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Critical Thinking

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Teaching critical thinking is a valuable and complex process that involves developing the skills necessary to analyze, evaluate, and interpret information effectively. Here's a detailed step-by-step guide to help you teach critical thinking:

1. Understand Critical Thinking: Before teaching others, ensure you have a clear understanding of what critical thinking is. It involves actively and objectively analyzing information, considering various perspectives, and making reasoned judgments.

2. Define Objectives: Determine what specific critical thinking skills you want to teach. These could include analyzing arguments, evaluating evidence, problem-solving, logical reasoning, and decision-making.

3. Create a Supportive Environment: Foster an open and respectful classroom or learning environment where students feel comfortable expressing their ideas and challenging assumptions.

4. Introduce Concepts: Start by introducing foundational concepts like logic, reasoning, evidence, bias, and fallacies. Use real-world examples to demonstrate these concepts in action.

5. Encourage Questioning: Teach students to question information, assumptions, and conclusions. Ask open-ended questions that encourage them to think deeper and explore different viewpoints.

6. Teach Analytical Skills: Provide exercises that require students to break down complex ideas into their component parts. Analyze different elements of an argument or issue to understand how they relate to each other.

7. Evaluate Evidence: Guide students in assessing the credibility and relevance of sources and evidence. Teach them how to differentiate between reliable sources and unreliable ones.

8. Discuss Bias and Assumptions: Explore the concept of bias and how it can influence thinking. Encourage students to identify their own biases and consider how they might affect their analysis.

9. Practice Problem-Solving: Present real-world problems that require critical thinking to solve. Encourage students to explore multiple solutions, weigh their pros and cons, and justify their choices.

10. Explore Counterarguments: Teach students to engage with counterarguments. This helps them understand opposing viewpoints and strengthens their ability to construct more persuasive arguments.

11. Foster Creative Thinking: Critical thinking also involves creativity. Encourage students to think outside the box, generate innovative solutions, and consider unconventional perspectives.

12. Teach Decision-Making: Guide students through the process of making informed decisions. Discuss factors like risks, benefits, ethical considerations, and long-term consequences.

13. Engage in Socratic Dialogue: Use the Socratic method, where you ask probing questions to guide students to discover answers themselves. This approach promotes active thinking and discussion.

14. Collaborative Learning: Encourage group discussions and debates. Collaborative learning helps students learn from each other's perspectives and enhances critical thinking through interaction.

15. Provide Feedback: Offer constructive feedback on students' arguments and analyses. Emphasize both strengths and areas for improvement.

16. Practice, Practice, Practice: Critical thinking is a skill that improves with practice. Assign regular assignments, case studies, debates, and projects that require students to apply critical thinking.

17. Reflect and Discuss: Periodically have reflective discussions where students share how their critical thinking skills have developed and how they've applied them outside the classroom.

18. Model Critical Thinking: Demonstrate critical thinking in your own discussions, lectures, and interactions. Be open to adjusting your views based on evidence and logical reasoning.

19. Provide Resources: Share books, articles, videos, and online resources that explore critical thinking and its applications.

20. Assess Progress: Use quizzes, exams, presentations, and projects to assess students' critical thinking skills. These assessments should reflect real-world problem-solving scenarios.

Here are some examples for each of the 20 points mentioned earlier:

1. Understand Critical Thinking:

• Example: Explain to students that critical thinking involves examining information from various angles before forming an opinion. Use a news article as an example and discuss how different people might interpret the same story differently based on their perspectives.

2. Define Objectives:

• Example: State that the objective is for students to be able to identify logical fallacies in arguments. Provide a list of common fallacies and ask them to find examples in advertisements or political speeches.

3. Create a Supportive Environment:

• Example: Establish a classroom rule that everyone's opinions will be respected and valued, even if they differ from the majority.

4. Introduce Concepts:

• Example: Teach students the concept of deductive reasoning using the classic example: "All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human. Therefore, Socrates is mortal."

5. Encourage Questioning:

• Example: Present a controversial statement like "Social media is beneficial for society." Ask students to write down reasons supporting and opposing this statement.

6. Teach Analytical Skills:

• Example: Provide a complex argument about climate change and ask students to break it down into its main premises and conclusions.

7. Evaluate Evidence:

• Example: Show students two articles about a scientific discovery, one from a reputable source and another from an unreliable blog. Discuss the differences in evidence and credibility.

8. Discuss Bias and Assumptions:

• Example: Show a news article covering a political event and discuss how the author's bias might have influenced the language used and the information included.

9. Practice Problem-Solving:

• Example: Present a scenario where a town is facing an environmental crisis. Ask students to brainstorm possible solutions, considering short-term and long-term consequences.

10. Explore Counterarguments:

• Example: Assign students a debate on a controversial topic like genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and require them to argue both in favor and against GMOs.

11. Foster Creative Thinking:

• Example: Ask students to imagine an alternative ending to a historical event and explain how it might have impacted the course of history.

12. Teach Decision-Making:

• Example: Present a scenario where a character has to choose between two job offers. Guide students through a decision-making process considering factors like salary, work-life balance, and career growth.

