Stories and critical thinking

I was so looking forward to going to Gaza on Sunday to participate in the conference 'Creativity and Critical Thinking in ELT' organised by our advisory board member in Gaza, Rida Thabet. There were going to be lots of talks and workshops about this theme by Palestinian teachers, supervisors and education specialists and I was going to be doing a short talk myself called 'The power of story'.

Unfortunately, like many other conferences  around the world, it's been postponed until the corona virus emergency situation is over. So instead, here's a whole session that I did with a group of twenty girls and their teacher at Zaytoun Prep Girls school - Gaza a few weeks ago. In the session, I told two stories and both of them involved points where Saida, their teacher in Gaza, and I asked questions to the students in order to encourage them to think critically. If you're a learner of English and you watch the video, I'd suggest that you pause it whenever we ask questions and think about how you would answer the question. It might be a good idea to even say your answer out loud.