Critical Thinking

Preparing the next generation for a lifetime of learning

Critical Thinking

Question: How in this time of the narrowing of the curriculum, the stifling of innovation, the homogenization of talent, and the tyranny of low expectations can we reverse the trend in education practices and create team-oriented learning, critical and innovative thinking, problem solving, and the leveraging of diversity?

Answer: The multiplier effect of best practices!

Copyright 2006 Alex Terego www.AlexTerego.com

Chief Editor: Leslie Rowe of www.GreatWords.net

Table of Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................1 How Critical Thinking is Taught ..................................................................2 What to Look For..........................................................................................6 Socratic Inquiry ...........................................................................................9 Conclusion .................................................................................................11

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Introduction
The Foundation for Critical Thinking, http://www.criticalthinking.org makes the best case for teaching critical thinking skills. We do not know what students will need to know. We do know that they will need to know, and we do know that they will need to be skilled in finding out the answers. As I have written elsewhere, the need for these skills is now more critical than ever, since the investment capital of this new century is only flowing to areas with an excellent educational system; and that means one that produces graduates who are able to think for a living. The foundations goal is to improve the way students think about historical, biological, sociological, mathematical, literary and scientific content using disciplined reasoning. They describe it in the following paragraph. Critical thinking is that mode of thinkingabout any subject, content, or problemin which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking. Critical thinking is the disciplined art of ensuring that you use the best thinking you are capable of in any set of circumstances. When we think critically, we realize that in every domain of human thought, it is possible and important to question the parts of thinking, and the standards for thought. In short: Critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it. I would add that a good way to get students to understand the goal of critical thinking is to help them realize the benefits of completely engaging with the material they are studying. Later I will write about intellectual engagement with the material under investigation, however, I believe that ultimately we need to teach students to engage with the material intellectually and emotionally. If we were simply an intellectual system on two legs, then engaging with the subject matter intellectually would be fine; but we are not. We are emotionally intelligent also, and so the ultimate goal of critical thinking is to engage with the material of our world intellectually and emotionally. That way lies the making of meaning; the true goal of any best practices in education.

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How Critical Thinking is Taught

In the ePrimer Thinking Groups, in this series I detail one way to approach critical thinking: in a group setting. This method kils two birds with one stone: getting students to learn how to collaborate on a problem by thinking critically about it. But what about teaching critical thinking as part of the normal classroom setting, with its focus on the rote lecture/memorize/test method, which is the law of the land? The answer must lie - in the Critical Thinking Foundations words - in intellectual engagement as a way to get the students to understand not just the what the content - of their lesson, but the why the purpose behind their learning. If students do not engage with the material, and merely memorize it for later recall, they will never understand why the material or content is vital to their future. Teachers, and also parents who take an active interest in their childrens education, must begin to understand that, in order to engage their students intellect in the learning process, they need to inculcate an intellectual way of acquiring knowledge and skills, which over time becomes routine. This sounds more daunting than it is. Your students only need to be reminded of several questions they need to constantly ask of themselves and the material being learned. What is the intended purpose behind the facts or skills they are learning and you are teaching? What is the bigger question that needs to be asked? What information do I have that will help learn this fact or skill, and what information am I lacking? What is the key concept I need to understand before fully comprehending the facts or skills I need to master? What inferences can I make about the facts or skills I am trying to take on board? What assumptions can I make about the facts or skills? What are the implications of learning these facts or skills?

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What is the point of view of the provider of the information?

If the teacher routinely gets her students to ask and answer these questions about the content of the lesson, then she can be sure that the students are more engaged intellectually with the content under investigation. They will begin thinking in a deliberative manner about the issue, they will read both critically and actively to discover more about the whys and wherefores of the content. They will listen more carefully to others as they make contributions. As the Foundation for Critical Thinking rightly says, Students will strive to make their thinking clear, accurate, precise, relevant, deep, broad, logical, fair-minded, and significant. Of course the ultimate aim is to have them develop these skills and take them with them wherever they go after school and into life. For instance, lets take a normal essay prompt and see what can be done with it by asking and answering the eight questions above. Why is it of any value to todays students to study the Civil War?

