We are swimming in messaging. It comes at our children from every direction: advertising, social media, entertainment, political speech, and the conversations happening in their peer groups right now. Nearly all respondents in national surveys say critical thinking skills are necessary in today’s world, and yet only 29 percent of adults say they definitively studied critical thinking in school themselves. REBOOT FOUNDATION The gap between what we say we value and what we actually teach is enormous.

The consequences are real. Lacking awareness of how extremist groups recruit and what makes their messaging persuasive can lead to unintentional engagement with propaganda content Simon Fraser University, and that engagement is happening at younger ages than most parents realize. Explicit, skills-based critical thinking instruction is one of the most well-documented protective factors we have.

Finland has known this for decades. Finnish early childhood education introduces critical thinking habits at age three, not as a separate subject but woven into how children explore the world. Blair Lee has built on that insight to develop an explicit critical thinking curriculum spanning early childhood through high school: named skills, taught directly, practiced across contexts, and designed to build on one another across years of learning.

In this session Blair makes the case that this work is not enrichment. It is essential. You will leave with a clear picture of what genuine critical thinking instruction looks like at each stage of development, why explicit instruction matters, and how to begin at whatever age your child is right now.

Explore the full SEA Publishing curriculum line in this live vendor session, featuring research-informed, skills-based resources designed to support deeper thinking, clearer communication, and meaningful learning across subjects. Built on explicit instruction, deliberate sequencing, and a multimodal approach, these materials help learners build skills they can actually use.

Join us for a live walkthrough, a closer look at what makes SEA Publishing different, and an open Q&A. Plus, one live attendee will win any SEA Publishing product of their choice (awarded as an ebook; winner announced at the end of the session).

Most writing instruction asks kids to do too much too soon: longer pieces, more paragraphs, bigger prompts, before the foundational skills are actually in place. The result is writing that is longer but not better, and kids who feel stuck or overwhelmed rather than capable and confident.

Most of us came to alternative education because the standard model wasn’t working for our kids. But when we bring them home, we’re often still working from inherited assumptions about what learning looks like — assumptions the research doesn’t actually support.

This talk goes to the source. What does cognitive science actually show about how memory forms, why some things stick and others vanish, and why skills learned in one context often don’t travel to another? And given what the research shows, how do we design learning that fits the real, individual kids in front of us?

Drawing on decades of findings in cognitive psychology — working memory, schema formation, retrieval practice, and the conditions for transfer — this talk offers a framework for thinking about learning that is grounded in how brains actually work. Not a method. Not a program. A set of principles you can use to evaluate what you’re doing, diagnose when something isn’t working, and design something better.