Critical Thinking Skills

My experience with those who teach and write about critical thinking suggests an awkwardness around CT talk that moves away, even a little, from logic and empirical proofs. That awkwardness is as understandable as it is troubling. Yes, the use of concepts like emotion, values, attitudes, faith, hunches, and intuition to justify conclusions is a huge problem. However, logic and empirical proofs are frequently abused to justify outlandish conclusions. We know they are, but we have the good sense not to push back from their usefulness simply because as tools they can be misused.

In this blog I wanted to focus on the importance of careful thought about particular attitudes–ones that are primary in the sense that when they are not present, all the critical thinking training in the world will not encourage greater magnitudes of critical thinking. Anyone who has taught critical thinking knows that a subset of students are quite proficient in learning the critical thinking game for classroom purposes.

Such students earn A’s. Then you have the opportunity to see them in action after the class is included, and, gasp, you are shocked. How could my phenomenal teaching have been so ineffective? The same students might be able to demonstrate on command a satisfying array of critical thinking skills.

What happened?

The learner played the teacher’s game, but the learner saw no more need or efficacy for critical thinking skills than he probably saw for the algebra class in which he was the star pupil.

While what I am saying is impractical, a pre-CT course or experience in which the learner came to feel the depths of the problems caused by a lack of critical thinking would seem to provide the attitudinal framework such that CT is internalized and enjoyed as it is being learned. Providing learners with disaster scenarios resulting from the absence of CT was a major objective of the “Medical Mistakes” course that at one time was taught at the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona as a CT course. For some students, reading an outstanding book like Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph Hallinan might so flood them with the dangers of sloppy thinking that they would be eager to acquire mental antidotes.

Later blog entries will focus on specific attitudes that are prerequisites for regularized CT. My single point here is—don’t overlook the mental frame the learner has toward CT in the rush to teach them a series of valuable CT skills.