Critical Thinking in Literature

“Be critical.”

It’s a phrase students hear often, especially in English Literature classrooms. It shows up in the top band of every mark scheme, from Edexcel to CIE. But what does it actually mean? And how do we make this more explicit in lessons? 

Too often, “critical” becomes background noise: a skill students are expected to develop by osmosis. We ask them to analyse, interpret, and evaluate, but what underpins all of this is something more fundamental - critical engagement.

What Does It Mean to Be Critical?

Being critical appears in many guises:

• Critical thinking:  forming careful judgments based on evidence

• Critical analysis: breaking down ideas to assess relevance or coherence

• A critical eye: not taking things at face value

• Criticality: thoughtful, engaged attention, not just pointing out flaws

  
  

At its best, being critical is about forming a sense of taste, judgment, and independent thought. It’s not cynicism or negativity, it’s about weighing ideas, asking good questions, and articulating an interpretation with clarity.

Why English Literature?

Few subjects develop criticality as richly as English Literature. When we ask students to:

• Interpret a writer’s intent

• Question a narrator’s reliability

• Compare texts and perspectives

• Explore ambiguity and contradiction

  
  

We’re not just preparing them for exams; we’re shaping adaptive, evaluative thinkers. Literature challenges students to think beyond binaries, to hold complexity and uncertainty, and to develop the confidence to disagree well.

It also builds moral and emotional literacy. By inhabiting other lives, times, and minds, students grow in empathy and learn to see the world through more than one lens.

What Happens When We Skip This?

If we avoid teaching criticality explicitly, students often fall into rote responses: memorised phrases, formulaic structures, or surface-level points (essays that focus on describing the plot or summarising). These might tick boxes, but they don’t inspire thought. 

Critical students:

• Take interpretive risks

• Develop original arguments

• Write with clarity and curiosity

• Build confidence through meaningful discussion

  
  

These aren’t qualities that can be drilled. They must be modelled, nurtured, and given space to grow.

What Does Critical Thinking Look Like in the English Classroom?

Critical thinking isn’t something students acquire passively, it’s something they practise, question, and refine.

You might recognise it in:

• A student who rephrases an idea mid-sentence to sharpen their argument.

• A classroom debate where multiple personal interpretations of a character’s actions are held in tension.

• An essay that doesn’t just answer a question, but begins to challenge how the question is framed.

  
  

Our resources aim to create space for those moments, not through rigid templates, but through structured tasks that promote reflection and intellectual independence:

• Open-ended questions like “what might an alternative interpretation be?” or “What assumptions does the writer want us to make?”

• Prompts that require students to evaluate authorial intent - for instance, asking Why does Colson Whitehead include graphic violence in The Underground Railroad? What does it force us to confront? Is it gratuitous or does it serve a deeper purpose?

• Scaffolded writing frames that help students balance evidence, interpretation, and ambiguity

• Discussion sequences that encourage curiosity and respectful challenge. 

• When introducing a new poem, you might begin by asking students to pick out lines and phrases they find powerful before launching into any demystifying or analysis (we've written about this in a previous series). This allows students to start with a basic sense of criticality and begin to build a personal response: what is powerful, and why / how?

• Show students an interview with the author in which they discuss a key aspect of their work, then ask students to evaluate how successful or effectively this has happened in the text. For example, our SoL on TUR includes an interview in which Colson Whitehead discusses his use of violence, then students are asked to discuss the function of violence in literature and develop a critical perspective on its inclusion in the novel.

• Give students a quote from a fictional student to respond to (some exam boards frame their questions like this to encourage criticality). For example: "Okonkwo is an unlikeable and unsympathetic character". To what extent do you agree?

• When analysing form, guide students towards a critical assessment of why that form has been used. For example: The use of the sonnet form, itself a romantic cliche, underscores Shakespeare's exploration of writing and romantic cliche in Sonnet 18. For a novel, ask students what the novel form allows the writer to do with perspective, chronology or narrative voice. For drama, critically analysing the genre can often work well: for example, how does the comedy genre enable the writer to deliver social critiques?

When students engage critically, their writing changes:

• Paragraphs move away from description or summary; they weigh, refine, and build arguments.

• Quotations aren’t dropped in or clunkily introduced, they’re used precisely and embedded purposefully.

• Interpretations demonstrate engagement with a text, rather than a rote response. 

  
  

As English teachers, our role isn’t to provide certainties, but to model what it looks like to find creative freedom in ambiguity. When students adapt to this and think critically, they grow into articulate, thoughtful, and independent thinkers, inside and beyond the classroom.