13. Engage in Socratic Dialogue:

• Example: Use the Socratic method to explore the concept of justice by asking a series of questions like "What is justice?" and "Can an unjust action ever be justified?"

14. Collaborative Learning:

• Example: Divide the class into groups to analyze a case study involving a complex ethical dilemma. Each group presents their analysis, and the class discusses different viewpoints.

15. Provide Feedback:

• Example: After a debate, give feedback to each student on their argumentation skills, acknowledging strengths like effective use of evidence and suggesting areas for improvement.

16. Practice, Practice, Practice:

• Example: Assign a weekly "critical thinking challenge" where students analyze a real-world news article, identifying logical fallacies and evaluating the evidence.

17. Reflect and Discuss:

• Example: Hold a class discussion at the end of the semester where students share instances when they applied critical thinking skills outside of the classroom.

18. Model Critical Thinking:

• Example: During a lecture, demonstrate your willingness to change your viewpoint based on strong evidence or compelling arguments from students.

19. Provide Resources:

• Example: Share a TED Talk or an article discussing cognitive biases and how they affect decision-making.

20. Assess Progress:

• Example: Create a final project where students have to analyze a complex issue, present their findings, and defend their conclusions using critical thinking skills.

Why the Technology = Progress narrative must be challenged

John Naughton in The Guardian

Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote the American philosopher George Santayana in 1905, “are condemned to repeat it.” And now, 118 years later, here come two American economists with the same message, only with added salience, for they are addressing a world in which a small number of giant corporations are busy peddling a narrative that says, basically, that what is good for them is also good for the world.

That this narrative is self-serving is obvious, as is its implied message: that they should be allowed to get on with their habits of “creative destruction” (to use Joseph Schumpeter’s famous phrase) without being troubled by regulation. Accordingly, any government that flirts with the idea of reining in corporate power should remember that it would then be standing in the way of “progress”: for it is technology that drives history and anything that obstructs it is doomed to be roadkill.

One of the many useful things about this formidable (560-page) tome is its demolition of the tech narrative’s comforting equation of technology with “progress”. Of course the fact that our lives are infinitely richer and more comfortable than those of the feudal serfs we would have been in the middle ages owes much to technological advances. Even the poor in western societies enjoy much higher living standards today than three centuries ago, and live healthier, longer lives.

But a study of the past 1,000 years of human development, Acemoglu and Johnson argue, shows that “the broad-based prosperity of the past was not the result of any automatic, guaranteed gains of technological progress… Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.”

Acemoglu and Johnson begin their Cook’s tour of the past millennium with the puzzle of how dominant narratives – like that which equates technological development with progress – get established. The key takeaway is unremarkable but critical: those who have power define the narrative. That’s how banks get to be thought of as “too big to fail”, or why questioning tech power is “luddite”. But their historical survey really gets under way with an absorbing account of the evolution of agricultural technologies from the neolithic age to the medieval and early modern eras. They find that successive developments “tended to enrich and empower small elites while generating few benefits for agricultural workers: peasants lacked political and social power, and the path of technology followed the vision of a narrow elite.” 

A similar moral is extracted from their reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution. This focuses on the emergence of a newly emboldened middle class of entrepreneurs and businessmen whose vision rarely included any ideas of social inclusion and who were obsessed with the possibilities of steam-driven automation for increasing profits and reducing costs.

The shock of the second world war led to a brief interruption in the inexorable trend of continuous technological development combined with increasing social exclusion and inequality. And the postwar years saw the rise of social democratic regimes focused on Keynesian economics, welfare states and shared prosperity. But all of this changed in the 1970s with the neoliberal turn and the subsequent evolution of the democracies we have today, in which enfeebled governments pay obeisance to giant corporations – more powerful and profitable than anything since the East India Company. These create astonishing wealth for a tiny elite (not to mention lavish salaries and bonuses for their executives) while the real incomes of ordinary people have remained stagnant, precarity rules and inequality returning to pre-1914 levels.

Coincidentally, this book arrives at an opportune moment, when digital technology, currently surfing on a wave of irrational exuberance about ubiquitous AI, is booming, while the idea of shared prosperity has seemingly become a wistful pipe dream. So is there anything we might learn from the history so graphically recounted by Acemoglu and Johnson?

Answer: yes. And it’s to be found in the closing chapter, which comes up with a useful list of critical steps that democracies must take to ensure that the proceeds of the next technological wave are more generally shared among their populations. Interestingly, some of the ideas it explores have a venerable provenance, reaching back to the progressive movement that brought the robber barons of the early 20th century to heel.

There are three things that need to be done by a modern progressive movement. First, the technology-equals-progress narrative has to be challenged and exposed for what it is: a convenient myth propagated by a huge industry and its acolytes in government, the media and (occasionally) academia. The second is the need to cultivate and foster countervailing powers – which critically should include civil society organisations, activists and contemporary versions of trade unions. And finally, there is a need for progressive, technically informed policy proposals, and the fostering of thinktanks and other institutions that can supply a steady flow of ideas about how digital technology can be repurposed for human flourishing rather than exclusively for private profit.

