This post is a guest blog by Dr Tom Chatfield, the author of the SAGE Campus Critical Thinking online course that equips students with the intellectual skills and practical habits of critical thinking. Tom is an author, tech philosopher and broadcaster.
Almost forty years ago, in his 1981 book Critical Thinking and Education, John McPeck identified one of the key problems with trying to teach critical thinking as a distinct discipline:
“It is a matter of conceptual truth that thinking is always about X, and the X can never be ‘’everything in general’ but must always be something in particular. Thus, the claim ‘I teach my students to think’ is at worst false and at best misleading.”
As someone who writes books and designs resources that aim to teach critical thinking—including a book called How To Think that’s due out next year—McPeck’s warning is never far from my mind. Not only is thinking always about something; it must also come from someone, somewhere, complete with all the baggage and limitations this suggests.
What does it mean, then, to talk about critical thinking in the context of foundational skills?
For me, the answer is that critical thinking is not so much a subject area as a set of habits, practices and aspirations; and that, when it comes to building the foundations of learning, helping students to develop a critically engaged mindset is essential if they are to take charge of their studies, develop understanding as well as memorize information, and (perhaps most importantly) translate in-depth reflections into enduring skills.
This last point embodies a seeming paradox of critical thinking: that it’s through sustained engagement with the particularities of a field that we can best acquire and develop transferable skills. At least, this is something that can sound like a paradox when put in intellectual terms. As soon as you consider it in the context of fields like sports or music, however, it becomes clear that there’s no real contradiction in play.
If I want to develop some general, transferrable physical competencies—hand-eye coordination, strength and stamina, for example—then frequently playing and training for a particular sport is likely to be more useful than dabbling across a couple of fields. Similarly, if I hope to enhance my musicality—my sense of rhythm and intonation; my appreciation of harmony and melody; my ability to read and remember music—then the in-depth study of one instrument will better equip me than noodling around with several. In both cases, the prolonged practice of particular skills is precisely what helps me to develop broader competencies.
Do these analogies seem a little strained?
As someone with a strong amateur interest in both sports (badminton, athletics) and music (jazz piano), they interest me partly because the business of critically-engaged practice feels so central to the acquisition and improvement of meaningful skills in any area. Indeed, I’d argue that it’s developing the habit of mindful, reflective iteration and improvement that lies at the heart of learning and excellence—and that critical thinking resources can (and should) be integrated into courses from the foundational level upwards to support this.
Another way of putting this is… if you wish to take charge of your own learning and improvement, you need to engage as honestly and constructively as possible with your strengths and weaknesses; with the advice and perspectives of others; with those things you might gain most from exploring, revisiting, and considering. You need to take deep, even a passionate, interest in the limitations of your current abilities and understanding—and then to embrace the incremental business of remedying this.
What it means to do this in an intellectual discipline is, of course, different to what it means to do so in an artistic or athletic one.
Critical thinking courses—including mine—tend to emphasize the importance of seeking good reasons and strong evidence for beliefs; of scrutinizing arguments and explanations for formal and informal flaws; and of recognizing different forms of bias, prejudice and rhetorical manipulation.
They do this because these are the techniques through which bodies of disciplinary knowledge are collectively built and tested—and it’s only by seeing and engaging with these techniques, within a particular context, that you can start to make them your own.
Yet all of this is also, in a sense, secondary to the embrace of critical engagement as a guiding principle—and of developing a “comfort with discomfort” in terms of asking questions, seeking improvement, and refusing to treat the current state of your or others’ knowledge as a final destination.
In other words:
To embed critical thinking in a foundational context is to emphasize that, first of all, critical thinking is not so much a body of knowledge as a way of thinking: one committed to mindful iteration, improvement and the testing of knowledge.
The greatest gains of a critically engaged mindset come from its deployment and development within a disciplinary context; and from reflection upon the larger lessons it can teach through the lens of concrete concerns, challenges and debates
Ultimately, many of the deepest and most valuable transferrable skills we can acquire relate to the habits and capacities underpinning honest, disciplined learning: of constructive engagement with our own and others’ strengths and limitations; of a mindset that privileges questioning, growth and improvement over final answers.
If you’re teaching a course that requires critical thinking, the SAGE Campus Critical Thinking online course could supplement your teaching and equip students with the skills to succeed.
Sign up to our demo hub to try a full sample module of Critical Thinking today or find out how libraries can get institution-wide access to SAGE Campus.