Webinars

Led by Dr. Linda Elder

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025

1:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
(10:00 a.m. PDT)

Recording Available Soon

Duration: 60 Minutes
    
This is primarily a presentation that will provide time at the end for attendee questions. 

Webcams are optional.

We record webinars for later viewing by members of The Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, and some clips may also be posted on other platforms.

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. Yet 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 the theories and therapies from various schools of mental health. In other words, they are frequently unclear as to the standards they should use in adopting and applying counseling strategies to their clients.

Dr. Elder’s new book, Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness and Self-Actualization, 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. 

To this point, only some of critical thinking’s many tools have made their way into the mental health profession, mainly through cognitive behavioral therapies. This book 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.

In this webinar, Dr. Elder will discuss how Critical Thinking Therapy’s concepts and activities can serve as foundations for improved mental health and self-actualization, both in the context of professional therapy and for those pursuing their own wellness. She will then open the session to your questions.

Webinar attendees will benefit from having some familiarity with certain critical thinking concepts and how they interweave with mental health. We advise completing as many of the following activities in advance of the webinar as you can. These require an account in The Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, where a 30-day free trial is available for new users. 

1. Read through page 13 of the partial copy of The Thinker's Guide to the Human Mind found in the Community Online.

2. Read pages 12, 14-21, and 24-25 in the partial copy of The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts & Tools found in the Community Online. 

3. Complete the activity “Identify Some of Your Irrational Beliefs.” See if you can think of any examples related to mental health specifically. (Be sure to read the content at the top of the page first.) 

4. Complete the activity “Identify Beliefs Acquired Through Group Membership.”

Led by Dr. Linda Elder

Tuesday, March 11th, 2025

Recording Available Soon


1:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
(10:00 a.m. PST)

Webcams are required and must remain on throughout the session.

We record webinar Q&A's for later viewing by members of The Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, and some clips may also be posted on other platforms.

What are your questions?

Together we ponder or answer them.

In our regular question-and-answer webinars, led by one of our Fellows or Scholars, we open the floor to your questions about critical thinking and its unlimited applications to human life. Join us in this forum where you can ask deep and probing questions as well as basic questions of clarification on the theory and application of critical thinking. Some questions we will be able to answer easily; those that do not lend themselves to definitive answers, we will explore with you.

Thinking is driven by questions. The quality of your thinking is determined by the quality of the questions you ask. Fruitful questions, when properly addressed, lead to knowledge. Knowledge leads to important understandings. Important understandings, when actively employed by the mind, can lead to increasingly more fulfilling, satisfying, and joyful lives.

The quality of the questions you ask and pursue every day - at work or in personal life - largely determines the quality of your life.

Similarly, in instruction, the quality of student learning can be largely captured in the questions students ask in our classes and as they go out into the world (not on how much information they have memorized).

Despite these insights, emphasis on questions in thinking is mainly missing from human conversations, relationships, and societies. The role of questions in thinking is rarely discussed in human life. Theory about questions is still in its infancy. While Socrates believed the most effective way to teach was through questioning, 2,400 years later, his insights seem to be little valued. Each of us needs to improve our ability to ask productive and rewarding questions.

Bring your questions on critical thinking to this session, whatever they may be.

Led by Dr. Gerald Nosich

Wednesday, February 19th, 2025

2:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
(11:00 a.m. PST)

View Recording

Duration: 60 Minutes

This is an interactive online workshop in which participants, with Dr. Nosich’s facilitation, will work as a group or in breakout rooms to explore and apply critical thinking concepts and processes.

Webcams are required and must remain on throughout the session.

We record webinar workshops for later viewing by members of The Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, and some clips may also be posted on other platforms.

Human conflict can arise for numerous, often overlapping reasons that operate in tandem, including:

• Clashing purposes, or purposes wrongly seen as clashing.
• Ignorance or misconceptions of one another’s intentions, beliefs, or point of view.
• Faulty assumptions.
• Preoccupation with trivialities.
• Differing views of what questions, goals, and risks are most important.
• Egocentric and sociocentric thinking.
• The impacts made by emotions and desires on reasoning.

This list is far from exhaustive.

In many cases, the true causes of a conflict remain unknown to one or each party involved. Participants may misapprehend the sources of strife, thereby stumbling down unproductive or counter-productive avenues of thought and communication; other times, they may disregard why friction is occurring as they focus entirely on concluding the dispute in their own favor.

In all the above circumstances, critical thinking can help. It can shift focus from declarations to exploration – for example, by uncovering the roots of conflict through probing questions about such factors as relevant purposes, points of view, and how words are being used. It can illuminate misconceptions on each side of a disagreement by explicating ideas, assumptions, information, and interpretations. It can help highlight solutions by finding new information, raising prior questions that generate context, and reasonably evaluating implications.

This webinar will discuss lesser-known ways that irrationality can provoke or worsen conflict, and it will offer methods of critically analyzing conflicts with a view of evaluating their components to find fairer resolutions.

To prepare for this webinar workshop, we recommend completing as many of the following activities as you can beforehand. These require an account in The Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, where a 30-day free trial is available for new users. You are not required to complete the activities to join the webinar workshop, but doing so can be highly useful for your and others’ learning.

1.    Read pages 14, 21, 24-26, and 30 in The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts & Tools.

2.    Focusing on a past or present conflict in your life, complete the activity “Analyze the Logic of a Problem or Issue.” Be sure to read the introductory information before you begin.

3.    Read the entry for concept on pages 11-12 of A Glossary of Critical Thinking Terms & Concepts.

4.    Complete the activity “Thinking Through Conflicting Ideas.” Be sure to read the introductory information before you begin.

Led by Dr. Linda Elder

Wednesday, January 15th, 2025

1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
(10:00 a.m. PST)

View Recording

Duration: 60 Minutes

This is an interactive online workshop in which participants, with Dr. Elder’s facilitation, will work as a group or in breakout rooms to explore and apply critical thinking concepts and processes.

Webcams are required and must remain on throughout the session.

We record webinar workshops for later viewing by members of The Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, and some clips may also be posted on other platforms.

Just as developing one’s physical fitness involves inherent tension and discomfort, so does developing one’s mind. This adversity often dissuades even gifted learners from progressing beyond rudimentary stages of intellectual development, given that no amount of raw intelligence can offset intellectual sloth when trying to improve one’s reasoning abilities and propensities. What causes this, and what can be done to overcome it?

The human mind, by nature, tends to resist change. The more painful the change, the greater the mind’s resistance, especially when we are forced to see ourselves in an unfavorable light (as when recognizing our human tendencies toward closed-mindedness, inaccuracy, unfairness, self-deception, and other pitfalls). This interactive webinar will discuss why this occurs, will offer strategies for recognizing and intervening in intellectually lazy habits, and will equip you to begin developing – or to further develop, as your case may be – the indispensable virtue of intellectual perseverance.

To prepare for this webinar workshop, we recommend completing as many of the following activities as you can beforehand. These require an account in The Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, where a 30-day free trial is available for new users. You are not required to complete the activities to join the webinar workshop, but doing so can be highly useful for your and others’ learning.

1. On page 43 of A Glossary of Critical Thinking Terms & Concepts, read the entry for intellectual traits/dispositions/virtues.

2. On page 42 of A Glossary of Critical Thinking Terms & Concepts, read the entry for intellectual perseverance.

3. View the video “Intellectual Virtues: Going Deeper – Intellectual Perseverance” from 2:05 - 16:38

4. Complete the activity “Develop Intellectual Perseverance.” Be sure to read the introductory text first.