The title for this post “teaching thinking” may be a bit of a misnomer in that we all ‘think’. The more accurate may be “what is it to think critically?” Almost every glowing college brochure or perspective given for parents (include middle and high school too…) includes something about developing critical reasoning faculties in your son or daughter. Everybody seems to understand what this means, but as with almost every aspect of cognition, things are vaguer and more complex than they seem…
On the other hand, once you get beyond the fluff of these brochures, there is little in any state standards to try to quantify and include critical anything into what our students are supposed to master. For me, a great way to see and understand what critical thinking is can be seen in a debate. You have two people presenting facts and assertions, using rhetorical methods to persuade the other (or the judges). To debate you need to be able to listen to your opponent and to come up with counter assertions, see flaws in their premises and to come up with rejoinders. This implies that you must need to listen very carefully and to employ some skepticism, in that you are looking for flaws. Basic listening is utterly uncritical, when compared to this other, less passive form of listening, and reading.
It would seem pretty obvious that spending enough time in debate to see that there is value in logic would be a real winner in any school curriculum. To understand something to the degree that you can defend it in a debate is of more value than to merely regurgitate facts. This is also a connection to a lot of math, traditionally considered to be light years from English and social studies classes…
This is valuable, but since I am also going to be covering the advantages of arguing in classrooms, I guess I should take a bit different tack here…First we need to examine what the term critical thinking is…from a cursory search online I have found some rather tendentious, and rather wordy attempts to explain what this term could be for every conceivable situation… For me, since I am talking about a practical classroom use, I see critical thinking as the ability to step outside of whatever form of information you are evaluating (and all of the information you receive, you evaluate!). This means that you are always asking questions about that is being presented to you.
Teaching critical thinking in a classroom environment is to try to get students to be enlightened skeptics with regard to such possibilities as the provenance of some piece of data, what the presenter is really trying to present (versus what you are supposed to swallow.
Another way to look at critical thinking is consider frames of reference. Perhaps even better, consider how a magician controls your frame of reference, and your attention while performing…Critical thinking is one way to be able to snap out of this ‘frame of reference’ (that is, you are watching magic, and are patiently waiting to be amazed). A skeptic would be watching the magician perform from a far different point of view (to analyze what is really going on…).
Imagine students starting to evaluate everything in a classroom…the fact is that much of this is innate I most students, and traditional methods have forced most of them to keep these sorts of thinking processes under wraps. I have personally had plenty of teachers who would not brook having to field questions in their classrooms…as a matter of fact I have seen this in just the last few years in middle and high schools. Sadly enough, there are plenty of classrooms which are not necessarily capable of weathering the skeptical scrutiny of their students (or of almost anyone else…).
Analytical thought, as well as applying these methods to speech, the written word, analyzing artifacts (art, documents, inventions, ideas, history, opinions, etc.). It is definable, and there are plenty of reasons to develop this for any academic subject.
Rethinking thinking
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1014/p18s01-lehl.html
Teaching Thinking Skills
http://www.thinkshop.org/howto-freepage.html
Do we really only need to teach rhetoric and critical thinking?
http://wordmunger.com/?p=421
Why Teach Thinking? Why Not ?
http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/7925/self_improvement_and_motivation/why_teach_thinking_why_not_.html
Critical thinking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
Defining Critical thinking
http://www.criticalthinking.org/aboutct/define_critical_thinking.cfm
Creativity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity
