S8 E6: The Critical Skills Classroom Is Turning 40. Why Don’t More Teachers Know About It?

Laura [00:00 – 00:15] – The parts that are trickiest for teachers are getting their heads around the idea that they’re allowed to set a goal for themselves, that they are a student in the classroom as well. In fact, they’re the most important student in the room. And so their learning counts. 

Jasper [00:19 – 02:08] – This is the Seed Field Podcast, the show where Antiochians share their knowledge, tell their stories, and come together to win victories for humanity. I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk, and today we’re joined by Laura Thomas for a conversation about the Critical Skills Classroom, a teaching approach that is kicking off its 40th anniversary celebration. Coinciding with this milestone, the Education Department on Antioch’s New England campus has just published a new book, The Complete Guide to the Critical Skills Classroom, which builds on earlier coaching kits to form a 400-page guide to using this approach from the biggest pedagogical concepts down to specific lesson plans. I’ve been reading it over the past week. It’s a really rich resource. And while it pulls together materials and voices from the wider critical skills leadership community, the book’s editor is our guest today, Laura Thomas. The critical skills classroom is a really exciting approach, and it pulls together experiential learning, cycles of action and reflection, and the cultivation of emotional intelligence. And it brings them into one unified, refined approach. I mean, it’s been going on for 40 years now, and that says something. But Laura says that the critical skills classroom is still in some ways a secret, a good idea, but one that more people should know about. So I’m excited to learn more about it today as we mark the publication of this book. Let me quickly introduce our guest. Laura Thomas is core faculty in our education department. She’s also director of the Experienced Educators Program. And before coming to Antioch, she spent nearly a decade teaching high school English, debate, theater, and speech. She’s highly involved in the Antioch Center for School Renewal, which is the home of the Critical Skills Classroom. Laura, welcome to the Seedfield Podcast. 

Laura [02:08 – 02:10] – Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here. 

Jasper [02:10 – 02:50] – So to start off, I always like to ask guests to disclose positionality. And when we’re talking about education, which touches all people in our society, it’s important to know different ways that power may come into conversation. So I can start off. I’m white. I’m a cisgendered man. I’m queer. I’m not living with a physical disability, but I do experience anxiety and depression, especially in 2025. I have a college degree and a master’s, and I have steady housing and steady income. I would also disclose that I’m the parent of a two-year-old. Laura, as much as you’re comfortable, where are you coming to the conversation from? 

Laura [02:50 – 03:28] – So I am a white cis hetero woman. I’ve been married to my husband for 32 years, and I live in a body that does what I want it to do most of the time, though I do have ADD, which, like many women, I just discovered when menopause hit, I discovered I had ADD, which is apparently a pretty common story these days. I also have steady housing. I live in a home that my husband and I co-own with our bank, and I have been at Antioch for 23 years or so, so my income is also very steady. So I recognize all the privilege in that. 

Jasper [03:29 – 03:50] – Yeah, that’s a lot of privilege, but also you’re a working person in our society, so there are plenty of people with much more. So always good to reflect on that too. Let’s jump into the critical skills classroom. I want to talk about this approach and kind of drill down into its different parts. But I thought a good place to start would be to define the term critical skills. 

Laura [03:51 – 04:41] – Sure. So, you know, it’s interesting because when we use critical skills out in the wider world, a lot of times folks think we’re talking about critical thinking skills. And critical thinking is one of the skills and dispositions that we work with. But when we talk about critical skills, we’re not talking about critical in like a negative way, because some people are like, well, you know, is it a bad thing? And it’s more like we think about it like critical care or important skills. So these are critical skills for critical times. And when we talk about critical skills, we’re talking about a set of skills and dispositions that we defined that include things like, oh, communication, collaboration, problem solving, organization, self -management, things like that, curiosity and wonder, creativity. But we recognize that those aren’t the only skills that folks might want to work with. 