None of this is rocket science. It can be done. And it needs to be done if liberal democracies are to survive the next wave of technological evolution and the catastrophic acceleration of inequality that it will bring. So – who knows? Maybe this time we might really learn something from history.

In an age of robots, schools are teaching our children to be redundant

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze


GeorgeMonbiot in The Guardian


In the future, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible: creative, critical and socially skilled. So why are children being taught to behave like machines?

Children learn best when teaching aligns with their natural exuberance, energy and curiosity. So why are they dragooned into rows and made to sit still while they are stuffed with facts?

We succeed in adulthood through collaboration. So why is collaboration in tests and exams called cheating?

Governments claim to want to reduce the number of children being excluded from school. So why are their curriculums and tests so narrow that they alienate any child whose mind does not work in a particular way?

The best teachers use their character, creativity and inspiration to trigger children’s instinct to learn. So why are character, creativity and inspiration suppressed by a stifling regime of micromanagement?

There is, as Graham Brown-Martin explains in his book Learning {Re}imagined, a common reason for these perversities. Our schools were designed to produce the workforce required by 19th-century factories. The desired product was workers who would sit silently at their benches all day, behaving identically, to produce identical products, submitting to punishment if they failed to achieve the requisite standards. Collaboration and critical thinking were just what the factory owners wished to discourage.

As far as relevance and utility are concerned, we might as well train children to operate a spinning jenny. Our schools teach skills that are not only redundant but counter-productive. Our children suffer this life-defying, dehumanising system for nothing.


At present we are stuck with the social engineering of an industrial workforce in a post-industrial era

The less relevant the system becomes, the harder the rules must be enforced, and the greater the stress they inflict. One school’s current advertisement in the Times Educational Supplement asks: “Do you like order and discipline? Do you believe in children being obedient every time? … If you do, then the role of detention director could be for you.” Yes, many schools have discipline problems. But is it surprising when children, bursting with energy and excitement, are confined to the spot like battery chickens?

Teachers are now leaving the profession in droves, their training wasted and their careers destroyed by overwork and a spirit-crushing regime of standardisation, testing and top-down control. The less autonomy they are granted, the more they are blamed for the failures of the system. A major recruitment crisis beckons, especially in crucial subjects such as physics and design and technology. This is what governments call efficiency.

Any attempt to change the system, to equip children for the likely demands of the 21st century, rather than those of the 19th, is demonised by governments and newspapers as “social engineering”. Well, of course it is. All teaching is social engineering. At present we are stuck with the social engineering of an industrial workforce in a post-industrial era. Under Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and a nostalgic government in Britain, it’s likely only to become worse.

When they are allowed to apply their natural creativity and curiosity, children love learning. They learn to walk, to talk, to eat and to play spontaneously, by watching and experimenting. Then they get to school, and we suppress this instinct by sitting them down, force-feeding them with inert facts and testing the life out of them.

There is no single system for teaching children well, but the best ones have this in common: they open up rich worlds that children can explore in their own ways, developing their interests with help rather than indoctrination. For example, the Essa academy in Bolton gives every pupil an iPad, on which they create projects, share material with their teachers and each other, and can contact their teachers with questions about their homework. By reducing their routine tasks, this system enables teachers to give the children individual help.

Other schools have gone in the opposite direction, taking children outdoors and using the natural world to engage their interests and develop their mental and physical capacities (the Forest School movement promotes this method). But it’s not a matter of high-tech or low-tech; the point is that the world a child enters is rich and diverse enough to ignite their curiosity, and allow them to discover a way of learning that best reflects their character and skills.

There are plenty of teaching programmes designed to work with children, not against them. For example, the Mantle of the Expert encourages them to form teams of inquiry, solving an imaginary task – such as running a container port, excavating a tomb or rescuing people from a disaster – that cuts across traditional subject boundaries. A similar approach, called Quest to Learn, is based on the way children teach themselves to play games. To solve the complex tasks they’re given, they need to acquire plenty of information and skills. They do it with the excitement and tenacity of gamers.

No grammar schools, lots of play: the secrets of Europe’s top education system



The Reggio Emilia approach, developed in Italy, allows children to develop their own curriculum, based on what interests them most, opening up the subjects they encounter along the way with the help of their teachers. Ashoka Changemaker schools treat empathy as “a foundational skill on a par with reading and math”, and use it to develop the kind of open, fluid collaboration that, they believe, will be the 21st century’s key skill.

The first multi-racial school in South Africa, Woodmead, developed a fully democratic method of teaching, whose rules and discipline were overseen by a student council. Its integrated studies programme, like the new system in Finland, junked traditional subjects in favour of the students’ explorations of themes, such as gold, or relationships, or the ocean. Among its alumni are some of South Africa’s foremost thinkers, politicians and businesspeople.

In countries such as Britain and the United States, such programmes succeed despite the system, not because of it. Had these governments set out to ensure that children find learning difficult and painful, they could not have done a better job. Yes, let’s have some social engineering. Let’s engineer our children out of the factory and into the real world.