45th Conference Focal & Plenary Session Descriptions

Room: DA 108

Join the Senior Fellows and Scholars of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, as well as your fellow delegates from around the world, as we introduce this year’s conference, make general announcements, and set the tone for a historic and unforgettable event.

Room: DA 101

Critical thinking does not entail merely intellectual skills. Rather, it is a way of orienting oneself in the world. It is a different way of approaching learning and problems from that which is typical in human life. People may have some critical thinking skills and abilities, yet be unable to enter viewpoints with which they disagree; incapable of analyzing the beliefs guiding their behavior; inept at distinguishing what they know from what they don't; and unwilling to persevere through difficult problems and issues, to duly consider the rights and needs of others, or to responsibly dissent. Thus, it is necessary to develop intellectual virtues such as intellectual humility, intellectual perseverance, intellectual courage, intellectual empathy, intellectual autonomy, intellectual integrity, confidence in reason, and fairmindedness.

Intellectual traits go beyond knowing a given set of skills; they define a person's intellectual character. That character impacts not only the thinker and his or her social circle, but also the society in which the thinker lives. The successes and failures of any society depends largely upon the degree to which it embodies intellectual virtues, or in other words, rational and ethical intellectual character.

This session will describe the desirable intellectual traits shared by ethical critical thinkers – necessary for high-level functioning throughout learning, teaching, and work and life in general – and how to develop them over time.

Room: DA 103

Intellectual virtues are important for learning the content of any field, or in other words, of thinking through any discipline or area of study. Students cannot learn to think well within subjects without, for example, coming to terms with what they don’t know or having the intellectual courage to imagine a world far more complex than that which they take for granted. In all subjects, students need to engage through intellectual empathy with other thinkers and envision new ideas. They also need to develop the intellectual autonomy and intellectual perseverance necessary to repeatedly work through deep and challenging issues without easily giving up or simply gravitating to groupthink. They need to develop fairmindedness in order to appreciate new theories and alternative viewpoints. They need to cultivate confidence in reasoning, so that they understand they can successfully work toward understanding themselves and the world more deeply.

This session will help you develop strategies for fostering a class culture of intellectual-character development through reasonable activities and communication strategies.

Room: DA 104

Leadership in business, government, and other organizations does not only reside with managers, supervisors, owners, executives, etc. It is present wherever any employee takes the lead on a project or an aspect thereof, wherever any colleague plays a role in redirecting team efforts (whether in a meeting or elsewhere), and so on. Thinking in leadership contexts is vital, as bad leadership misallocates the efforts not only of the thinker, but of everyone depending on his or her thinking.

It is clear, then, that human leadership needs critical thinking. However, it is possible to develop seemingly self-serving thinking skills while neglecting abilities that appear to mainly benefit others. This leads to the cultivation of weak-sense critical thinking. In professional life, leaders engaged in weak-sense critical thinking create obvious problems for organizations: manipulative, sophistic thinking tends to compromise colleagues and handicap the functionality of the whole. Lesser recognized is how such behavior also undermines the leaders doing it, such as when others grow wise to their tactics and begin undermining them without their knowledge, or when resulting damage to the organization decreases the wellbeing – financial and otherwise – of everyone. In contrast, the well-rounded development of intellectual character, which entails a sense of justice and ethics, leads to strong-sense critical thinking.

If you are to cultivate strong-sense critical thinking within your organization or department, you first need a reasonable conception of it, and then a plan for bringing it to your circle of influence. This session, therefore, will enhance your understanding of the intellectual virtues and why they are essential to high-functioning organizations. It will also help you develop a plan for implementing strong-sense critical thinking within your work community.

Room: DA 107

Richard Paul frequently observed the shortcomings of how reasoning is typically approached in academia – how disconnected it often is from real-world questions, problems, and challenges, and thus how little it lends itself to addressing these phenomena when students enter the worlds of work, community, politics, etc.

In his 1985 paper written for the Second International Symposium on Informal Logic, Paul wrote,

. . . we cannot face situations in everyday life in the terms in which we are academically trained. The real world of human action is not compartmentalized into academic categories. The social, the psychological, the philosophical, and the economic are, in the real world, often so entwined that it makes no sense to try to explain any one dimension without explaining the roles of the others. Consequently, we cannot turn to isolated disciplines for an answer to the problem of uncritical thought in everyday life. The only "neutral" background logic we have at our critical disposal is that of natural languages themselves. Academic or technical languages, in contrast, presuppose the compartmentalizations they themselves have created.

