Janet E. Kuebli et al.
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of their own thinking processes. A basic premise of this chapter is that explicit teaching
about CT can help college students to become better critical thinkers. By focusing directly
on CT, teachers help students to clarify their naïve misconceptions about CT and enhance
transfer of CT to endeavors outside the classroom. To that end, we present a framework to
help instructors achieve these goals.
At the college level, we also recommend that programs intentionally distribute CT
instruction across the psychology major curriculum. Teaching CT in general psychology
can provide a foundation upon which students progressively build these skills as they work
through their courses, culminating in capstone courses. We provide some illustrations of
this strategy as employed at our own institution in psychology courses taken at different
points in our curriculum.
Learning to teach CT is also challenging. This book provides many examples of activities
that involve students in CT, ways to assess that thinking, and programs to encourage it.
Instructors often learn to teach this skill by reading, planning, attending teaching
workshops, and by trial-and-error in the classroom. But are there better ways whereby
teachers can learn to teach critical thinking? We begin by describing a graduate course on
the teaching of psychology that strives to achieve this, followed by a description of a
framework for teaching CT. Although our experiences are as teachers of undergraduate
and graduate students, we believe that the principle of helping students to become more
aware of when they are thinking critically may also be extended to primary and secondary
classrooms. Finally, we describe several CT assignments we have used successfully in
different college classes we teach.
Learning to Teach Critical Thinking
One of us (Korn) has taught many aspiring college teachers about the art and science of
teaching psychology for over 35 years. In his course—The Teaching of Psychology—the
first major activity is the writing of a teaching philosophy (Korn, 2004). Students write a
series of drafts, with peer review, and continue to revise the statement as the class works on
other elements of teaching. In many such statements, students write something like:
“I want my students to think critically about psychology.”
Next students work on developing a syllabus for a course they expect to teach. The
selected course may be general psychology, more intermediate courses like social psychol-
ogy or child development, or a more advanced topical seminar or capstone course. The
most challenging part of this activity is stating the course objectives in a way that will be
useful for deciding what methods to use and how to assess learning. And again, “think
critically about psychology” appears often as an objective.
Then students look at how the design will be implemented in the teaching methods and
assessment. Here new teachers often talk about the style and content of their lectures, but
all of us know that lectures are not as effective as other methods for promoting thinking
(Bligh, 2000). How can we do better to achieve the objective of helping beginning teachers
learn to teach CT? We can start by providing thought-provoking readings and opportunities
to practice critical thinking, and through modeling.