We’re Teaching Kids to Read. Are We Teaching Them to Think?

By Barrie Olson

My son, Asher, is 11. Last week he asked me what started World War I. I didn’t answer right away. “An archduke was assassinated” is true, but it’s also the kind of answer that closes a conversation instead of opening one. It skips the tangle of alliances that turned one act of violence into a continental war, the nationalism and imperial rivalries building for decades, and the decisions by leaders who each thought backing down was riskier than escalating. I wanted a minute to give him the honest, complicated version where nobody planned a world war, but almost everybody’s choices made one more likely.

I didn’t get the minute, however. By the time I’d gathered my thoughts, Asher had already asked ChatGPT and gotten an answer that was confident, well organized, and grammatically perfect. It wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it also wasn’t what I would have said, and Asher had no way to know the difference. That’s the world my kids are growing up in, and it’s the world every kindergartner starting school this year will grow up in too. Access to information won’t be their biggest challenge. The question is whether they’ll have the judgment to evaluate what they’re told, recognize what it leaves out, and think beyond the answer they’re handed. Those abilities don’t begin in high school. They begin in the earliest years of school. 

The Missing Piece in Early Literacy

The early literacy movement has made important progress where educators have rallied around foundational skills like phonics, decoding, and fluency. That consensus took years to build, and it matters. But literacy is also about deriving meaning from words. In the push to strengthen foundational skills, critical thinking has often been treated as something that comes later, once students can read proficiently. The assumption is understandable, but it is also a mistake.

The habits that define strong thinkers—curiosity, questioning, connecting ideas, weighing evidence—develop over time through repeated practice. The early grades, when children’s curiosity is at its peak and learning habits are taking shape, are exactly when that work should begin. Waiting until students become strong readers before asking them to think deeply is like waiting until they become strong athletes before letting them play the game. One of the most effective shifts educators can make is simple: begin with a question that matters. Too often, reading becomes an exercise in compliance. Read the passage. Answer the questions. Move on. A more powerful approach starts with genuine inquiry. A kindergartner might explore, How do artists use color to express ideas and emotions? A third grader might investigate, How does looking at something from a different perspective change what we understand? These exercises invite children to wonder, discuss, and explore. They’re gathering information, testing ideas, and building understanding. 

Teaching Students to Zoom In and Zoom Out

Strong thinkers move between details and larger ideas where they can examine a fact, example, or piece of evidence and step back to see how it connects to a broader pattern. They can also move in the other direction, using evidence to support a larger conclusion. Many students struggle with this. One way to build that skill is through sets of texts that explore a common topic from different angles. Students learn to notice details within individual sources and connect ideas across them. A second grader, for example, might read one text about how living things depend on fresh water and another about the diverse life found in tide pools. On the surface, they seem different. With guidance, students see the deeper connection: both are stories about the relationship between water and life. That kind of thinking develops through repeated opportunities to make connections and test ideas.

Make Thinking Visible

Reading is often treated as a private activity, but understanding becomes clearer when students put their thinking into words. When children explain why they believe something, they have to organize their ideas. When they hear a classmate offer a different perspective, they have to reconsider their own. In both cases, thinking becomes visible. Those opportunities are important for young children to learn how to discuss evidence, compare ideas, and explain their reasoning with the right support. They can learn that disagreements are worth exploring and that good ideas become stronger when examined. 

Students need substantial support to develop these skills at first. Teachers can model thinking, guide discussions, and help students make connections they might not yet see. The goal is to help students become learners who can ask meaningful questions, evaluate information, and draw their own conclusions. Those habits take years to develop, which is why the work needs to begin early.

Preparing Students for an AI World

My son will grow up with AI as a continual presence. I can’t change that, and I wouldn’t want to. But I do want him to develop the instinct to stop before accepting an answer and ask: What’s missing here? Whose perspective is this? Does this actually make sense to me? That’s where schools have an opportunity. Preparing students for AI is about giving children years of practice asking questions, looking for evidence, making connections and changing their minds when the evidence warrants it. We need to start instilling these skills early.  These habits are built every time a young child wonders why, encounters another point of view or has to explain how they reached an answer. Literacy has always been about more than getting the words right. It’s about making sense of what we read. As answers become easier to generate, knowing what to do with those answers matters even more.

Dr. Barrie Olson is the vice president of reading curriculum and instruction at Curriculum Associates. In her work, she takes a system’s approach to drive a forward-looking literacy vision that connects each level of the educational system to enact change and create equity for all students and support for all educators. Barrie has spent the last 20 years pushing the boundaries of what English language arts instruction can look like, first as a university English professor, then leading a national educational nonprofit, and more recently, in educational publishing. Uniting the perspectives of researchers and practitioners across education, English, psychology, and cognitive science, Barrie creates high-impact and authentic standards-driven reading and writing solutions that enable students to be change agents in their lives and the lives of others.