Description

Aspire is a year-long critical thinking curriculum designed to help teenagers become thoughtful, discerning, and independent thinkers.

In a world filled with information, opinions, and distractions, students need more than answers. They need the ability to ask good questions, evaluate ideas, recognize patterns, reason carefully, and seek truth with humility. Aspire was created to help students develop those habits of mind.

Rather than teaching critical thinking through worksheets and lectures alone, Aspire engages students through discussion, literature, simulations, observation challenges, problem-solving activities, and principle-based experiences. Students learn by doing, questioning, discovering, and reflecting.

Throughout the course, students develop five foundational habits of mind:

• Observation — learning to notice what others overlook

• Pattern Recognition — discovering relationships, connections, and underlying structures

• Discernment — distinguishing truth from error and appearance from reality

• Reasoning — evaluating claims, evidence, assumptions, and conclusions

• Intellectual Humility — remaining teachable while pursuing truth

Lessons draw from classic literature, historical events, philosophy, science, mathematics, and real-world case studies. Students participate in Socratic discussions, collaborative activities, simulations, debates, and reflective challenges that encourage them to think deeply and engage meaningfully with important ideas.

Aspire is not about teaching students what to think. It is about helping them learn how to think.

For mentors, Aspire is designed to remove the burden of lesson planning. Each of the 24 lessons is fully developed and classroom-tested, with discussion questions, activities, simulations, mentor notes, debriefs, and invitations to act already prepared. Whether you are leading a homeschool co-op, commonwealth, discussion group, microschool, or family class, you can spend less time planning and more time mentoring.

Aspire has been taught, refined, and tested in homeschool co-ops and commonwealth communities for more than ten years. Every lesson has been used with real students, adjusted through experience, and strengthened through countless discussions, activities, and mentor observations. The result is a curriculum that is both intellectually rigorous and practical to teach.

Ages: 14–18

Format: 24 fully developed discussion-based lessons

Ideal for: Homeschool co-ops, microschools, discussion groups, and independent learners

Focus: Critical thinking, logic, reasoning, discernment, observation, and intellectual humility

Book List for Aspire

Carry On, Mr. Bowditch — Jean Lee Latham
Two Sherlock Holmes stories — Arthur Conan Doyle
Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
The Mystery of the Periodic Table — Benjamin D. Wiker
A Mathematician’s Lament — Paul Lockhart (essay)
“The Allegory of the Cave” – Plato
Flatland — Edwin A. Abbott
Contact — film, dir. Robert Zemeckis (1997)
The Man Who Counted — Malba Tahan
The Fallacy Detective — Hans & Nathaniel Bluedorn
The Witch of Blackbird Pond — Elizabeth George Speare
The Phantom Tollbooth — Norton Juster

Created by Misty Myer

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