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Critical Thinking in Critical Courses
Reading
There are several good textbooks for the beginning teacher of psychology. Forsyth’s The
Professor’s Guide to Teaching (2003) is one that we recommend. A quick survey of eight
books on teaching psychology showed how their authors addressed CT. All these books
recommended involving students using discussion, writing, and other methods. Two
books had separate chapters on teaching thinking; four books had sections on thinking in
various places in their texts. There are also entire books on CT, including those by Halpern
(1996) and Smith (2002). Especially impressive is a book by Svinicki (2004), Learning and
Motivation in the Post-Secondary Classroom, which provides an extensive application of
cognitive psychology principles to student learning with clear, useful examples. Many
experts on CT have also written articles on the topic.
Thinking
Class discussions of assigned readings about critical thinking are a starting point for
demystifying this otherwise fuzzy concept that people endorse readily yet so superficially.
Good discussion will also get aspiring teachers to think critically about their philosophy
and course design. These must be considered together because the course design is the
philosophy one puts into practice. “What do you mean when you say that you want your
students to think critically about psychology?” is the stimulus question. This is an old
question for some readers, but new to beginning teachers. Generating their own preliminary
definitions of CT is a useful early group activity. Students can usually produce something
similar to the definitions they will read more about later. These aspiring student teachers
thus also practice critical thinking about CT. This technique is used throughout the course
in order to develop teachers who can critically evaluate perspectives and empirical evidence
on CT teaching strategies.
Next, this definition gets translated into course objectives, and eventually into objectives
for individual units of the course. Student teachers learn about the cognitive taxonomy,
originally outlined by Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, and Krathwohl (1956). Bloom et al.’s
well-known Taxonomy of Educational Objectives included a hierarchy of thinking proc-
esses. Three lower level thinking skills—knowing, comprehending, and applying—formed
the foundation for three higher level skills: analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating. In
recent years, Bloom’s model has been revised by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001). Bloom’s
work also underlies the framework we will present shortly. One of the interesting things
that student teachers discover is that critical thinking is not a formal item in most taxono-
mies, although the elements are certainly there. That means teachers must synthesize the
individual elements into something that fulfills their own definitions of critical thinking
before they can specify course and unit objectives.
The true test for students who aspire to teach CT comes when they actually teach.
During our Teaching of Psychology course, each student is required to “guest teach” two
class periods in a regularly scheduled course, usually one offered by their teaching mentor.
They design a teaching module that includes objectives for those two classes. If CT is an