Jasper [04:41 – 05:02] – That makes a lot of sense that it’s like critical and creative thinking, collaboration, communication, self-direction. Thinking of the critical skills classroom as an approach that is to some degree an alternative to the mainstream of education today. Exactly. How does the mainstream think about cultivating these skills? Are they top of mind in most classrooms?

Laura [05:02 – 06:37] – I think, well, you know, classrooms aren’t a monolith. So even if we’re just looking across the United States and just looking at public schools, the continuum of approaches and philosophies is incredibly broad, depending on the affluence of the area, the ways that families and business leaders or civic leaders define the role of the school and the purpose of education, you know, so you see a lot of different things. What I see now most often is an emphasis on either compliance, you know, you do these things because these are the rules and this is what you have to do to get along, or skills and dispositions like this that are taught as discrete separate things. So we have like a week that we focus on kindness, or we as a school, we spend the year thinking about curiosity. It’s a separate thing from the academic content in the places that it’s intentionally taught. I think more often it’s recognized in its absence. You know, more and more we hear teachers talking about how students are disengaged, disinterested, they don’t come to school, they don’t see the purpose of school, and so their engagement during school is exactly what you would expect from people, you know, that don’t want to be there. And those are the places where it’s like, well, that’s really the absence of an emphasis on these kinds of skills and dispositions And I think you really hear a lot more conversation about that at this point than you do about places where this stuff is happening actively, though it’s definitely happening in different ways all over the country. 

Jasper [06:37 – 06:52] – It also resonates with me that that is not the main thing or the main emphasis. Oftentimes the emphasis is like, we have to chug through the state standards and make sure that you have enough so that you can hit it on the test at the end of the semester, the end of the year. 

Laura [06:53 – 07:40] – Yeah, and I think that if left to their own devices, the overwhelming majority of teachers, I think, would choose to teach in this more thematic interdisciplinary way. Unfortunately, the culture of education since No Child Left Behind, really, which was in 2001, something like that, has really become very fact-based. It’s very test driven with a lot of emphasis on alignment to math and reading standards with a complete focus on the test. And that really locks teachers out of a lot of ways that they would teach if they had the choice. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s something that teachers are choosing. I think that in a lot of cases they’re sort of they’re required to teach that way. 

Jasper [07:40 – 08:01] – It’s something that the Bush administration chose and that Congress chose at this point 20 plus years ago. And we’re all living downstream of it. But I want to get to the definition of the critical skills classroom. So I was curious if we were in an elevator together and we were going a couple floors and I was saying, so Laura, what’s the critical skills classroom? What’s your speech? 

Laura [08:01 – 08:42] – You know, I’ve never had a good speech. I’ve tried for 24 years to come up with a good speech. But what I tell people now is the critical skills classroom is an approach to teaching and learning that simultaneously targets the teacher and the student as co-learners, focusing on both building academic skill and process skills and dispositions at the same time through meaningful problems and through experiences. sometimes designed experiences, sometimes experiences that just happen. At its essence, the critical skills classroom is about doing things and then talking about them and then doing other things. 

Jasper [08:43 – 08:54] – I love that. So I think we can kind of like walk through each of those pieces. So let’s start with the experiences. I know experiential learning can be a bit of a buzzword, but what does that mean in practice? 

Laura [08:54 – 09:36] – When we talk about doing something, We mean typically in critical skills, we’re talking about a challenge, though that language is language that we started using 40 years ago. Well, actually, 40 years ago, we called them L-burps, learning by real world problems, or learning by real problems, L-burp. And then over time, they evolved into what we call a challenge. A challenge is an intentionally designed problem to solve that targets academic content and skills and dispositions at the same time in the context of a meaningful problem. Sometimes the problem is very what we call basic. It’s a basic challenge, which asks folks. 

Jasper [09:37 – 09:38] – Can you give like an example? 

