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 conversations with faculty across disciplines have revealed a widespread and fully authentic desire to ensure that students develop the willingness and ability to engage in critical reasoning. Go a few more levels up the campus organizational chart, and you’ll find administrators eagerly adding critical thinking to mission statements, long-range plans, and visioning documents. Finally, outside academia, critical thinking routinely tops surveys of the skills industry leaders are looking for in their new hires (Pearson, 2018) and according to some education experts, will only become more important as AI makes routine job skills obsolete (Dumitru & Halpern, 2023).
