Early childhood educators: Learn how to deepen children’s critical thinking and metacognition through STEM.

While many educators already feel confident identifying children’s STEM-related interests and supporting child-led exploration, in this special online workshop you’ll learn to move beyond engagement to strengthen children’s critical thinking and deepen their relationship with what they are learning with carefully chosen prompts, questions, and provocations.

This interactive 2-hour workshop unpacks metacognition — “thinking about thinking” — and examines how planning, monitoring, and evaluation during early STEM explorations support critical thinking across a range of early years ages and stages. This includes practical strategies for making thinking visible for infants, encouraging prediction and reflection with toddlers, and embedding planning and reasoning for preschoolers. In this online workshop, educators will: 

• Examine how intentional interactions during STEM exploration can enrich learning, deepen inquiry, and support children to reflect, predict, and reason more deeply. 
• Gain confidence in creating early STEM learning environments that encourage cognitive risk-taking and curiosity. 
• Develop a practical toolkit of open-ended questions and statements to extend children’s ideas, reasoning, and observations. 
• Design their own “seed of science” provocations and build a bank of prompts, questions, and statements to extend children’s ideas and inquiries. 
• Identify opportunities to integrate metacognition and critical thinking into everyday play, mealtimes, and routines — without adding complexity. 
• Explore effective ways to document and reflect on children’s thinking using photos, floor books, and discussion. 

Purchasing a ticket allows you to tune in live or via a recording.