Laura [09:38 – 10:41] – Yeah. So a basic challenge would be a challenge that asks us just to focus on getting used to doing this kind of thing together. So it might be a question like, you know, a challenge like, what does a quality conversation look like in our classroom? The problem is we don’t know how to talk to each other because we’re all new, right? This is our first week together as a class. So the problem is we don’t have expectations. So how are we going to set those expectations together? And so that might be a basic challenge. A lot of the stuff that teachers that are familiar with responsive classroom, those first six weeks of school, a lot of the stuff they do in those first six weeks in elementary schools are similar to what we’d call basic challenges. But they’re just about helping kids get used to the idea of being in a classroom where there’s some agency, where they have some agency and where it’s a sort of an interdependent organization of people working together to do meaningful work. At the upper grades, the problem might be something like cell phones or how do we want to manage the seating in our room? How do we want to design the seating in our room? Something like that. 

Jasper [10:41 – 10:51] – You’re describing problems that are extremely relevant to the operation of the classroom. And it’s really about like designing the system of the classroom and co-designing it. 

Laura [10:51 – 11:19] – Yeah. Though in some cases, the teacher has a very clear way of how they want things to work out. Like, this is how I want this to be solved. And so they can sort of help guide students to the outcome that they’re looking for. But the big thing about a challenge is that you can’t know the answer before you begin. You might know an answer. You might have some answers in mind. But you also have to be open as the teacher to arriving at an answer that you didn’t expect. So especially at the beginning.

Jasper [11:19 – 11:48] –  I always think this with my two-year-old kid, I’ll ask him a question and be like, do you want some yogurt? And he’ll be like, no. And I’m like, well, if I was just planning to give him yogurt, I shouldn’t have asked. So I’m not going to just like be like, well, you have to eat it anyways or something. And it makes me thoughtful. Like you really wanna ask a question when it’s a question. If you’re not asking a question and you know the answer, which sometimes as a teacher, that’s how it is. It’s like recess is over. You’re not saying, do you wanna come in kids? It’s like it’s time to come in. 

Laura [11:48 – 13:35] – Yeah. And there are certain levels of, you know, there’s this whole way of thinking about the balance of structure and support in the classroom. Like how much, what’s the moment where my students really need me to be the person in charge so that they can sort of relax and know that they’re safe? And then what are the moments where I need to back away? Because they can do it. You know, they may not feel absolutely sure that they can do it. But by stepping away, I’m showing them that I know they can do it, which builds confidence, which again, helps them gain agency, which is really what we’re hoping for as they grow up, that they have a sense that whatever the problem is, I can solve it. Like I’ve solved hard problems before. I know I can do this. I would prefer not to, but I have to, so I can. And so it’s not, again, it’s not binary. It’s an overtime and with experience is what we say. And then as we move forward, we layer academic content on. So as students understand how to do this, you know, we have standard operating procedures for what we do when we have a messy problem. And then I give them a messy academic problem because they already have a sort of a way to approach it. So now we throw some academics on top. And then as we start to make those academics more complicated, we bring in more ideas, we draw from different places. I may decide to, you know, create a scenario, some kind of a silly situation or something that’s fairly realistic where I’m asking students to imagine what it would be like to be an archaeologist in the year 2335, looking back on this period in history or an alien who is landed on this planet and who is from a planet with this ecosystem and needs to figure out how to survive on. And, you know… 

Jasper [13:35 – 13:53] – Yeah, there’s there’s a lot of like skills that have to be developed there and not just skills, because we often have agency in different aspects of our life, but just like comfort and knowing that you can mess up and that’s going to be OK, too. And so starting in the practical and then getting to the more subject based makes a lot of sense on my end. 

Laura [13:54 – 14:30] – Then the most advanced kind of challenge is the real world problem to solve, which is when people think about this kind of work, they often imagine that as like, well, this is what it is. It’s either that or it’s nothing. And those are situations where you see things like students presenting to school boards or students doing water quality testing and then presenting to the zoning commission or writing letters to the editor or, you know, things that really put kids out in front of the public in very sort of exposed ways in terms of what they know and can do. That’s actually the most advanced kind of challenge in a critical skills classroom. 

