The 21st century has four skills that must be mastered. One of them is critical thinking skills. Learning at school is an effort that can be made to form these skills. The independent curriculum was created to face the challenges of the 21st century, including the formation of critical thinking skills. It is not enough to just implement an independent curriculum. Educators need the right learning strategy, one of which is the use of learning models. This research was conducted to apply the CRI-WES learning model to improve students' critical thinking skills. This research is a quantitative experimental design with a pretest-posttest control group design. The subjects of this research consisted of 96 students from three schools in East Java, who were divided into two groups. The data collection technique used in this research was a test to measure students' critical thinking skills. The data analysis used in this research is an independent sample t-test. The results of this study indicate that the group that was taught using the CRI-WES learning model obtained better critical thinking skills scores than the group that was taught without the CRI-WES model. These findings indicate that the CRI-WES learning model has a positive effect on improving students' critical thinking skills.