One of the five literacies that our QEP team is addressing is the need to encourage critical thinking skills in our students. In our workshop this week, we were given the task of defining the term "critical thinking." You would think that would be easy to do. However, everyone in the room had a different definition. This started a great conversation and debate among us. It was interesting to see how the definition tended to be biased towards the professor's field of expertise.I believe that the main commonality among us though was that critical thinking involves some set of logic.
I know there are many different aspects of critical thinking. However, in a nutshell, I would define critical thinking as any endeavor that includes relying upon your knowledge and past experiences to determine a logical solution or to predict the outcome of a given situation. This criteria can be met regardless of if you are performing a scientific experiment or determining the actions of characters in a story that you are writing.
At our next workshop we are supposed to TRY to create a definition that everyone can agree upon. I look forward to that debate! :-)
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Nice, Stephanie. It seems that "consideration" is a basic theme here, and I've seen that and heard that in our discussions, too. "Consideration," to me, implies a conscious regard of something "other," which I see as the beginning of critical thinking. Then processing that information through prior knowledge seems to be a further step.
ReplyDeleteI think following a model through a number of these stages will let us see critical thinking in as complete a way as possible.