Critical thinking is a concept that is widely used and has high visibility in the accreditation and mission statements of educational institutions across the world. However, many educators and institutions have difficulty clarifying the concept and knowing how to infuse it within curriculum and instruction. This three part workshop focuses on explicating those concepts and principles that inform a foundational, cross-disciplinary conception of critical thinking as well as how these fundamentals translate into concrete teaching and learning strategies that, when done well, help our students improve the quality of their thinking.
Part 1: Introduction to Foundational Critical Thinking Concepts and Principles
In this first segment, participants will be introduced to a robust, cross-disciplinary conception of critical thinking. We will discuss what critical thinking is and explore how it can be substantively infused into our content areas and instructional contexts. It will be argued that critical thinking is not something that is merely added to our existing curriculum and workload, but should be the way we teach and learn. When critical thinking is treated as the organizing idea of teaching and learning substantive understanding will naturally result.
Part 2: Question Generating Concepts
The critical mind is the questioning mind. The extent to which students ask genuine questions and seek to answer them reflects the extent to which students take content seriously and think it through. The problem is that our students rarely know how to systematically ask questions that probe content by searching out assumptions, concepts, purposes, information, inferences and solutions, points of view, or implications. They rarely seek out intellectual standards to evaluate the quality of their thought and the thoughts of others: questions that target clarity, depth, relevance, validity, significance, and accuracy. We want to create a classroom culture where students actively, reflectively, and fair-mindedly question the content and each other. Such a culture cultivates important intellectual skills and abilities as well as virtuous dispositions like intellectual flexibility, empathy, humility, integrity, open-mindedness, and perseverance to name a few. This session will focus on the relationship between our ability to question and our ability to think critically. Participants will explore various ways to help students develop questions that analyze and evaluate content and their thinking.
Part 3: Focus on Instructional Strategies that Promote Critical Thought
This session will build on the foundational critical thinking concepts and principles addressed in the first session. In doing so, participants will explore the intimate relationship between what it means to think critically and how we can design instruction to promote critical thought. Based on best practices in teaching and learning, participants will engage and discuss specific instructional strategies designed to foster critical thought and the cultivation of higher order thinking skills. The instructional strategies act as examples of what instructors can do on a typical day of class, so at the end of the session participants should have a short list of practical strategies they can immediately incorporate into their instruction.
This workshop is appropriate for faculty and administrators interested in practical strategies for improving student thinking. This is also relevant to those administrators who have articulated critical thinking as part of their accreditation plans and/or college mission statements.