Jasper [14:31 – 15:17] – Thank you so much for clarifying what this kind of experiential learning and project or challenge-based learning can be. I think a lot of people, when they think of challenge-based learning, we think about engaging the problem. But then the critical skills classroom has these other two steps that seem really clear, which are exhibiting, like sharing out the work and presenting what you learned about the problem, which students are asked to do. And then debriefing afterwards and saying like, how did that go? Was that too hard of a problem? Would we do something different next time? Should we have taken a different approach from the start? And like, it’s kind of natural what the teacher’s responsibility would be. It’s like kind of like coaching them while they’re dealing with the problem and then maybe giving some feedback, pushing them to reflect a little bit more. But did I capture that? And why is this a powerful model? 

Laura [15:17 – 17:04] – Yes, you absolutely captured it. And I think the parts that are trickiest for teachers are getting their heads around the idea that they’re allowed to set a goal for themselves, that they are a student in the classroom as well. In fact, they’re the most important student in the room. And so their learning counts. And so when they’re designing a challenge, they need to think not just about what the students need, but also, OK, well, what’s my growing edge? What do I need? What do I want to develop as a teacher? Or what am I not ready for? What do I want to avoid because I’m just not there yet? Or maybe I’m there sometimes, but right now I’ve got a thousand things going on and I don’t have the bandwidth. So keeping that in mind. The other piece is that coaching piece is walking that line between supporting and providing enough help without doing too much and sending kids the accidental message that you don’t think they can do it. So walking that line is hard because as teachers, we want to help. That’s what we got into the field to do, right? We want to help. And when we see kids start to struggle, we can feel really good about the productive struggle, but there’s a moment where the struggle becomes really super struggly and it gets uncomfortable. And our kids have been through so much. We don’t want them to be uncomfortable. We don’t want them to. So we step in to help. And by stepping in to help with direction rather than question or just pointing at something or guiding eyes towards a resource, that kind of coaching is really hard for people to get used to doing. Because as soon as kids ask questions, we want to answer them. And in a critical skills classroom, ideally when a kid asks a question, we wait. Because most of the time when they ask questions, they already know the answers, especially if they’re procedural questions or if they’re what are we supposed to do again questions. 

Jasper [17:05 – 17:29] – Yeah. This is why I like the framing of coaching as opposed to teaching. Because if we think of like a basketball coach, you know, the budding basketball player is like, I can’t shoot the shot. You can say like, okay, we’ll take 20 more shots. Or do you want to work on your form or maybe stand closer to the basket and let’s see if we can get it really good from here. But you don’t take the ball and just like sink a couple threes. 

Laura [17:29 – 19:32] – No, no. You give them like reminders that they can hold on to. So yeah, that idea that I standing next to them. Now, I’m not going to let them cross a line into miseducative. You know, there are ways where as a coach, sometimes I have to call a timeout. Sometimes I have to bench a kid. Sometimes I need someone to come stand by me and watch so they can see what’s happening in the classroom. And then we’re going to come back together and talk about what we’re seeing. It’s not always going to work like it’s messy and it’s hard, but messy and hard is where learning happens. It’s just how do we keep it within the guardrails of that zone of proximal development, you know, so that everybody’s working hard and engaged, but not panicking or bored. So we use this XY axis that has on one side, it’s like the time that students have and the ill definition of the problem. And on the other, it’s like how well defined are the resources. And then there’s an array that comes out of the middle that’s over timing with experience. So at the beginning, I’m going to give you a problem to solve, but everything you need to solve that problem is in this packet of paper that I’m giving you or is something that we’ve already worked with. Everything you need to solve this problem is in this little box or this little bag. And then over time, as we get better, you’re going to work with a partner too, because every time you add another person to a group, you add another layer of complexity. And then eventually it’s going to grow into something that’s big and messy. But it’s not the problem. It’s not the experience that’s the meaningful part. It’s the reflection part. It’s the metacognitive part where we look back and say, okay, so what did we do? And how did it work for us? Did we get what we wanted out of the steps we took? And then what do we want to do the same or differently next time we have a problem to solve? How can we remember that next time? And it doesn’t matter if you’re working with preschoolers or graduate students, that same metacognitive piece is equally important and equally relevant. 

