Critical Thinking In-Service

Lisa Swope

Radford City Schools

January 29, 2010

What is critical thinking?

Qualities of Critical Thinking

• Reasonable

• Reflective

• Substantiated

• Evaluative

• Open-minded

• Creative

• Others???

A Rationale for Teaching Thinking

• Maintaining a free society depends on citizens who can think clearly

• Rapidly changing technology requires workers to have basic thinking skills that transfer to new tasks

• Individual development and well-being are enhanced by the ability to use higher level thinking skills

How to Teach for Thinking—Building the Skills

• Nurture a capacity for informed judgment

• Respond to student remarks with more elaboration (model evaluative thinking)

• Use “wait time”

• Emphasize critical reading and writing skills

A Playbook for Promoting Thinking

1 Create assignments that require students to read, write, discuss, build, prove, determine, imagine, evaluate, solve, analyze

2• Focus on issues,

questions, or problems

3• Create opportunities

for team work

4• Incorporate analogies and other kinds of relationships between pieces of

information

5• Ask open-ended

questions

• If your dog could talk, what would it say?

• If man colonized the moon, how would he breathe?

6• Teach for transfer (so

students can use their thinking skills to apply them to other situations and to their own lives)

7• Create a tolerance for

dissonance (discomfort caused by conflicting ideas; this discomfort motivates students to resolve the conflict)

How could a free country tolerate slavery?

8• Help students learn alternatives to

memorization (Building Categories—students use inductive reasoning to discovers the rules); Reverse Brainstorming; Timelines

9• Socratic QuestioningWhy are you saying that?

What do you already know about this?

Can you give me an example?

Can you rephrase that, please?

What else could we assume?

Please explain why/how……..

What would happen if?

Are these reasons good enough?

What other ways could we look at this?

Tactics That Encourage Thinking

• Cover more for students to grasp more; this helps them develop organizing concepts

• Cover less if more means they don’t learn as much

• Don’t spoon feed• Use visual aids• Focus on fundamental

concepts

More Tactics

• Think aloud in front of your students• Use group work (assign specific

tasks/problems, set time limits, and require groups to report back to the class)

• Use reading and writing regularly• Design activities and readings so students

must think their way through them• Continually re-weave new concepts into

the basic ones

Tactics

• Always make assignments clear—provide written assignments that spell out how they work.

• Make expectations clear on the first day of class.

Don’t Cooperate With a “Conspiracy for the Least”

Sizer warned of instructional situations where students prefer passive learning and resist intellectual efforts. Students directly or indirectly negotiate a “tug of war” to the place where the teacher and students do just enough to get by.

In Conclusion…Critical Thinking

• Requires practice with higher level thinking skills • Stretches teachers and learners out of our

comfort zones• Helps learners determine relevance and validity

of information and to problem-solve• Teaches for transfer—provides opportunities to

apply thinking skills to other situations

With Help Fromhttp://www.cartoonstock.com

http://pareonline.net

CriticalThinking.org

http://changingminds.org

http://www.ericdigests.org/pre9211/critical.htm