Teaching critical thinking effectively requires considerable front-loading—designing the details of the course in advance—while at the same time having alternatives ready on hand to switch to in case a particular way of presenting a topic isn’t working.
Those teaching the course for the first time will likely be looking for a textbook. Finding a textbook that is focused on critical thinking is easier said than done. Many textbooks marketed for critical thinking courses are devoted to argument analysis and assessment and elementary logic. The assumption of this book is that while skills in both of those contribute to critical thinking, they don’t constitute it. Some textbooks marketed for critical thinking focus on problem-solving or on decision-making. These are activities whose effective performance can require critical thinking but they don’t constitute critical thinking either. Instructors serious about teaching critical thinking are at best likely to find themselves in the position of needing to develop lesson plans and exercises that supplement the material in the textbook and wanting to skip chunks of the textbook, and indeed many feel the need to develop their own syllabus.
This part of the book begins, in Chapter 2, on teaching critical thinking, with, first, a brief account of John Hattie’s “visible learning” pedagogy followed by a radical suggestion for teaching critical thinking. What is impressive about Hattie’s recommendations is that they are based on a massive amount of evidence that Hattie accumulated and studied over many years of research. There follow five exercises of increasing complexity.
Derek Allen’s exercise in Chapter 3, to use when teaching the logical concept of deductive validity, is straightforward and thorough. It can also serve as a model to copy in designing parallel exercises to use in teaching similar simple, discrete concepts.
In Chapter 4, Justine Kingsbury proposes a way to construct arguments, making them as good as the conclusion being argued for admits. She does it with a class of 200 students that meets for a mass lecture and also in small discussion groups. She introduces it after having spent some time in evaluating arguments, but it might also work, albeit differently, if it were taught before spending time in evaluating arguments.
In their exercise in Chapter 5, Kingsbury and her colleague Tracy Bowell describe an ingenious exercise designed to encourage students to apply to arguments for their own beliefs the standards they have learned to apply to others’ arguments. This is an exercise in practicing what Richard Paul called “strong sense” critical thinking.
In Chapter 6, Jan Albert van Laar introduces an exercise in learning the value of compromising and methods of achieving a compromise in situations in which controversies cannot be settled otherwise. It’s an ambitious learning device that can be packed into a 2-hour class or two 90-minute classes.
Chapter 7 contains Mark Battersby and Sharon Bailin’s 4-lesson exercise in using arguments to inquire into the pros and cons of a controversial issue—thereby using arguments to help make up one’s mind instead of to just to defend an opinion. Like van Laar’s exercise, it would require at least a week’s worth of class time.