Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Critical thinking: What college should enable you to do
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“Critical thinking” is more than a catch phrase. It’s what your college experience should enable you to do, and it is one of the goals of the University Core Curriculum at USI. “I have a three-step definition of critical thinking,” said Dr. John Gottcent, professor of English and director of the University Core Curriculum. “It’s the kind of thinking which examines evidence carefully and doesn’t jump to conclusions; it questions popular assumptions; and it’s the kind of thinking in which you earn your own conclusion. In other words, you earn the right to say, ‘I believe this,’ because you’ve done your homework. “That’s what we’re trying to accomplish in general in college,” he said. “If we get students to raise questions, examine evidence, and do their homework, that would be successful. “In that sense, it is the overwhelming thing that everyone at the University is trying to do.” Critical thinking in the Core The Core defines critical thinking as such higher-order cognitive skills as interpreting, synthesizing, applying, illustrating, inferring, comparing/contrasting, distinguishing the central from the peripheral, and predicting. Freshmen get an initial introduction to critical thinking in the Core course English 101: Rhetoric & Composition I: Critical Thinking. “We deal with the very basic skill of developing ideas in the freshmen composition course,” said Dr. Betty Hart, professor of English. “The freshman students are just beginning to have the courage to question what they know and how they know it. As they get older and more experienced, then they realize that they have the power to shape that knowledge and direct it. “When they realize they can choose what they believe, and they can take the information and use it, they become confident about their ability to think independently. They don’t need the professor to sanction their ideas. “That’s what I hope my students will be able to do.” Can critical thinking be taught? Robert Boostrom, associate professor of education, doesn’t think critical thinking - or any subject - can be taught in the traditional sense. “I don’t think it can be reduced to any recipe and transmitted in any form,” he said. “I think we can create environments that allow students to think.” Boostrom teaches a graduate level education course based on his book, Thinking: the Foundation of Critical and Creative Learning in the Classroom, which explores the ways in which the practice of teaching unintentionally encourages students not to think. “It’s important for teachers to be conscious of the ways in which they teach non-thinking,” Boostrom said. “If you tell students, ‘Here’s how you do this,’ you end up with people not thinking at all, they are just following a procedure. There are a number of conditions in teaching and learning that encourage students to engage in non-thinking procedures.” The course is structured around the three main paradoxes from his book: defining, telling and believing. The Paradox of Defining In the book’s first part, “The Paradox of Defining,” Boostrom discusses the ways in which the study of subjects such as critical thinking releases students from thinking. “Subjects have boundaries, procedures, and protocols to follow,” he said. “To the extent that we define and give students procedures, they don’t have to think; they just do what is done in the situation.” Or, as series editor Jonas F. Soltis put it in the book’s introduction, “The more we seek to define and codify methods for teaching thinking, the more these things become procedures and templates for teachers and students to mindlessly follow rather than promoting thinking.” The Paradox of Telling In Part II, “The Paradox of Telling,” the fact that teachers tell students what to think is explored. “Teachers can’t avoid it, but it creates a perception that students don’t have to think about things, because teachers tell them what they need to know.” A student once asked Boostrom, “What do I need to know to get an A in this class?” “I told him, ‘I don’t know. We’re going to read the stories in this book, and we’re trying to think about what it means to be a teacher. I don’t know what you need to know to think about that question,’” Boostrom said. “I think there are a lot of students who would much prefer that I would tell them exactly what they need to know. I can give them some starting points and suggest some possibilities, but it’s a tentative process and different students are going to follow different paths.” The Paradox of Believing The problem of truth is discussed in the book’s third part, “The Paradox of Believing.” “Students need to be able to believe things, but to the extent that we believe things, those are the things we don’t need to think about,” Boostrom said. If education is about transmitting facts, receiving facts marks the end of thinking. Inventive teaching Boostrom said that teachers in his course begin to see for the first time the ways in which they are preventing their students from thinking through the structure of their lesson plans. “It seems to get them interested in doing things in different ways,” he said. “I think teachers have enjoyed coming up with more inventive approaches.” Julie Kissinger, a media specialist at two elementary schools in Mt. Vernon, Indiana, is pursuing a master’s degree in elementary education at USI. She took Boostrom’s course in summer 2005. “That course made me look at the way I taught, and begin to change things in the way in which I taught,” she said. Boostrom gave the class an assignment to incorporate thinking into a lesson they regularly teach. Kissinger teaches the Dewey Decimal System to fourth-grade students. “Normally, I would tell them the 10 categories of the Dewey Decimal System and have them complete different activities after I told them the categories, but I had the students themselves come up with 10 categories and explain their thinking,” she said. “They had to give a reason for creating these categories, and in doing that they were able to come up with the same 10 concepts,” she said. “The kids had a much better understanding, and they were able to retain it.” She said after the new Dewey Decimal lesson, students told her, “We really had to think today. We had to work hard.” |
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