Q. What is the intended purpose of this question? A. To discover if there is any relevance between the historical facts of the war and today.

Q. Is there a bigger question here? To get to this, try asking the question a different way. For example, Does history have any effect on us today and if so what? A. If we ignore historys lessons we will not learn from them.

Q. What information do I already have about the Civil War and what information do I need in order to answer the question? A. I have learned about the causes of the war, and the conduct of the war and the personalities of the major players and the immediate consequences. However, I do not have any information about the long term consequences of the war.

Q. What is the key concept I need to know about the war in order to answer the question about its relevance today?

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A. The key concept here is the broader one of how some civilizations have built on their experiences, and others have simply lived with the consequences and not built or learned from them.

Q. What inferences can I make about the Civil wars impact on me? A. The states in what is now the USA might never have been united if the war had ended differently, and slavery might still be the law of the southern states. The USA might never have participated in two World Wars, and wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Civil Rights act and states rights would be different.

Q. What should be the assumptions I make about wars and their impact? A. Other than geography, one of the main shapers of history is warfare and its outcomes.

Q. What are the implications of me learning these facts and surrounding information about the Civil War? A. What arent implications of learning history? Our entire history since 1865 has been shaped by those events, its leaders, and their conduct during and after the war. Its ramifications are still being felt, embodied by the current occupant of the White House as I write.

Q. Do the providers of information about the Civil War have a point of view about that event that I should be aware of? A. Yes. It is impossible for historians not to inject their biases into their work. They are human after all. So always go to more than one source.

So after all this rigor; asking and answering questions about the material, could your students answer the prompt in a more critically well-thought out and authentic manner that made sense to them, not just their readers, having engaged with the material?

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It is a systematic approach to thinking that with practice can become habitual. Thinking critically is probably the one discipline that can make a difference immediately in any students life. The goal is to get them to it automatically; and that can only be done with a disciplined approach in the classroom. Socrates did it. He did not answer his students questions; he questioned them, so that they would attempt intellectual engagement by thinking around the box in order to reach an enlightened opinion; one that they did not learn from others but developed themselves. How do you assess your students progress in the art of critical thinking? I am not going to use the words test or assess here simply because that is not my area of expertise. I refer you to the Foundation for Critical Thinking web site http://www.criticalthinking.org for information on assessment of progress in this vital 21st century skill.

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What to Look For

Teachers are taught how to assess progress in students; it is an intrinsic part of pedagogy. When it comes to objective measurements of how well they have memorized facts, the assessment is relatively simple. They either know the dates of the Civil War or the product of 5+7, or they dont. How to measure the more subjective skills, such as how well they are doing at critically thinking about a topic, is a more difficult task. So here are some ideas. I am grateful again to the Foundation for Critical Thinking and the University of Manchester school of education. How well your students draw inferences and use deductive and inductive reasoning. Inference is the act or process of deriving a logical consequence conclusion from premises that are known or can be observed. If I look outside and see a car passing with its windshield wipers in action I can infer one of two things: either it is raining or the driver just switched on his windshield cleaner. The act of inference is reasoning from evidence or facts. If a student is told to complete the following sentence, The boat drifted slowly out to sea, as the lone occupant struggled to control the boat with only one oar... what they write next is an inference. Inference is a mental process by which we reach a conclusion based on specific evidence. Inferences are used by forensic scientists and auto mechanics and doctors. We infer next steps. We infer intentions or purpose. We infer causes and effects. Inference is essential to, and part of, being human. We engage in inference every day. We interpret actions to be examples of behavior characteristics, intents, or expressions of particular feelings. We infer that the facts in a book, magazine or website are true when we notice that it was written by a noted scholar or authority in the field. So watch how well you students infer from evidence and facts and a general reading of the situation even if its just a facial expression, a gesture or hard evidence. The process is the same. It can be improved with coaching, drawing attention to their abilities, and Practice, Practice, Practice. What about deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning? They are two kinds of inference. Aristotle is a man. All men die. Therefore Aristotle will die. In this famous conclusion known as syllogistic logic or a syllogism, Aristotle took two related knowns or premises as they are sometimes called and reached a logical conclusion. If your student wrote: All roses have leaves. All geraniums have leaves. Therefore all roses are geraniums. Then what they have deduced is erroneous. But why? Because the two knowns or premises are not related. This is known as a weak induction.

