Teaching For and About Critical Thinking
When we refer to someone as 'well educated' we are often focusing on their display of relevant content knowledge. Yet owning content knowledge is a trivial pursuit if one cannot retrieve appropriate knowledge in the context of well analyzed problems or use it to draw critical inferences in emergency situations. For this reason, "Education is nothing more, nor less, than learning to think." Peter Facione
Everyone can learn to think better. Training someone to attend to their own thinking process, and teaching them about how they evaluate information, draw inferences, and avoid thinking errors, is a lifelong gift.
On this page we have included a number of resources for those engaged in teaching for and about thinking. Many of the strategies that have proven valuable for training excellence in reasoning and judgment can be applied across disciplines and settings, in teaching and training people of all ages, in all nations around the world. The external expression of thought differs culturally, as governments and families determine who can speak aloud. But the human reasoning process is universal.
The Reflective Log
The Reflective Log gives structure and focus to the journal assignment many teachers use. Coach and guide meta-cognition, to develop students' self-monitoring and self-correction skills. And yet, regardless of the clever strategies one may build into one's class, a very big part of teaching thinking, or anything else, is remembering that no matter what you say is important, you will get only what you test.
Learning Through Discussion PDF
The Learning Through Discussion strategy offers a smart approach to encourage students to read assigned material and come to class more prepared. The steps to this process along with some valuable suggestions for practical ways to prepare student discussion leaders are contained in the four-page PDF file.
Develop a Campus Culture of Learning PDF
This campus culture survey tool will reinforce your teaching and support your students and your colleagues in their work. Be sure to survey and focus students' attention on the core learning goals of your courses.
Course Evaluation Design PDF
You get only what you test. If you want students to think, they must know that you will test their thinking and problem solving skills as explicit elements that go into determining their grades. Any course assignment that can be used to engage students' thinking can be used to test students' thinking.
Sample Critical Thinking Exercises PDF
Sample exercises help you think about how you can build your own assignments for your own students. Remember in this process to use the language of thinking by asking students to interpret, analyze, evaluate, infer, and explain. Encourage them to be systematic, objective, fair-minded, mature, and truthseeking in judging what to believe or what to do. Don't just ask them to take a position and defend it; critical thinking is not about winning an argument it's about making a reasoned judgment. To evaluate student work, and to help students to internalize the language and standards of good thinking, teach them to evaluate their own work and the work of their classmates.
Peer Evaluation Example Standards PDF
Criteria for peer evaluation of group presentations are presented. Use of this tool can encourage honest feedback to ycolleagues to facilitate their development as scholars. Ratings are made on a 4-point scale.
Creating Exams and Study Guides to Incorporate Critical Thinking
We often learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. Take advantage of this feature of human learning by constructing exams that invite students to explain what is wrong with mistaken responses. Using this strategy on exams and quizzes can transform traditional memory-recall exams. Questions can ramped up in difficulty and in their power to generate learning. The PDF below offers examples that are easy to adapt to your own teaching and learning.
In the end, nothing substitutes for reflective practice:
- Improve Thinking by Reflecting on Actual Examples of Successful and Unsuccessful Decision-Making and Problem-Solving!
- Teach groups and individuals to reflect upon and critically analyze their problem solving and decision-making processes by asking themselves systematic and tough questions about their own assumptions, methodologies, standards, and theoretical frames of references.
- "Step-Back" and be sure that you understand the problem before you try to solve it.
- Be sure you know what success would really look like before you set about making things right. Too often we, and our students, do things just to be doing something, without knowing what what the problem really is, why we are doing it, or how we will know when to declare victory.
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