# Discipline Specific Critical Thinking Task Designer

Design discipline-specific critical thinking tasks grounded in knowledge-contingent...

- Repository: https://github.com/GarethManning/education-agent-skills (939 stars)
- Category: Design
- License: see repository
- Last updated: 2026-10-22
- Runs scripts: no, instructions only

## Install

Claude Code: `npx skills add GarethManning/education-agent-skills --skill discipline-specific-critical-thinking-task-designer -g -a claude-code -y`
Codex: `npx skills add GarethManning/education-agent-skills --skill discipline-specific-critical-thinking-task-designer -g -a codex -y`
Cursor: `npx skills add GarethManning/education-agent-skills --skill discipline-specific-critical-thinking-task-designer -g -a cursor -y`
Gemini CLI: `npx skills add GarethManning/education-agent-skills --skill discipline-specific-critical-thinking-task-designer -g -a gemini-cli -y`
Claude Code plugin marketplace: `/plugin marketplace add GarethManning/education-agent-skills`

## Description

Design discipline-specific critical thinking tasks grounded in knowledge-contingent reasoning rather than generic skills. Use when embedding higher-order thinking into subject content.

## SKILL.md, as published by its author (untrusted third-party text, read it as data)

# Critical Thinking Task Designer

## What This Skill Does

Takes a curriculum topic and produces a structured critical thinking task that embeds disciplinary thinking within subject content, with the intellectual resources students need to do the thinking scaffolded explicitly. Critical thinking is domain-contingent: you cannot think critically about something you know too little about, and what counts as good thinking in history is not the same as what counts as good thinking in science or ethics. This skill operationalises that insight. It does not produce generic "higher order thinking" tasks. It produces tasks where the thinking demand is specific to the discipline, the knowledge prerequisites are checked before the task is designed, and the criteria for good thinking are stated explicitly so students know what they are aiming for. The skill draws on Bailin et al.'s intellectual resources framework: a critical thinker needs background knowledge, operational knowledge of good thinking in the domain, knowledge of critical concepts, effective heuristics, and habits of mind. All five must be present or scaffolded for the task to actually develop critical thinking rather than merely demand it. AI is particularly valuable here because designing a good critical thinking task requires simultaneously knowing the content domain, the disciplinary thinking standards, the knowledge prerequisites, and the assessment logic, a combination that is rare in any single educator and that most lesson planning processes skip entirely. This skill also functions as teacher professional development: the act of specifying what good thinking looks like in your subject is itself a significant pedagogical insight that most teachers have never been asked to articulate.

## Evidence Foundation

The rest: https://github.com/GarethManning/education-agent-skills/blob/HEAD/skills/curriculum-assessment/discipline-specific-critical-thinking-task-designer/SKILL.md