Paul argued for the development of generalized, comprehensive critical thinking skills that transcend disciplines to synthesize knowledge across domains as required by the questions, problems, and purposes with which humans contend every day throughout the world – with, in modern times, increasingly serious stakes and ever greater urgency.

In this session, we will actively work with Richard Paul’s paper, “Background Logic, Critical Thinking and Irrational Language Games,’ gleaning its insights and exploring them through various activities and discussions.

Room: DA 101

Some educators conceptualize critical thinking as a skillset that students learn through a few weeks of lessons, or perhaps through a semester-length course, and then move on from. In fact, critical thinking is a set of understandings and skills that should be continually practiced throughout all lessons and courses.

The importance of teaching all subject matter through a critical thinking lens, at all levels of education, cannot be overstated. Students who cannot critically analyze and evaluate course content are incapable of learning it in a meaningful way – i.e., of internalizing and reliably applying it in the real world.

In this session, we will help you develop strategies for teaching students to interact with your content as they must in order to truly learn it: by critically analyzing, assessing, and applying it.

Room: DA 103

There are a number of conceptual and pragmatic connections we must make to successfully guide our students’ learning. Most school practices still cluster around or emerge from either a didactic conception of learning, or group-centered activities void of proper standards, both of which make the dominance of lower-order learning inevitable.

To get beyond this, students must understand your subject matter as a mode of thinking to be reasoned about and within using critical thinking concepts and principles. For instance, substantial improvements result from restructuring math classes so students learn to think mathematically, history classes so students learn to think historically, and so on. We must approach our disciplines not as bodies of content to be consumed, but constellations of concepts to be reasoned through and internalized. We must therefore understand our students as unique thinkers who must critically analyze, assess, synthesize, and otherwise process ideas and information so as to turn these raw materials into potent lifelong tools.

This session will help you employ practical approaches for kindling students’ reasoning faculties, focusing the educational process upon their engagement rather your “delivery” of content.

Room: DA 104

There are multiple dimensions of effective problem-solving and decision-making. For instance, by using one powerful set of critical thinking tools – the elements of reasoning – as our guide, we can identify at least nine dimensions that represent potential problems and opportunities for thought. These dimensions do not define a procedure that can be followed mindlessly or mechanically; rather, they presuppose good judgment and sound thinking within each and across all.

To be an effective and rational decision-maker:

1. Figure out and regularly articulate your most fundamental goals, purposes, and necessities. Your decisions should help you remove obstacles and create opportunities to achieve purposes and satisfy needs.

2. Whenever possible, take problems and decisions one by one. State the situation and formulate the alternatives as clearly and precisely as you can.

3. Study the circumstances surrounding your various possible choices to make clear the kind of decision at hand. Figure out what implications follow from the possible alternatives. Differentiate decisions over which you have some control from those that seem forced on you. Concentrate your efforts on the most important ones and those which you can most influence.

4. Determine what information you need and actively seek it.

5. Carefully analyze and interpret the information you collect, drawing what reasonable inferences you can.

6. Figure out your options for action. What can you do in the short and long term? Recognize explicitly your limitations in money, time, power, etc.

7. Evaluate your options, accounting for their advantages and drawbacks.

8. Adopt a strategic approach to the decision and follow through on it. This may involve direct action or a wait-and-see approach that is carefully thought through.

9. When you act, monitor the emerging implications of your actions. Be ready to change strategies at a moment's notice if needed. Be prepared to shift your approach, your analysis, your conception of the decision type, or all three as data becomes available.

In this session, we will explore these abilities and how to competently employ them for effective problem-solving and decision-making in business, government, and all areas of administration.

Room: DA 107

Socrates’ rigorous approach to inquiry laid some of the most important foundations for critical thinking ever formed, and its relationship with critical thinking can be explored from many angles. Below are merely some interconnections to consider:

1. The art of proficient questioning itself is indispensable to excellence of thought.

2. Socratic questioning can be used to pursue thinking in numerous directions for myriad purposes, including to explore complex ideas, determine what is true, reveal issues and problems, uncover assumptions, analyze concepts, differentiate knowledge from conjecture, and follow out logical implications of thought.

3. Socratic questioning is systematic, disciplined, deep, and usually focused on foundational concepts, principles, theories, issues, or problems.

Both critical thinking and Socratic questioning share a common end. Critical thinking provides the conceptual tools for understanding how the mind functions in pursuit of meaning and truth; Socratic questioning employs those tools to frame questions essential to said pursuit. When we use Socratic questioning, we have systemic ways of opening up and exploring any line of reasoning for any purpose whatsoever.

