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Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

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Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

#21

Post by csense »

The high school band problem experiment is an instance of Chinese Remainder Theorem [1].

I didn't actually read the cited study, but from the summary given in this article, I thought that experiment was poorly conducted.

The subjects weren't encouraged to engage with the material on all levels. The instructions might lead many subjects to focus on grammar and style rather than mathematical content. I would have told the subjects that one of the four example problems has a numerical error and they have a half hour or so to find it and write a paragraph explaining the issue, when in reality none of the example problems had an error.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_remainder_theorem

Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

#22

Post by barry-cotter »

R_Edward wrote: post #19
offshoreguy19 wrote: post #10

"Virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal of schooling is to enable students to think critically." Well that is a questionable presupposition. Government schooling is about teaching group think. It is about creating citizens that don't question what they're taught. Government school is about teaching kids to think emotionally. Teaching students to think critically might be what scho…

"Government school" is a wonderful example of how snappy terminology short circuits critical thinking. It may be rewarding on some level to assume that every school operated by the government is part of a monolithic agenda to turn the nation's youth into unquestioning robots to staff our various production lines. That is simply not true.

An explicit agenda isn't necessary. And when there is an explicit agenda that need not be the only thing taught. It seems extremely unlikely to me that there is any grand conspiracy. There never was, really. All modern school systems of any size are organisationally descended from ones designed to produce good raw material for soldiers[0]. Personally I don't think "government schools" is much more informative than just "schools". For practical purposes all schools with age ranked students do the same job of social control. They train children to do what they're told, reduce or sometimes channel creativity, and inure children to being ranked or judged[1]. There are some exceptions as schools or as philosophies of schooling but they're marginal things like Steiner-Waldorf.

[0]http://www.nber.org/papers/w18049

[1]http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

#23

Post by tellarin »

csense wrote: post #16

A course in programming would be a great way to teach critical thinking, especially if you spend several weeks specifically working on debugging skills.

Critical thinking is not necessarily analytical thinking.

One can be deeply analytical and yet not really critical. For example, some people that know all details of a religious text and can argue its points very well, while not paying attention to its limitations/inconsistencies or influences.

Not trying to bash religious people, just giving a common example.

Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

#24

Post by Millennium »

Teaching critical thinking is not as difficult as recognizing it. Epistemological lock, as is prevalent in today's climate, makes it all too easy to dismiss divergent opinions, particularly popular ones, as not arising from critical thought. Even more insidious, however, is how easy it becomes to preemptively accept desirable or convergent opinions as clearly critically reasoned even when they are not.

Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

#25

Post by danpat »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #6
lesterbuck wrote: post #3

Upton Sinclair's classic quote gets to the source of resistance to critical thinking: I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" And often the costs are far beyond financial, including ostracism, shunning and shaming. Critical thinking, as a mass movement, is about the most dangerous idea there is to any existing power…

I've heard Hilde Domin say something similar in an interview I listened to yesterday, paraphrased: "When you're young, you can still act on your insights [in this case, leaving Germany because of the rise of Hitler], but older people have more relations/commitments; and in fact many people don't even want insights, that's sadly true." It came to mind because people can be very defensive and petty even when no salary…

That reminds me of an interview with John Cleese where he said something along the lines of "I don't laugh as much as I used to. As I get older, I find that I'm coming across fewer and fewer novel jokes, novelty (to the listener) being a critical part of making things funny."

Getting old means you've seen lots of things. If all those things have created a consistent mental model, it's much easier to ignore the one, new outlier that contradicts the rest.

Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

#26

Post by gnaritas »

tellarin wrote: post #23
csense wrote: post #16

A course in programming would be a great way to teach critical thinking, especially if you spend several weeks specifically working on debugging skills.

Critical thinking is not necessarily analytical thinking. One can be deeply analytical and yet not really critical. For example, some people that know all details of a religious text and can argue its points very well, while not paying attention to its limitations/inconsistencies or influences. Not trying to bash religious people, just giving a common example.

Debugging requires critical thinking, as does programming in general; it's not just analytical. A course in programming would do everyone's mind some good just as reading does; it changes how you think.

Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

#27

Post by ef4 »

mfsch wrote: post #15
offshoreguy19 wrote: post #10

"Virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal of schooling is to enable students to think critically." Well that is a questionable presupposition. Government schooling is about teaching group think. It is about creating citizens that don't question what they're taught. Government school is about teaching kids to think emotionally. Teaching students to think critically might be what scho…

Sure, a lot of what school does is teaching compliance. Yet, I have heard a lot of speeches about how school teaches children to be critically thinking citizens and you can probably find the term “critical thinking” in most mission statements of educational institutions. I would even say that school usually want to raise critically thinking students, they just don’t want to deal with the implications this has for run…

The fact that schools as we know then can't tolerate much critical thinking tells you everything you need to know about their true function.

Any kind of "teaching" that is easier the less your students question isn't teaching at all, it's indoctrination.

Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

#28

Post by aik »

Interesting. So the idea is that critical thinking boils down to a combination of domain knowledge and specific metacognitive strategies, and so critical thinking isn't actually a skill.

I sense that "critical thinking" has become somewhat of a blanket term. When business leaders and others call for better teaching of "critical thinking", what exactly do they mean? What exactly are they looking for?

One answer could be that they expect the person to have knowledge/skill in the specific area a person is hired in. Although this would be great, I somewhat doubt this is it. Often it is expected that new graduates don't know much about the area they have been studying (from a professional sense).

It could be thought that they're asking the impossible -- domain knowledge is necessary for critical thinking, but they don't care about the domain knowledge as much as the critical thinking. Since they can't be separated, the problem is rather that students just need to be taught more domain knowledge, or leaders need to change their expectations.

Or, the education system has a poor understanding of the difference between critical thinking, domain knowledge, and metacognitive strategies. For one, personally I've never seen focus placed on metacognitive strategies, and not even a list of strategies that apply to any given discipline.

I would think that one component of the expectation from business leaders is the ability to learn and adapt. The issue here is: That it's OK that the person doesn't have domain knowledge, but rather the issue is that they struggle to learn what they need, and lack the self-awareness and understanding to best know what to focus on going forward and how. In school we are always given the information we need to learn, and in my experience, rarely are we given a blank slate and asked to learn everything we need, in any domain/discipline necessary, to accomplish the job.

Tokenadult -- have you read Willingham's book on this topic (When Can You Trust the Experts?) and would recommend it? I read his previous book (Why Don't Students Like School?) and found it fairly interesting, though there are elements I find misleading.

Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

#29

Post by snowwrestler »

csense wrote: post #16

A course in programming would be a great way to teach critical thinking, especially if you spend several weeks specifically working on debugging skills.

You've obviously never sat in a literary analysis class with a bunch of programmers...

Re: Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? [pdf]

#30

Post by tokenadult »

aik wrote: post #28

Interesting. So the idea is that critical thinking boils down to a combination of domain knowledge and specific metacognitive strategies, and so critical thinking isn't actually a skill. I sense that "critical thinking" has become somewhat of a blanket term. When business leaders and others call for better teaching of "critical thinking", what exactly do they mean? What exactly are they looking for? One answer could…

To answer your question, I have not yet read any of Willingham's books cover to cover, but as I read more of Willingham's articles, I increasingly think I should read everything that he writes. And then I should look up many of the references he cites. Right now, Daniel Willingham is doing an excellent job of filtering the research on human learning.
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