Ask any group of faculty whether they include critical thinking on their course learning objectives, and nearly every person will say that they do. This is not just because faculty were handed down a mandate or made to hew to some university policy. My many
After all, nearly every large language model (LLM) is good at summarizing readings, synthesizing large amounts of data and information across sources and culling it down to key points, and “remembering” foundational knowledge. So why memorize facts? Why practice applying concepts? Why learn to write?
I had been teaching for nearly 30 years when I discovered that I had failed to instruct my students in the basics of critical thinking.
My moment of awakening occurred in a conversation with one of the best students in that year’s graduating class.
When news broke of the Margory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on Valentine’s Day 2008, students and faculty at the small liberal arts college where I taught at the time were catapulted out of the pastoral slumber and relative safety of our tiny rural
We know what skills we want college students to learn. We list them in institutional mission statements, descriptions of our programs and majors, and our syllabi. We know what skills employers want graduates to obtain in college. They tell us, especially when students don’t have
In the very first article I ever wrote for The Teaching Professor, I quoted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities: “A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory
Designed as guide for faculty reading groups, this resource includes quotations from and questions about an article on a seldom-studied topic: the connection between course goals and assignments.
Critical thinking has become a catch-all phrase in any education literature that touts the development of 21st century learning. It seems that no matter which instructional model is being used or how the craft of teaching is being applied, as long as the approach claims
What does Tampa, that palm-fronded gem on Florida’s Gulf Coast, have to do with critical thinking? Nothing.
But in all caps, TAMPA is the acronym for a method of teaching critical thinking that I devised and have used for several years now with some success.
When I was an undergraduate, I distinctly remember my political science professor informing the class, “If you take one thing away from your education, learn how to think critically by the time you leave here.” At that point in my life, his sage wisdom went
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