TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING ???

December 14, 2016

Today, there is a rapidly growing movement to emphasize the teaching of “critical thinking skills” in our public schools.

Just what is it? — and can it be successfully taught?  The opinions expressed by Carl Hendrik in an article published in AEON, “Why Schools Should Not Teach Critical Thinking Skills,” make a strong and reasonable case against such teaching when detached from context:

“.  .  .  Since the early 1980’s, however, schools have become ever more captivated by the idea that students must learn a set of generalized thinking skills to flourish in the contemporary world – and especially in the contemporary job market. Variously called ‘21st-century learning skills’ or ‘critical thinking’, the aim is to equip students with a set of general problem-solving approaches that can be applied to any given domain; these are lauded by business leaders as an essential set of dispositions for the 21st century. Naturally, we want children and graduates to have a set of all-purpose cognitive tools with which to navigate their way through the world. It’s a shame, then, that we’ve failed to apply any critical thinking to the question of whether any such thing can be taught.

As the 1960’s studies on air-traffic controllers suggested, to be good in a specific domain you need to know a lot about it: it’s not easy to translate those skills to other areas. This is even more so with the kinds of complex and specialized knowledge that accompanies much professional expertise: as later studies found, the more complex the domain, the more important domain-specific knowledge. This non-translatability of cognitive skill is well-established in psychological research and has been replicated many times. Other studies, for example, have shown that the ability to remember long strings of digits doesn’t transfer to the ability to remember long strings of letters. Surely we’re not surprised to hear this, for we all know people who are ‘clever’ in their professional lives yet who often seem to make stupid decisions in their personal lives.

In almost every arena, the higher the skill level, the more specific the expertise is likely to become. In a football team, for example, there are different ‘domains’ or positions: goalkeeper, defender, attacker. Within those, there are further categories: centre-back, full-back, attacking midfielder, holding midfielder, attacking player. Now, it might be fine for a bunch of amateurs, playing a friendly game, to move positions. But, at a professional level, if you put a left-back in a striker’s position or a central midfielder in goal, the players would be lost. For them to make excellent, split-second decisions, and to enact robust and effective strategies, they need thousands of specific mental models – and thousands of hours of practice to create those models – all of which are specific and exclusive to a position.

Of course, critical thinking is an essential part of a student’s mental equipment. However, it cannot be detached from context. Teaching students generic ‘thinking skills’ separate from the rest of their curriculum is meaningless and ineffective. As the American educationalist Daniel Willingham puts it:

‘[I]f you remind a student to ‘look at an issue from multiple perspectives’ often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives … critical thinking (as well as scientific thinking and other domain-based thinking) is not a skill. There is not a set of critical thinking skills that can be acquired and deployed regardless of context.’  .  .  .”

Hendrik makes good sense, doesn’t he?!?  Like many other ideas we encounter in life.  Sounds good initially, but not so wise when we dig beneath the surface.

More on Monday  –  –  –

      — Bill Walton, co-Founder, ITC Learning

      www.itclearning.com/blog/  (Mondays & Wednesdays)

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