This session will focus on how Socrates’ legacy demonstrates the use of questioning as a means of cultivating the disciplined mind.

Room: DA 101

The quality of our students’ learning is determined by the quality of their thinking. The quality of their thinking, in turn, is largely determined by the quality of their questions, for questions are the engine, the driving force behind thinking. Without questions, students have nothing to think about. Without essential questions, they often fail to focus on the significant and substantive.

When students ask essential questions while reading, writing, speaking, and listening, they engage with what is relevant and necessary to course content. They recognize what is at the heart of the matter; their thinking is grounded and disciplined; they are ready to learn and able to intellectually find their way about. Sadly, few students are adept at the art of asking essential questions. Most have never thought about why some questions are crucial and others peripheral. Their questions, when asked at all, are haphazard and scattered.

This session will provide practical ways of teaching students to ask essential questions and thereby equip them to start the process of internalizing vital course knowledge.

Room: DA 103

To study well and learn any subject is to learn how to think with discipline within that subject, to think within its logic, to:

1. raise vital questions and problems within it, formulating them clearly and precisely;

2. gather and assess information, using ideas to interpret that information insightfully;

3. come to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria and standards;

4. adopt the point of view of the discipline, recognizing and assessing, as need be, its assumptions, implications, and practical consequences;

5. communicate effectively with others using the language of the discipline and that of educated public discourse; and

6. relate what one is learning within a subject to other subjects, and to what is significant in human life. 

To become a skilled learner is to become a self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinker who has given assent to rigorous standards of thought and mindful command of their use. Skilled study of a discipline requires that one respect the power of it, as well as its and one’s own limitations.

This session offers strategies to help students go beyond rote memorization so they begin to actively engage with class content.  

Room: DA 104

It is not possible to be a good thinker and a poor questioner. Questions define tasks and projects, express problems, and delineate issues. They drive thinking forward. Answers, on the other hand, often bring an end to thought – and if those answers are to irrelevant questions, trivial questions, unclear questions, vague questions, etc., they often function as liabilities rather than solutions. Superficial questions equal superficial understandings, unclear questions equal unclear understandings, and so on. Even more dangerous at times is a mind generating no questions at all, but merely following procedures that may be wholly unfit for the present context.

In this session, we focus on practical strategies for reliably generating effective questions in our work, and for using the art of inquiry to reach higher levels of effectiveness within one’s profession.

Room: DA 107

Profound ideas can be used to explain or think about a large array of questions, problems, information, ideas, and/or situations. Assimilating them helps us to think and learn in ways that facilitate deeper understandings.

Like all ideas, profound ideas and their functions within the human mind are more complex than we tend to recognize. On the one hand, they enable us to differentiate the various aspects of our experience from each other; on the other, they are not truly discrete. Rather, profound ideas overlap and interrelate in highly significant ways, together forming the assemblage of meanings that we construct about our world and thereby telling us (accurately or inaccurately, reasonably or unreasonably) the way things are, could be, and ought to be.

For instance, a fundamental concept in ecology is that of an "ecosystem," defined as a group of living things dependent on one another in a particular habitat. Another is "ecological succession" – a pattern of change which occurs within every ecosystem, including the birth, development, death, and replacement of ecological communities. Those communities can be grouped into larger units called "biomes," regions throughout the world classified according to physical features such as temperature, rainfall, and types of vegetation. These are profound ideas that should be seen not as a bulleted list, but as forming a dynamic whole, each helping us to better understand the others.

In this session, we will consider the interconnectedness of powerful ideas and how to take greater command of them for use in learning and everyday life.

Room: DA 101

Concepts are ideas used in thinking. They enable us, and our students, to group aspects of experience into different categories, classes, or divisions. They shape the basis for how things are labeled within the mind. They represent the mental map of reality which is charted and revised throughout the lifetime of the thinker; through their concepts, our students define situations, events, relationships, and all other objects of their experience. Each of their decisions depends on how they conceptualize things, and all subjects or disciplines are defined by their most integral concepts.

Integral and empowering concepts exist within every field and discipline. When well-grasped, they enable students far greater command over our course content as a whole. Students then begin to see our field or discipline not as a list of notions and data points to be memorized and repeated, but as a mode of thinking – a powerful lens through which to examine reality and our experiences within it, revealing insights which move us toward more effective and meaningful ways of thinking, learning, and living.

