Another academic year in the Kingdom as well as in many parts of the world is over. As academicians and educators strongly recommend, this is the time for retrospection or rather reflective teaching, the appropriate technical term that is widely used in the realm of education.The process of reviewing and evaluating the services that we, teachers, have rendered to our students during the school year is intended to give us a better insight into problems and possibilities and enable us to come up with better approaches and the techniques that work best for the students. I am a follower of this practice of reflective teaching. My experience, gained through countless visits to schools and in watching closely how my colleagues at college level teach their students, convinces me that we do not encourage and prepare our students to think critically and independently.As a result, students coming out of our schools lack the ability to analyze and think critically. Students should be trained to think critically and to evaluate any information under study. This is not a common practice followed currently in our schools. The system now merely expects students to memorize the given information. Developing programs to teach students to think critically is a crucial issue and an urgent need in education. Let me first elucidate the major components of such programs. The core critical thinking skills are analysis, inference, interpretation, and evaluation. Analysis involves the ability to identify the intended and actual inferential relationships among statements, questions, concepts, descriptions, or other forms of representation intended to express belief, judgment, experiences, reasons, information, or opinion. Interpretation, on the other hand, is the ability to figure out the intended message in the expressed statements. Inference means to identify and secure elements needed to draw reasonable conclusions, whereas evaluation is to assess the credibility of the given statements or opinions.Inculcating the spirit of critical thinking in students and sharpening their minds for the exercise are vital for their future pursuits for various reasons. When some particular information is given to our students or they come across it, a critical mindset will allow them to integrate all elements associated with the subject. This helps them to decide how to use the information. In other words, they put all the data available on the table and carefully examine them to reach a conclusion on what to do with what they have or how to proceed from there. A critical mindset also helps them judge well the credibility of sources and evaluate the quality of an argument on the basis of reasons, assumptions, and evidence. Having a critical mind also enables our students to use in-depth analysis of evidence to make decisions and guide their decision process as well. A critical mindset also assists our students in communicating their ideas clearly and accurately by choosing the best way possible to deliver them so that people will appreciate and receive them well. Critical thinking helps our students to take reasonable positions on issues by formulating plausible hypotheses and asking appropriate clarifying questions. This is simply because they are taught to think deeply and reflect thoroughly before communicating the message they want to convey. In sum, critical thinking is a liberating force in education and it often produces students who are well-informed, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in dealing with personal bias, and prudent in making judgment. The question that one might ask is how teachers can foster our students’ critical thinking skills. Teachers should first realize that critical thinking skills are teachable and learnable. Teachers are the central force in helping students develop these skills by assigning critical thinking exercises and supporting the efforts of students to learn them. A critical mindset is the key to success; if we want our students to be successful citizens, we need to work hard to enable them to possess such vital characteristics. Thus, it is in the national interest that we strive to promote this concept and make it an essential part of every school subject.– The writer is a Saudi academic who can be reached at alseghayer@yahoo.com