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Be on the lookout for another weak argumentation known as circular logic, sometimes called begging the question. A student uses the following argument: You cant give me a C. Im an A student! This is a problematic circular argument, because the claim is made on grounds that cannot be accepted as true because those very grounds are in dispute. How can a student claim to be an A student when he just earned a C? How well can the student interpret information? See my ePrimer on Infoliteracy on this website, which goes into great depth on how to teach children to access, interpret and use information, and the Foundation for Critical Thinking web site http://www.criticalthinking.org. Finding and using information involves analysis, synthesis, relevance, fallacy recognition, looking for connections, being skeptical, being realistic and viewing the information as a whole system; not a list to be memorized. Students who use information properly are building on existing, or prior knowledge, in a truth-seeking endeavor to make meaning for themselves. Please read this twice. Students who use information properly are building on existing, or prior knowledge, in a truthseeking endeavor to make meaning for themselves. How well can a student analyze information? Analysis is the ability to separate a whole into its constituent parts. See the ePrimer on Thinking Groups and the Power point Tutorial on this web site. It is vital that students are able to divide subject matter into constituent parts, however, as I advocate in the ePrimers and the Power Point tutorial, before analyzing a piece of new knowledge, it is helpful to first decide what the new piece of information is a part of. So before breaking a chemical compound down into its constituent parts, first take a look at the whole compound in its relationships to other compounds. I go into a lot of detail on this subject in the aforementioned ePrimer and Tutorial. If a student consistently can analyze literature, a math problem, a chemistry problem or a social studies issue, they are much more likely to write, or otherwise communicate, authentic findings, which is a hallmark of a critical thinker. How skeptical are your students when encountering propositions, facts, arguments or conclusions? What is skepticism? Skepticism is an attitude of doubt or incredulity. One can be skeptical by nature, and doubt everything, or one can be skeptical towards a particular line of inquiry, facts, positions, arguments or proposals. Some people are naturally disbelieving, and doubt everything. Some are optimists and want to believe anything. A critical thinker I believe is one who selectively chooses to employ skepticism as a tool of inquiry. Teaching skepticism to students as a method of inquiry simply means asking them to suspend judgment, doubt judiciously when

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encountering propositions, facts, arguments or conclusions. This is a very healthy and critical approach to an inquiry. Connections: Please make sure that all students realize that all knowledge is connected; its all part of the same data base, and is searchable and relevant. Cosmology and quantum physics and the human body and mind and the accomplishments of all those who have ever possessed a mind are all connected. Cosmology is just the physics of the large, quantum physics deals with the very small. The human body and the elements that make up the universe are the same. So the mind is expressing abilities that spring from the same elements that make up the sun. Get your students to understand this and they will connect the dots and make meaning from disparate sources. They might also understand how algebra and history are simply parts of the same whole, and this will convince them to study both not just memorize the facts of history and algebra because they have to. If a student cannot relate or connect a fact, a proposition, and argument, or any content matter to their own life now or in the future they have not made the connection to meaning making and have therefore not critically understood the material. The test for this level of comprehension is how well they do explaining the material and its impact on them to another person. Another characteristic of critical thinkers is how well they avoid irrelevance. If they are studying the history of art, the 30,000 year old cave paintings in Lascaux, France are relevant. A digression into food as art or landscape gardening is probably not helpful unless they can adequately make the connection of course. This is a very subjective area. Finally, can a student make an argument in a logical sequence? Again looking back to the section on inferences and deductive and inductive reasoning, students need to make sure when debating, writing or making a presentation that things follow a sequence. If a = 10, and b = 5, then a + b = 15. Its no different when making an argument using propositions.