Jasper [19:35 – 20:15] – I like that term metacognitive, which I hadn’t really, I don’t know that I’ve heard it before, but like thinking about thinking or like looking at the process of actually thinking through something or how our minds had worked approaching a problem. But I want to zoom out and here we are marking 40 years since this got started at Antioch. And of course, it’s older than that too. And like many of these ideas have been percolating for a long time. But I was curious about the history of this approach. And I mean, we don’t have time to like go deeply into that. That could be its own whole podcast. But how did this get started and how has it evolved? I know that it’s not the same thing that it was 40 years ago.

Laura [20:15 – 20:34] – Oh, golly, no. So it actually started in 1981 when an organization called the Corporate Council for Critical Skills was formed as a response to a nation at risk. We now understand that a nation at risk was really a manufactured crisis. And we are living in the, what did you, how did you put it? We’re living downstream of that now. 

Jasper [20:35 – 20:42] – This was like a Reagan era report that was like, we are falling behind the Soviets. We, our kids can’t read. 

Laura [20:42 – 22:15] – Yeah. And it was all manufactured. But in a lot of places, there was a lot of concern. So in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire, which is where Keene is, which is where Antioch University New England is, an organization called the Corporate Council for Critical Skills was formed. And it was a group of business leaders who met. And they talked about, you know, what should we do? How can we fix this? Is there a thing to fix? So in 1982, they brought together 18 teachers for five weeks to explore the two questions. And I’m going to read these questions because I literally just discovered them today in an old file. And I love them. The first is what skills are vitally important for students to have by the time they leave school in order to be successful in their lives? The second, what would a classroom be like that gave conscious and purposeful attention to the development of these skills? And I think those are awesome questions, right? Yeah, those are great. None of them are about like being productive employees or, you know, they’re just like, what does it take to be successful in your life? And we’re not going to tell you what that means. And we’re also not going to tell you what conscious and purposeful attention means. We’re just going to ask these questions. So they brought these teachers together and the teachers spent a lot of time thinking, well, how do we do it? And how do we do it in a way that’s not an add on? You know, our curriculum’s already full. Yeah. I think it’s also interesting that these business people did not prescribe curriculum. They had no interest in talking about curriculum because they trusted educators as professionals and they knew that curriculum existed and it was good. I know. 

Jasper [22:15 – 22:16] – It was a different time. It was such a different time. 

Laura [22:17 – 23:58] – And so the teachers came up with this, what we now call is critical skills. And at that point, it was just learning by real problems or L-burps, which I mentioned to you. And it sort of picked up steam. And then in 85, 86, we sort of formalized the idea of the critical skills classroom coming to live at Antioch New England Graduate School. It was the first service division, so the first non-credit or degree awarding entity in the institution. And so and now there are lots of service divisions, but we were the first. And then over time, you know, we just sort of grew and the first book came out in 88. And then since then, we’ve had institutes all over the world. Oh, I do want to say our first book was written by Wendy McGrath, who is still involved at Antioch University and still very involved in our community. She came on board and wrote that first edition of what was called A Guide Through the Critical Skills Classroom in 1988. Over time, we’ve worked with a team of teachers. We have this set of leadership folks who are practicing teachers who are using the critical skills approach in their classrooms, and they help us revise so that it reflects modern needs, so that the tools and processes that we are offering to teachers are relevant. And it’s, yeah, but it’s all teachers. So it’s by teachers, It’s for teachers. And as the research continues to evolve, everything that we’re learning about what people need to learn, how people learn, how people need to grow over time in order to be fulfilled and happy and regulated and confident. 

Jasper [23:59 – 24:38] – I like what you say about all these practitioners, these teachers who are out there doing the work and that they end up teaching and kind of bringing up future generations of teachers into figuring out how it works on a practical level. And it feels very inside the ethos of Antioch at its best to be a sort of incubator and hold space for a more grassroots and anarchic process where things are not arrived at through like, this is the panel and they will create the rubric and the methodology and then everyone will follow it. But that’s much more collaborative and co-created. I mean, it’s all of a piece. 