In this session, you will work toward identifying integral and empowering concepts in your field or discipline, toward explaining their role in thinking therein, and toward forming ways to help students take command of them.

Room: DA 103

Egocentric tendencies are natural within humans. While they can cause us to overestimate our abilities, they can also have the opposite effect, thereby undermining our likelihood to achieve that of which we are capable. For instance, people can and do tell themselves without good evidence that they are unable to perform beyond a certain level; they can and do allow assessments improperly made by others, or that they themselves create by drawing irrational lessons from past experiences, to impede them from reaching their potential.

It is essential that we command the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our pasts, and about our abilities to achieve within our abilities. In part, realizing one’s capacities requires 1) to see ourselves as capable of realizing our goals within reason, and 2) to repel negative, destructive tendencies and influences.

This session will discuss how egocentrism can act as a barrier to self-actualization, and will provide ways of identifying and countering manifestations of this problem.

Room: DA 104

Reading is, among other things, the translation of words into meaning. In a piece of writing, the author has previously translated ideas and experiences into words, which we must take and re-translate into the author’s original intent using our own ideas and experiences as aids. Accurately translating words into intended meanings is an analytic, evaluative, and creative set of acts, and each of these requires critical thinking in order to be done competently. Unfortunately, because few students (and, therefore, few educators) acquire the explicit tools and concepts of critical thinking, similarly few are skilled at such translation. Few can accurately mirror the meaning that an author intended, instead projecting their own meanings onto a text; in other words, through a lack of critical thinking, most readers unintentionally distort or violate the original meanings of the authors they read.

Reading is a form intellectual work, and intellectual work requires both understanding what such work entails, and a willingness to persevere through its difficulties. In this session, you will be introduced to five levels of close reading and will work through one or two of them closely as “students.” Accordingly, you will experience the process of critically reading significant texts so as to better bring it into your classrooms, and into your students’ thinking, on a typical day.

Room: DA 107

Intellectual humility is awareness of the limits of one’s knowledge, including sensitivity to the kinds of circumstances in which one’s native egocentrism and sociocentrism are likely to function self-deceptively. It entails mindfulness of the biases and prejudices within, and the limitations of, one’s viewpoint. It implies a lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit, combined with significant insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the logical foundations of one’s beliefs.

Oftentimes, the more we know about a given field or discipline, the more difficult it becomes to exercise intellectual humility within it. Critical thinking is no exception; recognizing the boundaries of our comprehension of critical thinking, and the intellectual vices to which we are most prone, allows us to more efficiently advance as reasoners. It facilitates the articulation of useful questions, the examination of dubious assumptions, the clarification of ambiguous concepts, and so on.

This session will explore ways of reflecting on your critical thinking knowledge and highlighting its limitations, so as to illuminate where your future efforts toward advancement might best be directed.

Room: DA 101

In this session, we will focus on strategies for engaging students’ intellects as a means of empowering them to internalize course content. These strategies are powerful and useful, because each is a way to routinely engage students in thinking about what they are trying to learn as they learn it. Many of the strategies offer students effectual methods for appropriately analyzing, assessing, and applying the ideas that they encounter in the schooling process. Each strategy represents a shift of responsibility for learning from teacher to student; each suggests at least one way of helping your students learn to do the often hard work of learning.

Room: DA 107

Three disturbing facts impede modern education:

• Most educators at all levels lack a substantive concept of critical thinking.
• Most educators don’t realize this, but instead assume that they sufficiently understand critical thinking and are teaching it to students.
• Lecture, rote memorization, trivial exercises, and largely ineffective short-term study habits are still the norm in instruction.

Taken together, these realities are torpedoing essential, long-term institutional change. When faculty have a vague or mistaken notion of critical thinking, or they reduce it to a single-discipline model, students fail to learn the concepts and principles necessary for making essential connections within and across subjects – connections that give crucial order and substance to teaching and learning.

In some regards, these problems are worsening, in part because the term “critical thinking” is now more popular than ever. This has partially led to a backslide to the morass of the 1970s, when the phrase was seemingly up for grabs, appearing to mean whatever a given scholar, department, school of thought, or business wanted it to mean. This has caused extensive confusion about what critical thinking is; while most call it important, precious few can adequately define it or explain how it can be done or taught.

