Jane S. Halonen
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In contrast with truly fine programs that exist today in many psychology graduate
programs, mine didn’t provide much preparation for what an academic career might entail.
At least I like to blame the absence of career preparation to explain why I failed to respond
very gracefully when my dean at Alverno, who happened to be a psychologist/historian,
offered me an opportunity of a lifetime after I had been teaching for just one year. This
episode leads us to the first of several crucial ideas that will enable new faculty members to
optimize their critical thinking practices:
Big Idea #1: When your dean or chair asks you to do something, suspend criticality; it could be
life-changing.
My academic dean, Austin Doherty, had pulled together a grant-writing team to capture
support from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). Their
goal was to address the disturbing report Nation at Risk (National Commission on
Excellence in Education, 1983), which had concluded that colleges and universities were
failing in their responsibilities. (If this sounds familiar, a similar theme has been addressed
more recently in the higher education bestseller, Declining by Degrees, Hersch & Merrow,
2005.) In response to the criticism, Alverno convened four disciplines to discuss and
disseminate strategies for the promotion of critical thinking in the classroom. The Dean
asked me to select and coordinate a group of 10 psychologists who would come to
Milwaukee and debate what strategies and frameworks could shed some light on how best
to teach psychology students to think critically about behavior.
Early in the discussions, the specter of critical thinking assessment reared its head. At
the outset of the discussion, I recall that one of our members referred to himself jokingly
as the “Johnny Appleseed” of critical thinking. He shared that he saw his role as “planting
the seed” of critical thinking that would fully flower much later in the student’s career.
Sadly, he had resigned himself to the idea that he wouldn’t be able to observe directly the
fruits of his labor. Although I was a relative neophyte in teaching, that comment struck me
as unimaginative and perhaps even irresponsible. Why couldn’t we develop teaching strat-
egies that would allow us to measure the impact more immediately? Much of my academic
writing has been devoted to addressing that question.
My favorite memory from the FIPSE experience still informs my teaching and leads to
Big Idea #2. Bruce Henderson from Western Carolina University in an exuberant moment
suggested ...
Big Idea #2: Why study psychology? So you won’t be a jerk!
I refer to this observation as the überoutcome of psychology. If we deconstruct the state-
ment, it reveals a lot about what end states we seek for our students. Avoiding jerk status
means, among other things:
●
Practicing amiable skepticism●
Seeking evidence to support what we think or believe (Halonen & Gray, 2001)●
Understanding the perspectives of others