Teaching Critical Thinking
Learn about the psychology of critical thinking ...
Far-reaching disasters, such as the collapse of the 2007 U.S. housing market, the Wall Street crisis a year later, and BP PLC’s massive Gulf Oil spill in 2010, all point to the need for government and corporate leaders to possess critical-thinking skills, skills that respond appropriately to crises, solving tough, complex problems as well as circumventing them in the future.
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But what exactly comprises critical-thinking skills, what do they look and sound like, and can they be taught and measured?
Those are questions that plague not only philosophers but psychologists as well, more specifically “neuropsychologists” who study the integral link between the brain and behavior.
“It’s not that we don’t know how to teach critical-thinking skills, but that we simply don’t teach those skills,” said Jordan Grafman, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Md.
Grafman, who has his Ph.D. in human neuropsychology, said that the field of Cognitive Psychology (link to Cognitive Psych page) has produced a large volume of empirical studies demonstrating how people acquire analytical and logical reasoning skills, but this information isn’t shared or read by educators.
Cognitive psychology studies how individuals acquire, process, and store information, and how they use this knowledge in decision-making and problem solving.
Grafman said there’s also another growing problem affecting students’ abilities to effectively think through issues in a meaningful way: technology. Computers and hand-held devices offer instantaneous access to a multitude of data, yet the speed at which this information arrives and the way individuals quickly sift through it doesn’t lend itself to thoughtful, reflexive responses.
However, some schools and educators are responding to the need to prepare future “thinkers.”
Lisa King, Director of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at Poudre High School (PHS) in Fort Collins, points to the Theory of Knowledge course that all students in the IB Diploma Program must complete.
Available in 3004 schools in 139 countries, IB programs are designed to prepare students to think deeply and analytically about global issues and problems. Its stated mission is to “encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.”
IB offers three programs for students aged 3 to 19. Students aged 16 to 19, or those usually in their last two years of high school, are accepted in the “IB Diploma Program.”
King, who started teaching in the PHS IB program 10 years ago, and who is also a consultant for the IB nonprofit educational foundation, said that the Theory of Knowledge course is designed to give students the analytical skills to critically examine how “they came to know what they know.”
In other words, how exactly did the student – called “The Knower” – acquire his or her knowledge of math, science, history, politics and religion? And what has helped or inhibited the student’s ability to know?
King said that the course examines all the ways individuals draw on their knowledge: experiences, memories, intuitions, belief systems, biases, abilities, and perceptions.
Students also examine different “ways of knowing,” including sense perception, language, reasoning, and emotion.
For example, a scientist’s “way of knowing” about climate change will differ from an environmentalist ‘s “way of knowing.”
Students will examine issues like climate change from many perspectives, stepping into another’s skin to see how viewpoints are influenced by many factors. Language, for instance, might play a key role in this example as some call this issue “global warming” while others refer to it as “climate change.”
In this way, students introspectively view issues and problems from not only their own perspective, but others’ perspectives as well – the purpose of the course, and an important component in the type of thinking required for future workers and leaders of an increasingly interconnected world.