This has had predictable consequences for human societies at large: the average person has little to no idea how to analyze, assess, and systematically improve thinking. Because most people lack these skills, they simply do not value reasoning, despite its dominant role in the quality of their lives and of human societies. Accordingly, most personnel in business, government, and military bodies lack a robust concept of critical thinking as well. This has led, in a time when humanity faces its greatest-ever existential challenges, to thinking ranging mostly from insufficient to calamitous – including among persons in the most important decision-making positions on earth.

This problem can be solved. In fact, it already would be, had a robust, practical, universally-applicable conception of critical thinking – framed in natural language – been adopted throughout educational curricula when the field of critical thinking studies began to take shape decades ago, only to again be buried under a mishmash of alternative approaches that are variously partial, cryptic, or counterfeit.

This session will discuss the state of critical thinking today, its implications for human societies, and how we can begin progressing in a better direction. 

Room: DA 104

Critical thinking, deeply understood, provides a rich set of concepts that enable us to think our way through any subject or discipline, as well as through any problem or issue. With a substantive conception of critical thinking clearly in mind, we start to recognize the pressing need for staff development that fosters critical thinking within and across the curriculum. As we come to understand such a conception, we can follow out its implications in designing a professional development program. By means of it, we begin seeing important implications for every part of the institution — redesigning policies; providing administrative support for critical thinking; rethinking the mission; coordinating and providing faculty workshops in critical thinking; redefining faculty as learners as well as teachers; and evaluating students, faculty, and the institution as a whole in terms of critical thinking abilities and traits, within and across disciplines. We understand, in other words, that robust critical thinking should be the guiding force for all our educational efforts.

This session focuses on the importance of placing critical thinking foundations at the core of teaching and learning at all levels of the institution, and it presents a professional development model that can provide the vehicle for deep change throughout the organization.

Room: DA 103

Often students’ failure to do well, to apply what they have “learned,” to remember in the Fall what they learned in the Spring, results from naïve misconceptions about what real learning requires. Above all, learning requires thinking — critical thinking. To learn, one must continually ask ,“What does this really mean? How do we know? If it is true, what else would be true?” At the heart of our approach is the conviction that, ultimately, learners must answer these questions for themselves in order to learn, to know, to truly understand. Answers you provide cannot fully sink in unless students’ minds are ready to process them.

Although bringing critical thinking into the classroom ultimately requires serious, long-term development, many simple, straightforward, yet powerful strategies can be implemented immediately. Many enable you to take advantage of what students already know and what they can figure out for themselves, and many involve students’ working together. Students learning in collaboration can correct each other’s misunderstandings and accelerate each other’s progress. This enables them to become responsible for more of their own, and one another’s, learning.

These strategies are widely applicable; most can be fruitfully applied to any subject, any topic. Most can become standard practice – techniques you continually use. At the heart of these methods is a realistic conception of what it takes for someone to learn something.

This session will provide ways to begin the process of enabling students to think their way through your class content, to learn how to use what they learn, and use the power of their own minds to figure things out.

Room: DA 101

Educated persons skillfully, routinely engage in substantive writing. Substantive writing consists of focusing on a subject worth writing about and saying something worth saying about it. It also enhances our reading: whenever we read to acquire knowledge, we should write to take ownership of what we are reading. Furthermore, just as we must write to gain an initial understanding of a subject's primary ideas, so also must we write to begin thinking within the subject as a whole and making connections between ideas within and beyond it.

Quite remarkably, many students have never written in a substantive way. Instead, they have developed the habit of getting by with superficial and impressionistic writing which only obscures the purpose of writing itself. The result is that they are blind to the ways in which writing can be used to enrich their learning and lives.

This session will explore ways of developing students’ abilities in substantive writing, through the tools of critical thinking, as a means for fulfilling, deep learning and communication.

Room: DA 107

Every group to which we belong – nation, culture, profession, religion, family, peer group, etc. – has some social definition of itself, as well as some oft-unspoken “rules” that guide the behavior of its members. In other words, each group to which we belong imposes some level of conformity on us as a condition of acceptance. This includes sets of beliefs (of varied degrees of rationality), sets of acceptable behaviors (reasonable and unreasonable to diverse extents), and sets of taboos that entail consequences when broken.

For most people, conformity to group restrictions is largely automatic and unreflective. They internalize group norms and prejudices, take on group identities, and act as they are expected with little or no sense that what they are doing might be reasonably questioned. They function within social groups as unreflective participants in a range of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. This creates myriad intellectual blind spots which act in thinking as faulty assumptions, illogical conclusions, misinformation, and so forth.

This session will focus on how sociocentric thinking stands as a barrier to the development of critical thinking, and how we can recognize and intervene in our own sociocentric tendencies.

