Confusion around Critical Thinking
Slides of my presentation
Critical thinking skill is one of the most important skills ever - 100%. However, if you keenly look around the education world, you will be able to realize the weird understanding around it, presumably because of the “means-end” conflation.
Yes, critical thinking is the end, the outcome, the key learning objective. No, the way to achieve that outcome is not by teaching critical thinking skills right away.
Sounds absurd to a lot of teachers, educators, and students.
Our team at CIPL (King’s College) has been organizing a monthly sharing platform for teachers called Empowering Hours. It is divided into two-parts, a Thinking session and a Featured Presentation session. I usually lead the Thinking session part where my aim is to “provoke” the participants with questions about teaching and learning. In doing so, my goal is to make them reflect on their own beliefs, and ideas and make them think harder.
In the July Session of Empowering Hours, I wanted the participating teachers (and even some students) to dissect their preconceived ideas about critical thinking and make them question: is this an outcome or is this a means?
Also, their task was to come up with a metaphor for critical thinking based on rock climbing. (Borrowed this idea from Nidhi Sachdeva, Phd. Thank you.)
And since a lot of participants usually ask for the slides, here you go. I’m trying this gallery format of substack for a change.
1 to 9
10 to 18
19 to 27
28 to 30
If you are in Kathmandu, why don’t you join our Empowering Hours session.
Here’s the next one: bit.ly/emphrs
Love this Umes! You reminded me of this analogy and I recently used it in one of my presentations - different topic but it worked.