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May 2011 Newsletter

Foundation for Critical Thinking

NEWSLETTER
Foundation for Critical Thinking
www.criticalthinking.org

May 2011

Critical Thinking in the News... Rush Cosgrove, Fellow of the Foundation for Critical Thinking has had the following article accepted for publication in the Journal of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia, a peer reviewed journal. Critical thinking in the Oxford tutorial: a call for an explicit and systematic approach. This paper summarizes a study focusing on the extent to which the Oxford tutorial fosters critical thinking in students. In doing so, it aims to contribute to a largely ignored area of research regarding teaching pedagogy and classroom practice. The results of this study successfully reveal that participating tutors were primarily concerned with fostering students' abilities to clarify central questions, define key terms and question important assumptions (principally within the writing of essays). Participating tutors were less focused on fostering other essential critical thinking skills and dispositions including: (1) intellectual analysis and the internalization of new ideas, (2) intellectual evaluation and (3) intellectual traits of mind. The primary hypothesis suggested by this study is that students are more likely to internalize those intellectual skills and dispositions that are explicitly and systematically discussed and required than those that remain implicit (and seem optional). Click here for access to the article: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=... Rush Cosgrove holds a Masters Degree from the University of Oxford, New College. He is currently engaged in research for a PhD at the University of Cambridge. ______________________________________________ Honoring Critical Thinking Faculty To further support critical thinking across their campus, Eastern Kentucky University has presented ten EKU faculty members with the university’s first Critical Thinking Teacher of the Year awards. The awards program, developed by the Office of Quality Enhancement Programs, recognizes outstanding faculty who have fostered students’ critical and creative thinking skills. “The award recognizes the hard work of faculty members who have adopted EKU’s QEP mission of developing ‘informed, critical/creative thinkers who communicate effectively,” said Kate Williams, director of Quality Enhancement Programs. “These faculty members have made it apparent to their students that they are indeed helping them develop their critical thinking skills to further aid them in the future.” Read more about EKU’s accomplishments at this link: http://www.eku.edu/news/ten-faculty-members-... Note: Eastern Kentucky University is one of the Institutions Using Our Approach to Critical Thinking, listed on our website at this link: http://www.criticalthinking.org/professionalDev/...	Register now for the fall online course in critical thinking, for those who teach. Click here to read more. *We hope to see you at the* *World’s Oldest Conference on Critical Thinking!* 31^st International Conference on Critical Thinking July 25-28, 2011 Preconference July 23-24 Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, CA* Register by July 4th for the Early Registration Rates. We offer group rate discounts for 2 or more. Click here for registration and rate information. Book your room at the Claremont by July 4th to receive our special rate of $159/ night, $5 parking, restaurant discounts and complimentary use of the spa facilities. Sessions incude:* Developing a Substantive Approach to Socratic Questioning Through Critical Thinking How to Work Together with Colleagues to deepen Your Understanding of Critical Thinking Through Extended Book Studies Teaching Students to Think Within a Field or Discipline What are Intellectual Traits and How Does One Teach for Them? Fostering Critical Thinking in the Secondary Classroom Advanced Session: ‘On the potential of the critical vocabulary of the English language as an academic lingua franca’ (for returning registrants) The Role of Administration in Creating Critical Thinking Communities Using Peer Review on a Typical Day to Foster Substantive Critical Thinking Teaching Students to Distinguish Strong and Weak Sense Critical Thinking Fostering Critical Thinking in the Social Disciplines Using the Tools of Critical Thinking to Teach Students How to Study and Learn Teaching Students Fundamental and Powerful Concepts The Art of Close Reading and Substantive Writing For a conference brochure click here. For complete information on sessions, presenters, early registration rates and the workshop hotel, please click here.
Fostering Critical Thinking in the Classroom… If we want students to learn important ideas from textbooks, we can offer these suggestions for them: All textbooks are organized by systems of ideas within them. Diagram the systems to help you begin to learn them. Notice yourself naming, identifying, connecting, distinguishing, and explaining things using ideas. Where we have knowledge, we have an organized technical vocabulary. Create a glossary of the most important ideas you learn in each subject you study. Your knowledge can be no stronger than the knowledge you have of ideas in a subject. Test yourself by trying to explain key ideas in non-technical language. All ideas must be understood in relation to contrasting ideas. Try naming and explaining the ideas opposite to key ideas you learn. All idea clusters must be understood as part of further such clusters. Take any important idea you learn and name the ideas that cluster around it.
*Quotable Critical Thinking Quotes...* I believe in liberty. And when I say liberty, I mean the thing in its widest imaginable sense — liberty up to the extreme limits of the feasible and tolerable. I am against forbidding anybody to do anything, or say anything, or think anything so long as it is at all possible to imagine a habitable world in which he would be free to do, say, and think it. The burden of proof, as I see it, is always upon the policeman, which is to say, upon the lawmaker, the theologian, the right-thinker. He must prove his case doubly, triply, quadruply, and then he must start all over and prove it again. The eye through which I view him is watery and jaundiced. He is the enemy of everything I admire and respect in this world — of everything that makes it various and amusing and charming. He impedes every honest search for the truth. He stands against every sort of good-will and common decency. I am against him until the last galoot’s ashore. H.L Menken, 1923