Children's literature is a powerful tool for teaching critical reading. It offers children the opportunity to actively engage in texts while simultaneously considering ideas, values, and ethical questions. Students must be encouraged to question, to make predictions, and to organize ideas which support value judgments. Two techniques for developing these kinds of critical reading skills include problem solving and learning to reason through reading. Synthesis involves combining relevant parts into a coherent whole, and evaluation includes setting up standards and then judging against them to verify the reasonableness of ideas.
Comprehension requires inferencing, which plays a central role in reasoning and problem solving.
For Beck, children's literature has the potential to engage students in reasoning activities. Teachers may want to experiment with a particular children's book and plan a lesson which places reasoning at the center of instruction. She cautions against skills lessons that are repackaged in the name of critical thinking but which are only renamed worksheets. She points out that teaching students to read, write, and think critically is a dramatic shift from what has generally taken place in most classrooms. Critical thinking implies that a reader is actively and constructively engaged in the process of reading.