Guided Study Groups

in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online

Meeting Times: 

• Oct. 20, 2025:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

• Nov. 3,   2025:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

• Nov. 17, 2025:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Dec. 1,   2025:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Dec. 15, 2025:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Dec. 29, 2025:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Jan. 12, 2026:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

Meetings Last 1.5-2 Hours

Web Camera and Microphone Required

Participation in this group requires active membership in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online. Join now to participate!

You are what you think. Whatever you do, whatever you feel, whatever you want, whatever you learn – all are heavily influenced by your thinking. 

The problems we increasingly face in human education, business, society, and daily life demand thinking that is complex, adaptable, and sensitive to divergent points of view. The world now requires that we continually relearn, routinely rethink our decisions, and regularly reevaluate the ways in which we work and live. In short, the reality we now face is one in which the power of the mind to command itself, to regularly engage in competent analysis and evaluation, is increasingly determining the quality of our learning, our professional endeavors, and our lives.

Since few people understand the powerful role that thinking plays in their lives, few ever gain significant command of it. Therefore, most people are frequent victims of their own thinking, harmed rather than helped by it. They are often their own worst enemies; their reasoning acts as a continual source of problems, preventing them from recognizing opportunities, keeping them from exerting energy where it would do the most good, poisoning their relationships, and leading them down blind alleys.

This study group will help participants begin to internalize the foundational concepts inherent in a rich, explicit, universally-applicable framework for critical thinking. It will focus on how these conceptual foundations are necessary for anyone aspiring to live a reliably reasonable, effective manner, and it will focus on ways to actively apply critical thinking in your daily life. This study group, in other words, will offer potent concepts and tools for working toward your goals and ambitions, making better decisions, and understanding where others are trying to influence your thinking (for better or worse). It will help you take charge of whatever you do in your professional and personal life, how you relate to others, and even what emotions you feel. 

Discover and leverage the power of critical thinking to learn more, accomplish more significant personal goals, become a better problem-solver, become less subject to manipulation, and more – in other words, to live a fuller, happier, more secure life. 

Meeting Times
Each Meeting Lasts 1.5-2 hours

• Feb. 15:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

• Feb. 29:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

• Mar. 14:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Mar. 28:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Apr. 11:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Apr. 25:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• May   9:  4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

Registration Closed

Web Camera and Microphone Required

Participation in this group requires active membership in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online. Join now to participate!

This study group will explore ways to improve the quality of your thinking and, therefore, help you achieve your goals and ambitions, make better decisions, and understand where others are trying to influence your thinking (for better or worse). It will help you take charge of what you do in your professional and personal life, how you relate to others, and even what emotions you feel. If you are an educator, it will help you to improve the quality of your students’ thinking and learning.

The problems we increasingly face in teaching and learning, business, society, and daily life require thinking that is complex, adaptable, and sensitive to divergent points of view. The modern world requires that we continually re-learn, routinely re-think our decisions, and regularly re-evaluate the ways in which we work and live. In short, the reality we now face is one in which the power of the mind to command itself, to regularly engage in competent analysis and evaluation, will increasingly determine the quality of our learning, our professional endeavors, and our lives.

Since few people understand the powerful role that thinking plays in their lives, few ever gain significant command of their thoughts. Therefore, most people are frequent victims of their own thinking, harmed rather than helped by it. They are often their own worst enemies; their reasoning acts as a continual source of problems, preventing them from recognizing opportunities, keeping them from exerting energy where it would do the most good, poisoning their relationships, and leading them down blind alleys.

Through this study group, discover and leverage the power of thinking to achieve more significant goals in your work, your teaching and learning, and your personal life – to live a fuller, happier, more secure life. 

Meeting Times
Each Meeting Lasts 1.5-2 hours

• Feb.   4:    4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

• Feb. 18:   4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

• Mar.  4:    4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

• Mar. 18:   4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Apr.  8:    4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Apr. 22:   4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• May   6:   4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time 

Enrollment Cap: 25 Participants

Registration Closed

Web Camera and Microphone Required

Participation in this group requires active membership in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online. Join now to participate!

Educated persons routinely and skillfully engage in substantive writing. This is acutely true for students in their classes. Students need to learn how to engage in critical writing: writing that entails focusing on a subject worth writing about, then saying something about it worth saying. It involves using the concepts and processes of critical thinking to write in a way that, for example, is clear, accurate, relevant, and as detailed and supported as it needs to be in in context.

The same holds for learning to read critically, which entails reading texts carefully, analytically, and with a genuine attempt to capture what an author is saying. Critical reading requires explicit employment of critical thinking concepts and principles, including reasonable interpretation and accurate delineation of the logic of an author’s reasoning, followed by proper assessment of the quality of the reasoning.

Both critical, careful, analytic reading and critical, focused, well-reasoned writing are essential for learning content in a course or class, as well as for success within the professions. Critical reading and writing are necessary to gain an initial understanding of a subject's primary ideas and to begin thinking within the subject as a whole,  making connections among ideas within it and applying those ideas to life beyond the classroom.

Most students have never learned to read or write critically. Instead, with reading, when they attend to a text at all, they tend to react to the text, or capture only vague ideas of what authors are saying. With writing, they have developed habits of getting by with superficial and impressionistic composition which only obscures the purpose of writing itself. Because students have typically never understood how disciplined reading and writing can be used to enrich their learning and lives, they may resist or even dread it.

