Critical Thinking: The Art of Taking Charge of Your Mind Learning to think critically and reason well as a result is the intellectual analog of learning to play basketball, tennis, or chess well. It is analogous to learning how to dance ballet or do architecture well. As in the other domains, there are general principles and strategies intrinsic to the doing of it. There are skilled “moves”–critical thinking moves– to be learned. One must find the time to practice the moves, to talk about the principles that underlie them, to critique and assess one’’s own, and others’’, use of them. One must commit oneself to standards–intellectual standards. One must not only practice but strive continually for excellence in practice. One must be willing to make mistakes and to learn from one’’s mistakes, to grow progressively in ability over an extended period of time. Insightfully conceived instruction is designed to create all of the above conditions: to facilitate students learning the general principles and strategies intrinsic to the disciplined mastery of a body of content; to facilitate students actively making critical thinking moves in reading, writing, speaking, and listening; to facilitate students talking about intellectual standards; assessing their own and other students’’ reasoning; to facilitate student intellectual development over an extended period of time. What Does a Mind Need to Know About Itself to Reason Well? It is important, then, to understand our minds as a potential repository of intellectual skills and abilities, of capacities that can be disciplined by critical thinking principles, strategies, and moves; and to begin to see why the mastery of reasoning is intrinsic to the task of taking charge of our mind and thus taking personal responsibility for the quality of our own thinking. To do this we must develop an interest in all of the components of reasoned thought:
- basic elements (the source of critical thinking moves),
- the elements combined into abilities ( which are the basic moves),
- the abilities in modes of reasoning (a patterned sequence of moves as in reading critically or writing critically or questioning Socratically, etc…)
- the abilities as regulated by traits of mind (the attributes that motivate making the moves) , and
- intellectual standards (the standards used to assess the moves).
Each of these dimensions of reasoning will be explained at length in a later chapter. Each will be discussed in the light of the role they play in the intelligent redesign of instruction. Here we simply whet your appetite and provide some initial basis for seeing why it is that teachers tend to find it difficult both to develop assignments that require student reasoning and to assess the students’’ “reasoning” once completed. The stage will then be set for understanding how to go about redesigning instruction. The Basic Building Blocks of Reasoning: Mastering the Art of Breaking Reasoning Down into Its Component Parts As students of the art of reasoning, we must learn to take our thinking apart at the seams, to see the nuts and bolts parts of it; the very stuff — the elementary stuff — out of which critical thinking moves are inevitably structured.
This includes nine elements:
- a) the purpose that guides it
- b) the problems on which it is focused
- c) the information it gathers and uses
- d) the ideas and concepts by which it shapes the information it uses d) the conclusions and interpretations to which it comes
- e) the reasons it gives in justification
- f) whatever it takes for granted
- g) whatever it implies (or leads to in the way of consequences)
- h) the point of view in which it is embedded as a whole
If we want to develop as critical thinkers, we need to develop an interest in making moves that probe these basic structures implicit in all our reasoning. Let me illustrate. As good reasoners we should be ever-ready and disposed to probe our thinking with questions like the following, each of which constitutes a critical thinking move:
- a) What am I trying to accomplish?
- b) What problem or problems do I have to solve?
- c) What information do I need and where can I get it?
- d) What basic concepts do I need to clarify and carefully use? d) What conclusion or conclusions shall I come to?
- e) What do I base those conclusions on?
- f) What am I taking for granted? Should I?
- g) What is implied in my reasoning? To what consequences do they lead?
- h) From what point of view am I reasoning? Do I need to consider another?
These are some of the most basic and fundamental considerations continually used by good reasoners to keep their reasoning functioning well. Each of the elements of thought define a domain of “moves” that good critical thinkers effectively make. There are a variety of moves one can make concerning one’s purpose; a variety concerning the question at issue; a variety concerning information, etc . . .
