demand from language demand, task complexity, topic difficulty, and student confidence.
Describe observable learner behaviors that can serve as credible indicators of critical thinking.
Develop practical design and assessment tools that teachers can adapt across age groups and proficiency levels.
Test whether different teachers can use the framework consistently enough for curriculum planning, feedback, and classroom inquiry.
A shared JALT Critical Thinking Framework that is rigorous enough for research and practical enough for lesson planning.
An open repository of annotated classroom tasks showing precisely what makes each task require critical thinking.
A developmental map showing how critical-thinking performance can become more sophisticated without equating sophistication with advanced English.
A set of classroom assessment exemplars, student work samples, and moderation protocols.
Multi-institutional research capable of informing curriculum standards, teacher education, textbook design, and future SIG publications.
Clarity before measurement: We will not assess an undefined construct.
Construct fairness: Language proficiency will not automatically be treated as evidence of reasoning quality.
Pluralism with discipline: Different frameworks may remain useful if their purposes, assumptions, and boundaries are explicit.
Teacher usability: A theoretically elegant framework must still help a teacher design or improve a real task.
Development over ranking: Assessment should help learners become more capable thinkers, not merely classify them.
Transparent uncertainty: We will distinguish working propositions from validated findings.
What must a learner decide, evaluate, interpret, justify, or reconsider for a task to require critical thinking?
When is a complicated task cognitively undemanding?
What forms of elementary critical thinking are visible among lower-proficiency learners?
Which observable behaviors can be assessed without overclaiming access to a learner’s internal thinking?
How can assessment recognize questioning, qualification, revision, and intellectual humility as well as confident assertion?
Which parts of a shared framework should remain invariant, and which must be adapted to context?
A framework crosswalk comparing selected definitions and taxonomies.
A Critical-Thinking Task Demand Audit with a small number of usable design questions.
A bank of 12 annotated tasks across at least three proficiency bands.
A draft observation-and-feedback rubric focused on visible reasoning behaviors.
A collaborative conference paper or SIG report documenting agreements, disagreements, and the first pilot findings.
Weeks 1–3: Share frameworks, sample tasks, and assessment concerns; agree on working definitions and scope.
Weeks 4–6: Audit existing tasks and identify recurring dimensions of authentic reasoning demand.
Weeks 7–10: Redesign and pilot a small set of tasks in participating classrooms.
Weeks 11–13: Compare learner evidence, revise the tools, and decide whether a larger study is feasible and suitable.
Classroom tasks, student samples with appropriate consent, framework expertise, assessment design, qualitative coding, quantitative analysis, lower-proficiency teaching experience, materials-development experience, and collaboration stewardship.
Use rotating framework, classroom-practice, assessment, and evidence stewards. Major construct or publication decisions should be documented and reviewed collectively. Authorship and recognition should follow actual contributions rather than institutional status.
Join if you want to help answer a deceptively difficult question: What would count as credible evidence that a language-learning task required—and helped develop—critical thinking?