[ Music ]
>> It's thinking that goes beyond the surface.
It gets beyond the obvious and it's the ability to be aware
of that your thinking might be characterized
by perceived notions.
The world doesn't fit easily into either/or patterns.
One of the standing jokes in my classes is
that the national pastime is not baseball but dichotomizing,
that Americans love to put things in either/or categories.
You know, it's conservative/liberal,
Republican/Democrat, American League/National League,
you know.
But, most of the things that kids write about,
that most of the issues that we think about and explore
in higher education are far more complicated than that.
They can't be boiled down to either/or propositions and so,
for me, critical thinking is the ability to get beyond those sort
of easy formulations that are kind of handed to us
by the culture and to get beyond the surface
to question what looks like the norm.
You know, what looks like the natural state of being.
[ Music ]
I think the constant practice of doing that,
of sort of holding off judgment if someone poses a question
or if a text poses a question that students want to slip
into an easy either/or answer to.
That constant practice helps communicate to students
that critical thinking is more than just sort
of accepting what you see at first glance
and there are a whole number of strategies that you can employ
but I think they have to be done over time and, for me,
they tend to be writing and reading activities.
Very often collaborative, small groups, partners.
Usually, I give students opportunities
to do those activities in small groups and then we come together
as a class, share what we've found, pose questions,
and then brainstorm together.
So, it's not one set of strategies.
It's really the repetition of a whole variety of them
that we do class after class throughout the semester.
[ Music ]
For me, the best answer to that question is
to create a classroom in which the activities
and the assignments that I give to students are
such that they have a way into them.
They look generic on the surface but kids can come
in at whatever level they happen to be at so there has
to be some flexibility there.
It's kind of a, you know, it's kind of a one to one thing.
I work in a small setting with twenty-five or so students
and they often do small group work but I meet
with my students two or three times during the
semester individually.
Those conferences give me opportunities to work closely
with students and help identify where students might not be
up to par or those students who seem to be ahead of the curve,
whom I can challenge a little bit more and also, you know,
writing, in some sense, writing instruction is inherently
individualized so that in my commentary on students,
not just on their final papers but on the drafts
that they create, I have opportunities
to work with students.
I can really push kids that need to be pushed.
I can back off with kids that are struggling
and provide a little bit more support.
I think the writing classroom, a process-oriented approach,
offers instructors all sorts of opportunity to do that.
[ Music ]
Yeah, three things I think.
The first is scaffolding, the second is modeling,
and the third is practice.
Students often are able to do a certain kind
of challenging intellectual task if you help them move
to that level on a step-by-step process.
That's scaffolding.
You hear that term a lot in K-12 education, a little bit less
so I think in higher ed and especially
in the writing classroom.
So, for example, if you want students to learn something
about how to make a deductive argument or how
to use deductive reasoning in argumentation,
most of them can get there but it isn't, you know,
it's a big leap for many of them to sort of start where they are
and then just make a deductive argument.
So, you can set up activities or assignments in such a way
that they practice some of the intellectual operations
that they need to do in order to make a deductive argument.
Understand what deductive reasoning is.
You know, start with a principle and have them identify what does
that look like and then how can we reason
from that principle, for example.
So, scaffolding is really important.
And, the same is true with things that we might take
for granted in academic writing like how to support a claim,
you know, or what constitutes an appropriate claim.
In writing Ten Core Concepts one of those ten core concepts is
that writers have to support what they say.
They have to back up what they say.
That's an absolutely fundamental principle
in effective academic writing.
There's no genre or discipline in higher ed
that doesn't have some version of supporting your claim
but many kids come out of high school not really knowing what
that is because they haven't engaged
in that kind of intellectual work.
So, you can work with them to scaffold that kind of activity
over time, both in class and outside of class.
Modeling is really important.
You say to a student well here's an appropriate claim
or that's not an appropriate claim.
How do they know what an appropriate claim is?
Showing them how to do that or, back to my example
about deductive reasoning.
Show them what it looks like to state a principle and then work
from that principle to come to some logical conclusion
about some argument or problem or question.
[ Music ]