Critical Thinking in our Regular Classes

A question often asked is whether critical thinking should be taught as a stand-alone course or as part of regular courses. Both are possible. Continuing from the previous post,  Critical Thinking and Campbell's Soup  no matter what form the course takes, the content is important to set the context. Content can be the syllabus material for a subject or it could even be a theme with multi-disciplinary topics. Content is what the students will latch on to in order to learn and exercise the skills. The skills in turn enable a deeper learning of the content material.

 A stand-alone course will require the teacher to find interesting content material to hone in the skills. There are a lot of textbooks available, but the content there is very American or British --- not very relatable to Indian students. The biggest problem with most of these books however is that the content is composed of disparate resources, paragraphs, excerpts from articles and exercises, with nothing to bind them.  Education research has by now established the need of contextual content to hone in deeper learning. The more familiar student are with the content and its context, the better will they be able to critically engage with it.

In my stand alone courses, I find it helpful to set a theme to provide context and to hold the content together. The theme may either be a topic, such as inequality, gender, food, sports, movies, or whatever else students would find interesting. No matter what the theme, I pick debates on the things that students usually take for granted (e.g. Is the family meal an overrated idea, Do millennials have a different idea of patriotism/ Independence and Republic Days from their parents and grandparents, and so on.)  Stories, songs, movies, poems, videos are used to explore multiple perspectives on these ideas.  Students are given the opportunity to critically analyze and evaluate arguments on myriad unquestioned opinions, as well as hone in their own reasoning skills with the understanding that at the end of the session, they would have examined that topic at a deeper level and with new eyes.

A theme could also be something as mundane but unexplored as their own thinking. One of my most popular courses has been one that I call Critique Your Thinking, where students explore their own unquestioned ideas on various topics. The theme in this course is Changing Lenses. Though the topics used in this course are diverse and change each day, students know that they will be required to explore that topic from different perspectives and question their own thinking on it. They also know that at the end of the session, they will be required to see how their ideas have changed when they have looked at the same issue with multiple lenses.

When done as a part of a regular course, the content is already available. Teachers just need to find ways to impart skills of analysis and evaluation into their lessons.  I have seen from experience that when these skills are woven into lessons, the class too becomes interesting, learning becomes active, students are better engaged and thus easier to manage.

Overarching the entire critical thinking endeavour are three basic skills of analysis, evaluation and creation of new ideas. These work together to sharpen three abilities that mark a critical thinker --- ability to ask the right questions, ability to identify and appreciate perspectives other than one’s own and lastly, the ability to objectively critique one’s own thinking.

In a previous post, Interpreting Critical Thinking Pedagogically, I talked of sound reasoning skills as a bedrock of critical thinking. Reasoning an important skill that is needed in all subjects --- to make sense of the content material, to analyze and evaluate complex information, and to justify and communicate knowledge in an exam, in a presentation or in a job interview.  Every time a student is able to articulate a viewpoint, either their own or some else’s in a coherent manner and justify its internal logic, reasoning skills are used. For example, when students are articulating why Karl Marx makes sense in a particular situation, using a series of relevant reasons, they are making a reasoned argument. Every time a student is thinking in terms of reasons leading to a conclusion or justifying a conclusion, he/she is making an argument. No matter what subject we are teaching, this is a skill set that is needed to understand complex content. Evaluating the Marxist argument they have made on a particular situation with a Feminist one and deciding which one fits better in this context, they are engaging in critical thinking.

Most of the time, however, we teachers do not see reasoning as a part of our content teaching. We use a lot of questions in our tests and assignments that say ‘Give reasons for .....’. This is not always the same as using reasoning skills. For example, a very common sociology question in India is ‘What are the reasons for the breakdown of the joint family’. Teachers list out the reasons in their classes and students regurgitate them in the exam. No critical thinking is happening here. However, suppose the question gets changed to ‘Evaluate the statement that the breakdown of joint families has been advantageous  for women. Give reasons why you say so’. This question has a lot of scope for reasoning skills to be exercised. Students think through the changes in family systems and then come up with their arguments for both sides of the debate. They then evaluate both sides in the context of the question and come up with their balanced opinion. Most of the analysis and evaluation is done by the students, with the teacher facilitating their thinking.  This is a critical thinking exercise which can be conducted as a class discussion or as a graded assignment.

Such thinking sessions are however much more time consuming and needs a lot more planning than a regular lecture. Teachers therefore often do not even venture into such sessions, even if they want to, in the interest of time.  My contention is that not all classes need to have this kind of methodology. Besides, for conceptual clarity, nothing beats a clearly articulated lecture. In fact, a lecture too is making an argument that is being communicated to students. The point I am making here is that once there is conceptual clarity, thinking questions can be used to help students hone in reasoning skills as a part of regular classes. This also helps contextualize class material with the outside world. For example, when I do these reasoning oriented joint family sessions, students usually go home, talk to their parents and grandparents about their experiences and end up having a much more in-depth understanding of the concepts. They have also learned to critically engage with the topic.

I would like to end this post by reiterating that clear reasoning is the first step in honing in critical thinking skills of analysis, evaluation and generation of new ideas. These skills can be easily taught as a part of our regular classes using the content matter we are teaching. This is because no matter what the methodology we use, teaching critical thinking requires a context to enable the skill to be understood and practiced. The context is already provided to us in our syllabus. We just need to use the right teaching strategies to hone in skills using that content.