1. Critical Thinking In-Service Lisa Swope Radford City Schools January 29, 2010

2. What is critical thinking?

3. Qualities of Critical Thinking Reasonable Reflective Substantiated Evaluative Open-minded Creative Others???

4. 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

5. 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

6. A Playbook for Promoting Thinking 1 Create assignments that require students to read, write, discuss, build, prove, determine, imagine, evaluate, solve, analyze

7. 2 Focus on issues, questions, or problems

8. 3 Create opportunities for team work

9. 4 Incorporate analogies and other kinds of relationships between pieces of information

10. 5 Ask open-ended questions If your dog could talk, what would it say? If man colonized the moon, how would he breathe?

11. 6 Teach for transfer (so students can use their thinking skills to apply them to other situations and to their own lives)

12. 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?

13. 8 Help students learn alternatives to memorization (Building Categories— students use inductive reasoning to discovers the rules); Reverse Brainstorming; Timelines

14. 9 Socratic Questioning Why 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?

15. 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

16. 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

17. Tactics Always make assignments clear—provide written assignments that spell out how they work. Make expectations clear on the first day of class.

18. Don’t Cooperate With a “Conspiracy for the Least” S izer 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.

19. 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

20. With Help From http://www.cartoonstock.com http://pareonline.net CriticalThinking.org http://changingminds.org http://www.ericdigests.org/pre9211/critical.htm