Laura [24:39 – 24:39] – Yeah. 

Jasper [24:39 – 24:51] – So I wanted to ask as a last question, what is the future of the critical skills classroom? Is there room for this to grow? Do you think it’s relevant, necessary for our wider world? 

Laura [24:51 – 27:25] – I think it’s been necessary all along. It’s relevant right now, probably more so than ever, because of this disengagement that we’re seeing all the way down. It’s focusing on this idea of helping kids find agency, which is the key to moving from disengaged to engaged. is claiming your agency, finding something you’re passionate about, and then also knowing that you have the right and the capacity to move with that, to act on that. So it’s not that everything is being done to me. It’s that I have the right to make things different. I have the right to change things. I have the right to make decisions. So many kids don’t know what they think. They don’t know what they believe. If you tell them something, some of them will tell you it back. But if you ask them what they think about something, about an idea, they don’t know. And that’s an agency issue. That’s not having the opportunity to develop the skills that make you feel like you have the right to an opinion. And then the other piece, I think, is this idea of making meaningful problems because the problems we’re facing are bigger and they’re more overwhelming. And we see more and more folks who just put their heads down and check out. The problem’s too big, I can’t deal. And the more time they spend in that reflection, that metacognition, the more they build executive functioning skills, which is another thing a lot of people talk about students lacking. And that then makes them more able to work with big problems in their own lives, in their own communities, and then in the wider world as well. And then the last piece, the most important piece, I think that I think some folks would say is less important, but to me, it’s everything. It’s about joy. Critical skills classrooms are joyful places. People laugh, they’re engaged, they feel safe and connected. They explore big ideas, they play. And we don’t see that a lot right now, especially at the middle and upper grades. Teachers are not feeling a lot of joy right now. And in critical skills classrooms, teachers and students are joyful together. They’re reclaiming their time because we do have a limited number of days on the planet. And I feel like classroom approaches like this, I’m not going to say critical skills is the only one doing it, but approaches like this encourage people to take their time back. Like it’s my time. I’m going to take it and I’m going to use it for something that makes me feel valuable and valued and worthwhile. 

Jasper [27:26 – 27:36] – I love that. It’s good for the kids and it’s good for the teachers too. And ultimately for everyone, for us to feel like we have agency. Thank Thank you so much, Laura, for coming on the podcast today. 

Laura [27:36 – 27:38] – You’re so welcome. Thank you for having me. 

Jasper [27:44 – 29:17] – You can learn more about the Critical Skills Classroom by visiting the Critical Skills Classroom website, which is hosted within antioch.edu. We’ll include a link to that specific website in our show notes. We’ll also include a link to purchase the print and digital editions of the book Laura edited, the complete guide to the Critical Skills Classroom. Though if cost is a concern, please note that you can download numerous free ebooks and other materials off the Critical Skills Classroom website that we’re linking to. One more thing we’ll link to in the show notes is a Seedfield podcast episode from 2022. That was the first time I interviewed Laura, and we titled that episode “To Grow Emotional Literacy, A Classroom Must Become a Community”. If you enjoyed this conversation, maybe give that one a listen. We post these show notes on our website, theseedfield.org, where you will also find full episode transcripts, prior episodes, and more. The Seed Field Podcast is produced by Antioch University. I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk. Our editor is Nastasia Green. Our producer is Karen Hamilton. Stefanie Paredes, Lauren Arienzale, Dani LaPointe, and Liza Wisner are our work-study assistants. We received additional production help from Jen Mont, Amelia Bryan, Melinda Garland, and Laurian Alexandre. Thank you for spending your time with us today. That’s it for this episode. We hope to see you next time. And don’t forget to plant a seed, sow a cause, and win a victory for humanity. From Antioch University, this has been the Seed Field Podcast.