Education was once the pursuit of truth and imparting knowledge, knowledge built on generations of talent and genius. Today, dialectics and the 20th Century’s pursuit of creating a morally relative society, educates critical thinkers for the 21st Century. The Common Core Standards for English Language Art are littered with directions to analyze, synthesize and evaluate the total sum of their education and heritage.
Critical thinking From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Critical thinking is a way of deciding whether a claim is always true, sometimes true, partly true, or false., although there is debate among educators about its precise meaning and scope.”(Critical thinking; Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Scholarly definitions of critical thinking skills abound in the realm of schooling. Suspending judgment as to the exaggerated emphasis on this particular cognition, a search for the methods in teaching critical thinking is fair. Try these sources or select from the dozens found on the web.
Socratic Questions
http://changingminds.org/techniques/questioning/socratic_questions.htm
Using Reading Prompts to Encourage Critical Thinking
http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/using-reading-prompts-to-encourage-critical-thinking/
The Instructors Challenge: Moving Students beyond Opinions to Critical Thinking
http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/the-instructors-challenge-moving-students-beyond-opinions-to-critical-thinking/
Higher order thinking skills originated with Benjamin Bloom. His Taxonomy of Educational Objectives pictured below, places analysis, synthesis and evaluation at the top. Knowledge and Comprehension. at the bottom of the pyramid, were coined together as ‘lower order thinking skills’ as if they were less important to understanding. Some sources label analysis as critical and synthesis as creative thinking. Evaluation is that point when students arrive at some conclusion or personal opinion the issue at hand or lesson.
Factoring in a degree of controversy in a reading assignment, the outcome may or may not elicit a change in attitudes or beliefs. An elementary approach is found next:
Blooms Thinking Prompts http://www.msad54.org/district/literacyspecialist/pdf/blooms.pdf
Blooms influence as a behavioral psychologist matches Dewey’s pragmatism in seeding progressive school reform. He authored two books dedicated to cognitive and affective domains of learning.
“What we are classifying is the intended behavior of students the ways in which individuals are to act, think, or feel as the result of participating in some unit of instruction. . . We recognize the point of view that truth and knowledge are only relative and that there are no hard and fast truths which exist for all time and places.” (Benjamin Bloom, et al., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Book 1, Cognitive Domain)
We think what we believe, what we do, what decisions we make and we think when we learn new information. Creative thinking, problem solving, associative thinking, perceptual thinking, concept formation, and the counter processes of inductive and deductive thinking is used every day. Bloom’s intent is without question. With one sweep of his pen, Bloom relegated knowledge to the bottom of the pyramid, and truths are left to the timeline of evolutionary changes. Socrates never wrote a tittle, but at least believed in the pursuit of truth.
Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it, to reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience. (Edward M. Glaser, An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1941)
http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766
Alternative labels for critical thinking – reflective thinking, problem solving and effective thinking. By whatever name it calls itself, the meaning has far more implications than ever imagined in the history of thinking. Good thinking is a persistent effort, but concern is raised where this effort is directed to reconstruct ones patterns of beliefs? This is the very crux of conflict when standards consistently direct students to using higher order thinking skills; analyze, synthesize and evaluate local to global problems. Progressive scholars point to their purpose of embedding critical thinking within young minds, to separate honest general attitudes from others. They would like to carry this over to a whole realm of subjects, as attitudes abound in the fields of economics, history, philosophy, science and even into the new radical mathematics. What constitutes good attitudes from unfavorable ones? Critical attitudes are favorable if ones conclusion or belief is founded on the basis of sound reason, without bias and nonscientific explanations. Persevering in the face of prejudice and keeping an open mind, while respecting diversity will gain you moral ground.
John Dewey1 is at the heart of critical theory and his thoughts are far from being forgotten;
“Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and suspense is likely to be somewhat painful. As we shall see later, the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry these are the essentials of thinking.”
http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1910a/Dewey_1910_a.html
Dewey’s reference to a painful suspense is called cognitive dissonance and the result is a mind suspended between honest doubt and an ever learning skeptic. Pepper a social studies curriculum with hot issues and add some critical salt, and in a generation or two students will never hold any truth as self-evident. And that’s the truth.
1 – How we think, John Dewey, Lexington, Mass: D.C. Health, 1910. Online, in public domain, courtesy of the Mead Project.