Room: DA 103

Writing is key to the acquisition of content. At present, however, students are poor writers – not because they are incapable of learning to write well, but because they have never been taught the foundations of substantive writing. They lack intellectual discipline as well as strategies for improving their writing. This is true because teachers on the one hand often lack clear theory of the relationship between writing and learning and, on the other, are concerned with the time involved in grading written work.

If we understand the most basic concepts in critical thinking, we can provide the grounds for solving both problems: 1) theory that links substantive writing and thinking with the acquisition of knowledge, and, 2) awareness of how to design writing assignments that do not require one-on-one instructor-student feedback.

The development of writing abilities, as well as all other intellectual abilities, occurs only through sound theory and routine practice. When students understand the relationship between learning and writing, and are engaged in routine writing practice using the tools of critical thinking, they are able to learn content at progressively deeper levels and improve their ability to communicate important ideas.

This session will provide techniques that enhance students’ learning and foster their abilities to communicate clearly and logically what knowledge they are acquiring in your class.

Room: DA 104

Most students have very little experience of reasoning within opposing points of view, or even of reasoning at all. In today’s typically didactic classes, instructors engage in inculcating information; students then come away with the impression that knowledge can be obtained without having to consider more than one point of view, without having to identify or assess evidence, question assumptions, trace implications, or consider objections.

The result is students with no real sense of what the process of gaining knowledge involves, who make absolutistic judgments without recognizing that they think from a point of view among potentially infinite others, with nothing more than a jumble of information and beliefs, and with little idea of how to reason one's way to knowledge and better judgment. As a result, students uncritically internalize concepts of what they, others, and things are like – e.g., of what Americans are like, of what Indians are like, of what business-people, liberals, conservatives, immigrants, capitalism, socialism, Christianity, atheism, corporations, governments, etc. are like. They then ego-identify with their conceptions, spontaneously using them as guides in their day-to-day decision making.

Over time, these students are laden with mountains of ill-founded information and ideas, as well as a method of constructing world views nearly devoid of appropriate analytical tools and intellectual standards. The resulting dysfunction at the individual and societal level is obvious throughout the world.

Students need assignments in multilogical issues to break out of their uncritical absolutism. They need to discover opposing points of view in non-threatening situations. They need to put their ideas into words, advance conclusions, and justify them. They need to discover their own assumptions and inconsistencies, as well as those of others. They do this best when they learn how to role-play the thinking of others, advance conclusions other than their own, and construct reasons to support them. Students need to do this for the multilogical issues – issues involving conflicting points of view, interpretations, and conclusions – which tend to form the most contentious political and social questions of the day. But they also need to do this to bring discipline to the process of thinking through monological questions.

This session will offer practice in reasoning through social and political issues as a model which can foster intellectual empathy and discipline, and which can be brought into the classroom.

Room: DA 108

Critical Thinking Therapy assumes that mental health depends, among other things, on reasonable thinking. One cannot be emotionally healthy while being an unreasonable person, and reasonability requires critical thinking. Unfortunately, mental health professionals generally misunderstand critical thinking and its vital importance to effective mental health therapies.

It isn’t that mental health professionals never think critically; in fact, the best therapeutic approaches to mental health have a direct relationship with critical thinking. However, clinicians do not always utilize the best mental health therapies, because they don’t always know how to choose among them. In other words, they are frequently unclear as to the standards they should use in adopting therapies and applying them to their clients.

Critical Thinking Therapy introduces a substantive theory of critical thinking to the field of mental health therapy. It details a broad, integrated set of critical thinking tools for use in self-therapy and professional therapy. It is for individuals seeking a more enlightened, more fulfilled, less fearful, and less self-defeating orientation to the world. It is also for those not reaching their potential who seek a self-actualizing frame of mind.

Thus far, only some of critical thinking’s many tools have entered the world of mental health, mainly through cognitive behavioral therapies. Critical Thinking Therapy vastly broadens and deepens the critical thinking concepts and principles explicitly available to therapists, and is therefore recommended for their use with clients, as well as for clients and individuals working alone.

This session will explore how the concepts and principles of critical thinking can serve as foundations for improved mental health and self-actualization, both in the context of professional therapy and for anyone concerned with their own wellness and ability to achieve. 

Room: DA 108

In this session, we will reflect on the conference as a whole and what we’ve learned together. We will furthermore discuss ways to continue applying and developing our critical thinking skills and traits into the future.