In this study group, we will explore and apply the concepts and principles of critical writing and critical reading as indispensable parts of skilled reasoning – and of the development of good intellectual character. Our work will relate directly to teaching and learning. It will also directly link with personal and professional life, since self-actualized persons, or in other words, accomplished critical thinkers, engage in critical reading and writing as a matter of course. Therefore, throughout the study group the “students” in question may be those we happen to teach (if we are instructors) or they may be ourselves, as active lifelong learners.

Suggested readings for the study group, though not required, are:

• Richard Paul and Linda Elder’s How to Read a Paragraph (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019)

• Richard Paul and Linda Elder’s How to Write a Paragraph (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019)

• Gerald Nosich’s Critical Writing: A Guide to Writing a Paper Using the Concepts and Processes of Critical Thinking (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

There is a 25-participant limit. The first 25 people to register will be sent an invitation to join the group through the Critical Thinking Community Online. Anyone who registers after the first 25 people will be added to a Wait List.

Any of the first 25 registrants who do not accept the invitation by January 25th will be removed from the roster, and people on the Wait List will be invited in order of earliest registered.

Meeting Times
Each Meeting Lasts 1.5-2 hours

• Oct. 2:      4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Oct. 16:    4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Oct. 30 :   4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

• Nov. 13:   4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

• Nov. 27:   4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

• Dec. 11:   4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

• Jan. 8:     4:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time 

Enrollment Cap: 25 Participants

Registration Closed

Web Camera and Microphone Required

Participation in this group requires active membership in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online. Join now to participate!

Critical thinking is the disciplined art of ensuring that one uses the best reasoning you possibly can in any set of circumstances; this entails adhering to one’s intellectual standards (such as logicalness, accuracy, fairness), understanding reasoning and how reasoning can go wrong (one’s own reasoning as well as the reasoning of others), developing ethical character that embraces and contributes to community while cultivating one’s individual potential, and embodying critical thinking virtues such as intellectual empathy, intellectual courage, intellectual integrity, intellectual perseverance, and confidence in reason.

Through developed critical capacities, you can take command of the thinking that commands you. No matter what your circumstance or goals, no matter where you are or what problems you face, you are better off if you are in control of your thinking. As a professional, parent, citizen, lover, friend, colleague—in every realm and situation of life—skilled thinking is needed. Poor thinking, in contrast, inevitably causes problems, wastes time and energy, engenders frustration and pain. Poor thinking frequently keeps you from achieving your potential as a unique individual.

Becoming a critical thinker requires that you learn to observe, monitor, analyze, assess, and reconstruct thinking of many sorts in many dimensions of human life. It has implications for every act that takes place in your mind. It requires a special form of dedication and perseverance, honesty and integrity.

In this study group we will study and apply the concepts and principles of critical thinking to improve our reasoning in all aspects of personal life.

There is a 25-participant limit. The first 25 people to register will be sent an invitation to join the group through the Critical Thinking Community Online. Anyone who registers after the first 25 people will be added to a Wait List.

Any of the first 25 registrants who do not accept the invitation by September 18th will be removed from the roster, and people on the Wait List will be invited in order of earliest registered.

                                  Meeting Times
                          Each Meeting Lasts 1.5-2 hours

Thursday, April 30   4:00 p.m. Eastern Time (1:00 p.m. Pacific) 

Thursday, May 7      4:00 p.m. Eastern Time (1:00 p.m. Pacific)  

Thursday, May 14    4:00 p.m. Eastern Time (1:00 p.m. Pacific) 

Thursday, May 21    4:00 p.m. Eastern Time (1:00 p.m. Pacific) 

Thursday, May 28    4:00 p.m. Eastern Time (1:00 p.m. Pacific) 

Thursday, June 4     4:00 p.m. Eastern Time (1:00 p.m. Pacific)

Registration Closed

In this six-week Study Group, sponsored by the Foundation for Critical Thinking, we focus on how the explicit tools of critical thinking interrelate with deep understandings that come to us through the classics.

Classic literature is deeply interwoven with critical thinking by its very nature, since the classics typically are seen as exemplifying the highest-level standards in literature. But what tools of critical thinking do classic works illustrate? And how can critical thinking help us better understand what makes for the most enlightened ideas as evidenced in classic literature? Or is all classic literature equal in quality? If not, how do we discern the gems in classic ideas, and what should we discard? Just because Aristotle wrote an idea, is it naturally to be considered truth?

In this group, we will study some of the foundational concepts and principles in critical thinking (using the libraries in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online), and will read in several classic works - including those of Socrates (through Plato), Seneca, John Stuart Mill, and John Henry Newman.

This Study Group can help you not only apply critical thinking to the classics, but to any field of study, since critical thinking principles are universal. We all need these skills, as do our students, employees, colleagues, and intimates.

In this first Study Group, we can take up to 25 participants, who will meet with Dr. Barnes by GoToMeeting. (It is essential we are able to see and hear one another during each meeting, so cameras and microphones will be required.) You will be given brief assignments each week using the activities and resources in the Community Online. After this group ends, we hope some of you will volunteer to lead similar Study Groups with other members in our community, using our approach and working with us while focusing on a multitude of subjects you may be interested in.

Our ultimate aim is to create a Study Group model that others can emulate – those interested in working their way through universal and powerful ideas while internalizing the tools of critical thinking.