Critical Thinking

As you think critically, you create the environment in which you become a citizen of the world. Critical thinking is one of these very challenging terms. It is challenging to identify what it is, have a definition for it and then figure out how to how to teach it and when to teach it.

So the way how this project came to light was that we started to think about how we can explicitly teach critical thinking and telling the students that they are learning these skills. Some students come into Cornell super well-versed with critical thinking. They've had it around their coffee tables at home, around their dinner tables.

They've had experience in their classrooms as high school students, maybe even in junior high in elementary school. Other students might be coming with much less exposure to critical thinking. And in fact, they might think about content as something that is presented by a professor.

And then they're supposed to absorb that content, not ask about it, not interrogated and think, Wait a minute, does that make sense? Does that work in my world? And in fact, if they think that doesn't really work, they might somehow see their world as being wrong, as opposed to thinking that this information might need to be interrogated in a different way.

So basically what we're trying to do is create some resources for instructors to actively, explicitly teach these skills and dispositions that make up critical thinking and provide resources for them to then reinforce critical thinking skills by applying them into a framework which is more discipline specific. What we are going to produce is a transdisciplinary module. So this is a standalone module that can be implemented into either a lecture or a discussion section or a lab, or could be maybe an out of class activity which introduces the students to this idea of what critical thinking is and why it's important, and starts to provide some examples about how they can apply that into a variety of situations.

Along with that, then we're also going to be creating this framework which complements this module, which is going to allow instructors to then use that information that has been provided in the critical thinking module and apply that and make it relevant to the material that they're going to be teaching in that course. We sent out a survey to CALS faculty to see what was on their learning objectives. What are they dedicating specific time to, what challenges have they come into contact with when it comes to actually teaching critical thinking.

And we've been using that data as a foundation for identifying what should be taught in the module that we're developing and how should this actually be taught. So critical thinking is how we think and what we do. When you start to have a conversation with people about, oh, what is critical thinking?

Very often they easily shift the conversation to misinformation and information literacy and critical thinking is so much more than that. Thinking about biases, thinking about how you use data, how you use evidence, how to verify that evidence. It's not just information literacy.

That's where I think critical thinking integrates so well with active learning and team based learning that's already going on in our introductory classes in CALS, because when teaching these critical thinking skills, it's important to also provide opportunities to practice listening, to think about how cognitive flexibility is important to critical thinking, to allow for communication, to allow for teamwork and to allow for leadership. I think the challenges of the project is exactly the strength of the project. It's interdisciplinary and we want to hear the voices of many instructors from many different disciplines, bringing all of that together and putting it together into one single module that will be applicable in all of these disciplines, in all of these courses.

It's incredibly challenging. The overall dream result is that this is a module that gets implemented across every introductory course in CALS. And what this will look like then is a student body that are all equipped with these essential skills and understand the importance of thinking critically in a variety of different contexts.