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Socratic Inquiry
What follows is the introduction to Socratic inquiry as described by the Foundation for Critical Thinking. It is hard to imagine someone being a good critical thinker while lacking the disposition to question in a deep way. It is also hard to imagine someone acquiring the disposition to question in a fuller way than Socrates. It follows that those truly interested in critical thinking will also be interested in the art of deep questioning. And learning the Socratic art is a natural place to start. Of course, to learn from Socrates we must identify and practice applying the components of his art. Without a sense of these components, it is hard to grasp the nature of the questioning strategies that underlie the art of Socratic questioning. The art requires contextualization. In the ePrimer on Leadership on this website, I refer to Toyotas manufacturing arm using the Five Whys system for quality control and problem solving. Toyota management decided that five repetitions of the word why would be sufficient to uncover the root cause of a problem or defect. They were right. Toyota has been a leader in quality control and defect free manufacturing for decades. Getting an answer to the first why and then asking another question based on the initial answer, and then repeating the question several times it can be three or ten is a simplified explanation of what Socrates did. Of course he may have got the idea by watching young kids who seemed to do this irritatingly well. In the ePrimer Thinking Groups and the Power Point tutorial on Critical Thinking and Collaboration on this web site, I have a variation on Socrates method. Here is a simplified account. Given a new proposition or prompt or question Why do we all need heroes? - begin by defining the key word; in this case hero. Next look for synonyms, then ask and answer the who, what, where, why and when questions multiple times. I show a detailed way to do this in a diagrammatic format in the above mentioned sections of this web site. You will be surprised at the results. Of course the questions need not always be framed beginning with the word why. I was taught by an order of priests called the Salesians, who were fond of asking me rhetorically What makes you think Im here to teach you? And then answering their own question by informing me that is was my job to find things out. They would help of course by asking me their equivalent of the five whys. These included Thats a good point, Alex, try elaborating further. How about using an example to illustrate your point? Did you check that as a fact? How did you check on that? Could you be more specific? How about some more details clarifying your proposition? Try to be more precise? Whats the relevance of that to the overall question? Does that help or harm your proposition, Alex? Shouldnt you look at

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this from a different point of view? Does this make sense, Alex? Your first statement does not corroborate your last one, why is that? Did you come to a conclusion and then make the evidence fit again, Alex? Are the things you are considering relevant to the main argument? Is this the best place to put your focus? Whats the main idea again, Alex? Have you thought about which facts are relevant and which are not? I am indebted once again to the Foundation for Critical Thinking for reminding me of these questions from my own youth. They have not diminished in importance since. In fact they have been sorely missed in the era of rote memorization and test taking.

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Conclusion
Try to stop thinking.NOW! In my speeches and presentations and writings I regularly ask my readers or listeners to do this. Its a dare of course. No one can actually stop thinking; or rather no one can eliminate thoughts from coming into their head; not even the most practiced meditators, mystics or monks. So the question becomes how to think? The human brain has been described as the most complex organism in the universe. How the mind emerges from the brain if indeed it does has been described as the new frontier for the Evo-Devos (otherwise known as evolutionary development scientists.) All I can say for sure is that, somewhere between the brain and the outer limits of the universe, the magical thing we call thinking takes place. It is our nature to think. We will think whether we want to or not, or like to or not. Like all other evolutionary strategies the idea is to use this mechanism to strengthen our survival prospects. So do we really want to leave this magnificent tool to chance? If we do, its usage will be diminished, its potential unrealized and the quality of our lives and those of generations to come diminished. Worse, the great patronage that we are holding onto, and adding to for the next generations, will not be engaged intellectually or emotionally by this generation. Do not let this opportunity be wasted in your classroom or home. As the Foundation for Critical Thinking puts it, Excellence in thought must be systematically cultivated. A well cultivated thinker raises vital questions and problems, formulates them clearly and precisely, gathers and assesses relevant information and uses abstract ideas to interpret effectively. They come to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions testing them against relevant criteria and standards. They are open-minded thinkers. They communicate effectively. Critical thinking is self-directed, selfmonitored, and self-corrective. It requires rigor and a commitment. Well said.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Alex

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