Critical Thinking Skills for Teens: Red Riding Hood Revisited

If you are a college-bound teen, you should be working every day to sharpen your critical thinking skills. These are the skills you will need in each of your college classes to be able to...
1) read & prepare for class
2) listen to class lectures
3) make insightful contributions to class discussions
4) complete written assignments, including response papers, research papers, and interpretations

As a former college professor, I know just where you're heading and can guide you expertly as you prepare yourself for your next step in the academic world. Come join me in this class and the others in the "Critical Thinking for Teens" series!

In each of the classes, we use a three-step method for academic inquiry:
STEP 1 = observe
STEP 2 = categorize
STEP 3 = analyze

These are the steps I coach my writing students through as they prepare to choose a paper topic, write a thesis statement, assemble their evidence, and draft their conclusions. 

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In this particular class, we will base our investigations on the fairy tale "Red Riding Hood."

I know: "Red Riding Hood" is a story most of us probably think we know backwards and forwards. What more could there be to possibly learn? Well…a lot! One of the goals of these “Critical Thinking for Teens” courses is to give you the opportunity to see that close examination can yield delightfully new perspectives on just about anything. 

In this class, we will learn a little bit about the Brothers Grimm, who first published the German version of Red Riding Hood in 1812. More than mere collectors of tales for children, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were thinkers of the first class—professors of German language and literature, discoverers of linguistic principles, caretakers of the library of the King of Westfalia, even rabble-rousers who were exiled from the city of Göttingen for their political beliefs.

In looking at the story of Red Riding Hood, we will exercise our critical thinking skills by working together to observe, categorize, and analyze. We will focus particularly on the instructions Red Riding Hood’s mother gives her, considering the relative guilt of the individual versus that of society.